The Lost Landscape - Joyce Carol Oates

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“underpaid.”) Not only was it the task of a one-room schoolteacher to lead eight disparate grades through their lessons, but also to maintain discipline in the classroom, where most of the older boys attended school grudgingly, waiting for their sixteenth birthdays when they were legally released from attending school and could work with their fathers on family farms; these boys were taught by older male relatives to hunt and kill animals, and they were without mercy in “teasing” (the more accurate term “harassing” had not yet been coined) younger children. Mrs. Dietz was also in charge of maintaining our wood-burning stove, the school’s only source of heat, in that pitiless upstate New York climate in which below-zero temperatures weren’t uncommon on gusty winter mornings, and we had to wear mittens, hats, and coats through the day, stamping our booted feet against the drafty plank floor to keep our toes from going numb . . . I can only imagine the emotional and psychological difficulties poor Mrs. Dietz endured, and feel now a belated kinship with her, who had seemed to me a very giantess of my childhood. No other teacher looms as archetypal in my memory, for no other teacher taught me the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and doing arithmetic, which seem to me as natural as breathing. I am grateful to Mrs. Dietz for not (visibly) breaking down, and for maintaining a certain degree of good cheer in the classroom. The schoolhouse for all its shortcomings and dangers became for me a kind of sanctuary: a precious counter-world to the chaotic and unbookish roughness that existed outside it.

      Years later, revisiting the Lockport area, giving a talk sponsored by the Lockport Public Library, I was approached by a woman of my approximate age who looked familiar to me, to a degree; when the woman introduced herself, I remembered her at once, as a girl who’d lived on a farm a few miles away on one of the creek-side roads; she spoke of how, outside the school at recess, I would sometimes “teach” her and a few other children, who hadn’t understood our teacher Mrs. Dietz . . . What a pleasure to meet again, after so many years, Nelia Pynn! I love the name, out of that lost past, and must write it again: Nelia Pynn.

      FOR A LONG TIME vacant and boarded up, District #7 school was finally razed in the late 1970s. And for a long time afterward, when I returned to Millersport to visit my parents, I would make a sentimental journey to the site, where a collapsed stone foundation and a mound of rubble were all that remained. Soon such one-room schoolhouses will be recalled, if at all, only in photographs: links with a mythopoetic “American frontier past” that, when it was lived, seemed to us, who lived it, simply life.

      “DON’T BE AFRAID. DADDY is right here.”

      Yet, Daddy was not visible to me, for Daddy was behind me. It did not seem natural to me that my father, who always drove our car from the position of authority behind the steering wheel, was seated behind me in the Piper Cub that was a beautiful bright yellow like a butterfly’s wings.

      It was a summer day in the late 1940s. I would have been nine or ten years old. My young, adventurous father Fred Oates had earned a pilot’s license a few years before, and this was my first trip with him.

      Daddy had not been drafted into the army as he’d feared. He had not served in World War II due to deferments he and his fellow workers at Harrison Radiator had been given, since they were involved in “defense manufacturing.” And now, after the war, planes belonging to the government had passed into private ownership, and men like my father began to take flying lessons.

      How and why my father took flying lessons at Lee’s Airfield on Transit Road north of Buffalo, New York, I have no idea. There wasn’t much money in any household in which he’d ever lived. To help with expenses my father not only worked at Harrison’s but also painted signs for commercial businesses in the area. Yet somehow he’d been able to afford flying lessons as early as 1935 (when he was twenty-one) and had acquired a pilot’s license by 1937, the year before I was born, which enabled him to fly not only small planes like Piper Cubs, Cessnas, and Stinsons but also eventually the sporty Waco double-winged biplane, and even ex–Air Force trainers—a Fairchild with 175 horsepower, a Vultee basic trainer, 450-horsepower, with a canopied open cockpit that could fly at twelve thousand feet.

      My first time in the Piper Cub would be one of the great memories of my life.

      Initially, immediately, there was the strangeness of my father “dressing” me—(which he never did; only my mother dressed me)—as I was outfitted with goggles and a helmet, which were much too large for me. (My father wore a parachute, but I did not, which might have seemed ominoua if I had thought about it. But of course—I could not have used a parachute.) Next, I was half-lifted by Daddy into the single front seat of the plane, and buckled in; the door which seemed to be made of some metal much lighter than a car door was shut and secured. Next, the Piper Cub propeller was turned manually by a boy who worked at the airfield until it began to spin with a loud roar, and the motor kicked in. Next, I was being driven along the bumpy airstrip, past rows of larger planes, at an ever-accelerating speed, totally terrified, dry-mouthed and astonished as I stared through the windshield at a world that was rushing at me much too quickly, and without any adult to shield me from it as if I, and not my father behind me, were the pilot.

      Suddenly then, and sickeningly, the quaking little plane was in the air—rising above a row of trees, and above open fields.

      Like any ten-year-old I trusted my father, absolutely. As I trusted my mother. (And now I wonder what my young mother must have been thinking, watching us from the runway. Did she, too, have complete trust in my father? Was she frightened when he took her up into the air, and did she really want to accompany him?—or was she, perhaps subtly, coerced? Should my father, with his newly acquired pilot’s license, have taken up a ten-year-old child?) There was a daredevil recklessness to life in those days which seems in our more cautious era, in which children are likely to be over-protected by their parents, very remote indeed. Recall that this was a time when seat belts in vehicles were unknown and virtually everyone (including my parents) smoked.

      Through his life my father would always say, “Flying is safer than driving a car.” Statistically, this is (evidently) true, yet not quite a consolation for some of us.

      My most vivid memories of that first trip are the fields opening beneath the plane, the blur of the spinning propeller close in front of me, the buffeting rush of the wind, and the quaking of the plane. In small aircraft you are very conscious of the wind. You are very conscious of the sky. Below, every detail seems heightened. You have suddenly an entirely new, unexpected perspective—you are looking down, bizarrely, from above. It is something of a miracle to see the roofs of houses and barns not so very far below as you pass over.

      Pilots of small planes invariably head for home to fly over their houses and property. My father never failed to do this, a quick trip of only a few minutes, since our farmhouse was no more than three miles away. What is more pleasurable than to “buzz” the houses of friends and relatives?

      Such playfulness suggests the youth of my father at this time, as it suggests the youth of the era. “Buzzing” low over houses and property was viewed as a sort of practical joke and not a dangerous annoyance as we would be inclined to see it today.

      In the Piper Cub my father was likely to fly us to Lockport, where we could see the Erie Barge Canal stretching out below; he was likely to fly us in the direction of Niagara Falls, and the Niagara River; we would never fail to see the Tonawanda Creek, that stretched past our house on Transit Road and would enter my dreams for a lifetime. All these waterways were fascinating to me like the wind-buffeted airborne perspective itself. Safety is a small price to pay for such a perspective!—so my father might have said.

      To be in the air—airborne! There was nothing like it for my father and his pilot-friends.

      Returning to the airfield: that thrill in the pit of the stomach as the Piper Cub circles the runway and begins to dip down. (Sometimes, if the plane isn’t in the ideal position, the pilot decides not to land. And so you sweep up again, rapidly up into the air again, the nose of the plane lifting into the sky so that for an unnerving moment there is nothing to see but sky.) Then, circling back,

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