THE BOX THE HISTORIAN BUILDS - TO FRAME THE WAY IT WAS -
I’M CLAUSTROPHOBIC AND THIS BOTHERS ME
I have for long and long referred to myself as an historian. My wife has, on numerous occasions of agitation, also referred to me as "The Historian I married," and at various social / cultural functions I have been properly introduced as such. I have a few credits that pretty much prove this claim whether my contemporaries wish to acknowledge this or not. I don’t, as a rule, hang around with other historians simply because, well....... I have very little in common these days with those who are obsessed by historical record. While I do possess considerable respect for these diligent fact finders and re-creators, I find their work a black and white enterprise, that while necessary and important in a thousand different ways, always makes me feel, in company of their cache of information, as if I’ve been unceremoniously stuffed into a tightly fastened, airless box, that inspires a near suffocation.
While it may seem outrageous for anyone who calls himself an historian, to feel overwhelmed by fact and figures, my real problem is that these same hunter-gatherers, in their unbridled zeal to paint in the details of our existence and accomplishment as a civilization, always, at the regional level, make a tight, durable, practical weave of former living, breathing, feeling, caring souls, into a variety of well meaning tomes, that leave me feeling unhappily restricted as if all similarly framed history is indeed entombed in print.
I have long persisted in a more socially relevant history, and while I can’t write personal biographies of everyone I’ve know in my life, what has been imprinted has always stood me in good stead. When you read conventional, general community histories, which have a necessary place in the local reference collection of the library, most are dry as can be expected, because they are vehicles of information not really intended for entertainment but as a research cornerstone, on which to add more discovered fact as the years march on.
What you get is an assessment of characterless townsfolk from the earliest settlers onward. What I have long pursued is knowledge of these interesting citizens, their quirks, ambitions, good qualities and questionable conduct, their benevolence and their miscues in life and times. We’ve had many interesting locals since the first axe was propelled into a tall pine here in Muskoka. We’ve had murderers amongst us, bank robbers, embezzlers, petty thieves and masterminds of good projects and bad. We’ve had our share of manipulators, speculators, good cops, bad cops, smart bankers and dumb, and some fine God-fearing folks who built pioneer churches and associations that helped the less fortunate. Like all communities in this global civilization, the color of history is not always given the attention it deserves and for very good reason. We still believe in this enlightened period of history, that we shouldn’t always tell it the way it was.....because some of the details weren’t very nice......outcomes of events weren’t always positive, and sometimes the biggest news of the week was something terribly adverse, yet the emotion connected is often purposely neglected, avoided, side-stepped, or at least minimized, despite the fact it may have had a huge emotional impact on the community. It is censorship and there are plenty of examples where history is sidestepped because it is viewed as being divisive, too personal, or "something we’d all rather forget." Are you likely to read, other than by my pen, that a former bouncer at the Albion Hotel, in Bracebridge, was found executed in his trailer at Skeleton Lake, while reading my column in that week’s copy of The Herald-Gazette. I’ve seen the crime scene photos. So you’re asking, did we have such a drinking problem that we needed a bouncer at the local hotel?
Us neighborhood kids used to sit by the train station, on hot summer nights, and watch bouncers dump patrons onto the tarmac frequently. We watched as angry spouses came to their mate’s chagrin, and offer to box the bouncer, or the police constables, and this folks was witnessed fact. It wasn’t a perfect town and you’d need a pretty big frame of local history, to include the human stuff......that made us a community.....not just the brick and mortar, the span of bridge over a cataract, the steamboat era, but the appreciation of the genuine characters who were the color, the guts of history, the good, bad and yes, the ugly.
I started my history gathering jag as a watchful kid, who wanted to know what his community was all about. When I go to write a piece now, I can’t write it any other way, than by including the realities, whether we want to have them re-introduced today or not, because the fact remains, history can’t be re-written, but it can be revealed, appreciated and understood in context of all lives lived.
I have no plan to become a builder of boxes and to frame history is irrelevant, as it has its own boundless realm of occupation, in our minds, and truth is, the spirit-kind have earned their freedom from explanation anyway.
"Live and let live, I hear some folks say," was a comment made by a Civil War soldier to a Billy Yank, who was holding him as a war prisoner. So let history live,....... and that means acknowledging it all, not just the highlights.....because otherwise, history hasn’t been served at all! When we get cut, we bleed, we heal, or we die. The soul? Does it look back to where it has dwelled? Does it care? I care. And that is what I see as my role, as historian, and there’s nothing black and white about it.