Frederic Remington: Historians of the Tribe (1890–99)

"Cicadas, like history, spend much more time in the ground than they ever spend making noise."

For most of my life, my history has lived in a series of loose-leaf binders, papers separated by surnames, compiled by my Aunt Colleen and her aunts and great-aunts. I occasionally visited these documents to refresh my memories before replacing them back in their basement banker's box repository. When I finally started trying to comprehend the stories, I quickly found nearly overwhelming additional evidence that considerably expanded what I'd always considered my history by centuries. Now, the volume of material should properly prove impossible to remember and also essentially impossible to chronicle. The material I've dredged up creating this series will never be subjected to my Aunt Colleen's scrutiny and organizing abilities since she has already been gone for more than thirty-five years: history.

I feel moved this morning to wonder just where my history resides. There were times when creating this series, I felt my history right beside me, vibrating and alive, as if I'd magically transformed history into a presence, into this present. Of course, presence and present can only fade into some past again, for neither serve as stable surfaces. I can sometimes almost touch my history, but I inevitably cannot quite reach that far. Further, my history continues streaming out behind me as I've rediscovered and expanded it. It was always too vast to hold in my hand or my mind. It has grown more vast with further investigation. I foresee that the understanding creating this series induced cannot last, for it seems the very nature of history to forever remain annoyingly just beyond anyone's grasp.

Therefore, I cannot rightfully insist that I own my history. It might be more accurate to believe that my history, such as it ever was, owns me. I only chose the more recent chapters of it. It was a flawed inheritance, a legacy bestowed without any accompanying means by which it might be maintained. I'm in the same position as our local history museum, which has always been peppered with requests to accept donations of antique farm implements without accompanying endowments to pay for their upkeep. Even tombstones require maintenance, at least yearly visits with that moss remover and a few late-blooming flowers. History cannot exist without some present remembrance. It can only ever live for brief moments before it recedes back into the bushes like cicadas, perhaps to return in some future time.

Our Midwestern friends are beginning an ordeal that has not visited their country for two hundred years. A swarm of cicadas not quite as noisy as a jet airliner passing low overhead, but almost. Some people go crazy during cicada summers. The inescapable endless racket frays nerves. Some say that such catastrophes serve as gifts, separations between otherwise continuous existence, and that we need such differences to ever experience our lives. Our histories, too, depend upon such disruption. We might only recognize history happening once some disruption jangles our awareness. We witness then, but we never capture these experiences. It almost seems that history experiences us before shuffling off to somewhere West of Buffalo or just somewhere else.

I have still not cracked either of the steamer trunks that hold our documentary history: pictures, contracts, old greeting cards. Most of the photos have no captions. We never got around to sitting down with my mother to capture her perspectives and experience. She certainly knew more of those hollow-eyed people than anyone remaining ever will. That once LivingHistory has returned to hibernation, perhaps never to reawaken. The very notion of LivingHistory should properly disturb me, for history only rarely contains the living. It's where pasts reside, and tomorrows might live someday if they prove disruptive enough to spark anyone's interest. I fear that my scholarship has only added to the thickness of those looseleaf binders, more content, and a little more context for the next in line to rediscover. Cicadas, like history, spend much more time in the ground than they ever spend making noise.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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