I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

by Moore, Tim

  Gerry returned with a modest smile and yet another reward for his eerie omni-sentience. A shard of sculpted obsidian, found in a distant clearing: part of an Indian axe-head, he casually announced, that would have lain undisturbed for perhaps 500 years. I marvelled at this mystical, gleaming artefact – now resident amongst the ringhead bodkins and flint hand tools in the shelf-bound museum to my right – as Gerry revealed his probable Indian ancestry, and that he'd done a fair bit of relevant re-enacting. Six months later, in the depths of a bitter winter, he emailed me a pithy resumé of his latest historical adventure, leading an Archaic Indian hunting party in the Kentucky hills: 'It was cold, but nobody starved to death.'

  Ponderous but resolute, the oxen clumped on through the silent, humid endlessness of the woods. Occasionally we stopped by a dappled glade or stream, where the boys would rest and refuel as I arduously downed a palmful of sausage or refreshed myself from the canteen Gerry had lent me – a Mateus Rosé-shaped bottle expertly encased in a bespoke leather holster. Alone Gerry would have been refilling this in streams, but with an invalid, somebody else's young son and a Limey milksop in his care, he'd thought it best to load the pick-up with several dozen gallons of supermarket spring water.

  After the third such halt, Gerry consulted the map, scratched his stubble and marshalled the boys through a challenging three-point turn. Eight miles out, eight miles back: with my feet separated from gravel and rock by no more than leathery cardboard, I returned to camp at a bruised hobble. Gerry – sixty-two and shoeless – could plainly have whistled onwards through the night.

  The road gang were packing up once more, another uprooted tree ablaze on their malodorous inferno. When the foreman doffed his baseball cap and sauntered up, my overworked heart leapt: here it was, that flagon of overproof hooch. But his huge, well-used hands were empty, and all he had to offer us was another stream of amiable incoherence. 'He was saying how jealous they all were,' translated Gerry as their pick-up bucked away down the trail. 'Leaving us here with everything looking so pretty and peaceful.' Very soon afterwards, a shiny new SUV crunched to a halt in the car park, and a well-groomed father walked his pre-teenage daughter towards the firing range, one hand in hers and the other clutching the handles of a weighty holdall. The first explosive report cracked out a moment later, attributed by Gerry to a .44 semi-automatic pistol. Over the following hour, this unlikely pairing employed a variety of high-calibre weapons to shred the twilight several hundred times.

  After the rigours of the trail and two bowls of Gerry's rice and beans, sleep came easy: one minute I was tracking the moon across the huge heavens, the next Jacob was nudging me awake for breakfast, telling me I'd snored all night 'like Big Foot'. 'In a jungle war, a habit like that would get you killed,' Gerry called out from the fireside.

  The boys had got their own back on the wagon by once again trying to eat it: Gerry had replaced the leather hubcaps, but only two remained. It was now that I learned what a 'cow magnet' was – not just an unwise way to describe yourself in a lonely-hearts ad, but a finger of metal slipped down a grazing animal's throat, which then sat in the stomach attracting bits of ingested wire and so forth, thus preventing the misery of 'Hardware Disease'.

  The afternoon before, letting a horsefly have it with an inadequately covert blast of spray, I'd wondered at the life that lay in store for an insect when coated in insect repellent: an outcast, shunned by its revolted brethren, and consumed with self-disgust. Rising from my bed, it was as if overnight I'd been slathered in human repellent. Marinaded in sausage-oil and cow crap, I had never felt more repulsively soiled; viscous with sweat and smoky grease, my hair could be shaped at will. Marching stiffly to the livestock trailer with my penultimate refreshing-towel sachet stuffed down the fetid front of my britches, I yanked a forelock tuft into a unicorn horn: it was still there, tenting out the front of my hat, when I saw myself in the pick-up truck's wing mirror an hour later.

  I'd just tossed the blackened ball of tissue into the bin by the firing-range shelter when the wagons rolled. With a scrunching creak and a steady chorus of shepherding calls, the convoy lumbered into the car park; I stepped across half a Somme's worth of spent cartridge cases and other percussive detritus to join Gerry, Jacob and the boys for our final walk in the woods.

  Shuffling footsore through the heavy, dank shade of those towering pines and oaks, I realised what a disappointment I had been to the grizzled, learned übernactor beside me. That morning, he'd tackled my niggling pointlessness by bestowing upon me an appropriate character history: I was an Irish emigrant, recently released from twenty-five years of indentured service, out looking for farmland and a place to build a homestead. It was a thoughtful gesture, and for a few painful minutes I'd endeavoured to get into character, calling attention to promising fields in a funny voice, and closing every pronouncement with 'to be sure'.

  I couldn't hold my own in the eighteenth century, and even in the twenty-first Gerry had to hold it for me. Our early conversations suggested he'd imagined our time together as a transatlantic congress on the philosophy of re-enactment. Finding the British delegate's contribution limited to long, wondering hums, he'd moved the debate on to Anglo-American history, one downgraded to a lecture after I confidently identified Paul Revere as 'the Pony Express bloke'. Yet not once did Gerry emit even the tiniest tut of reproach, and as Jacob darted about the wagon like a restless puppy, he embarked on another genial, roving soliloquy.

  Drawing parallels between the Roman invasion of Britain and the British colonisation of America, he thoughtfully connected my debut re-enactment experience with my most recent. After delivering a brief history of philosophy, Gerry's musings fast-forwarded to the near future, with the 'lazy and complacent' US and Europe eclipsed by China and South-East Asia, in a world ultimately dominated by huge EU-model regional confed erations. 'Assuming we get that far without bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age,' he said, with a cheery wink.

  Gerry had earlier apprised me of Mark Twain's intention to flee to Kentucky when the end of the world came, 'because there it will come twenty years later'. His words were no more than a jibe at the expense of a behind-the-times backwater, but here in these untamed, unpeopled woods it was easy – and oddly appealing – to imagine us as motley refugees crossing a post-apocalyptic wilderness, the frail veneer of fossil-fuel technology stripped away, back to basics, living off the land and on our wits. But how terrifying to picture this scene without Gerry in it: an upturned cart made from pallets and pram wheels; beside it, an emaciated man with a pipe in his hat, prostrate and giggling in a puddle of fermented apple juice and earthenware shards; a barefoot boy leading four animals away down the trail, shaking his head sadly.

  At what, with a practised skyward squint, he judged to be lunchtime, Gerry parked up by a stream and untethered the boys. Then he squatted down and swiftly got a fire going with a technique I'd last seen successfully employed at Cinderbury, almost 2,000 years previously: a flint striker, a small square of scorched linen and a pinch of 'punk wood' – flaky tinder harvested from rotten, dried logs. Once again, the moment of combustion had me laughing in disbelief: it seemed more witchcraft than bushcraft.

  Gerry stoked his fire with twigs, leaned a flat stone against it, and presently anointed this with a golden slurry of ground maize and water. A moment later, on the tip of a smutted knife, he passed me a floppy, lightly singed biscuit: his famous Johnny cake. Slathered in butter it was almost delicious, like giant, flattened popcorn.

  An hour later, back on the road, a gleaming swish of ebony right in front of us stopped the boys in their tracks: 'Black racer,' murmured Gerry, 'one of the fastest snakes in the world.' Scanning the trailside with renewed diligence, shortly afterwards I spotted one of our leather hubcaps, evidently shed the day before and subsequently blamed on bovine cannibalism. In the heady aftermath of this, my debut act of useful participation, I embarked on a hat-swatting massacre that left twitching oxen flanks besmeared with horsefly purée.
/>   I thwacked and splattered my way through Gerry's life history. He was the son of a wealthy, old Virginia family – 'fancy Richmond tobacco types', Butch later called them – who had first disappointed his parents by enrolling at art school, then dismayed them via the seismic life shift that still haunted him in flashbacks: he couldn't sit in the back of a car without reliving the murderous moment the VC's gunners let loose on the helicopter carrying half his platoon. He had lost one wife to cancer, and divorced three more. Children had been accrued along the way: at the age of thirteen, his daughter announced her intent to spend her leisure time as an eighteenth-century pickpocket, a role she trained for by stealing state troopers' wallets at public events; now a Maths Ph.D., her current character was that of a travelling magician. Gerry's son – a Navy Seal with thirteen years' service – pitched up at period-weapon crack-shot tournaments and was invariably triumphant.

  The military veterans I'd mixed with in Denmark and Leicestershire were attracted to re-enactment by a nostalgia for hard-bitten, tough-talking camaraderie. This clearly wasn't what Gerry was looking for – apart from anything else, the worst I heard him say in five days was 'oh, shoot'. As he spoke, I understood that experiments like these – he called them 'adventures' – were a unique opportunity to meld the keen socio-historical knowledge so diligently accrued after his military days, with the low-tech survival skills he'd honed during them.

  Thinking back through Butch's doomsday vigil round at Gerry's on the eve of the millennium, and Gerry's pronouncements on the first world's shiftless decadence, I recalled that the only story he'd ever told me twice was the one in which his boys hauled a crashed Jeep out of a ravine, after all mechanical rescue attempts failed. I had a sense that if not quite looking forward to a post-oil lifestyle meltdown, or something even more dramatic, they were at least relishing the challenges that such a scenario would bring, while the rest of us sat in front of blank TV screens and cried ourselves to death.

  We harvested sumac, ate hot cheese, chased butterflies, turned for home. Jacob tired of our slothful progress and jogged off back to camp. At sweaty length, we led the boys up the penultimate hill; we were leading them down when I received a hot, wet nudge in the back of the head.

  I turned to behold a jostling stampede at memorably close quarters: a looming logjam of minotaur heads, their expressions for once conveying more than vacant indifference. The wagon seemed much closer to the boys than it should have been; pairing this with their ragged and increasingly rapid progress I quickly saw the need to distance myself from the scene forthwith. I was fifty yards downhill and scrabbling blindly away into the trees when with a mighty whoa and a scuffling, creaking clatter of hooves and wheels, Gerry brought the runaway to a halt. By the time I crept back his incident investigation was complete: a single crooked link had detached itself, thereby loosening the rear two oxen from the wagonpole. We found it 200 yards back up the path. 'If we'd had horses, that would have been a whole mountain of trouble,' said Gerry, though a wing-mirror check soon after showed that this apparently inconsequential alarum had drained all colour from my cheeks – and after three unwashed days in the broiled woods, and three fireside nights in a field full of crap, that meant an awful lot of draining.

  Butch had fallen off the covered wagon in our absence: we found him drinking Mountain Dew and wearing bifocals. We didn't say anything. His worst leg was propped up on a wooden chest, his suffering plain to behold. He'd already boiled us up some rice, and in the chirping dusk we bulked this up with a few hunks of sausage and doled it out into our grimy bowls.

  Because it wasn't raining, I'd blithely volunteered to wash up. The creek recommended for this chore lay at the outer reaches of our pasture, but, reluctant to invade the realm of the eight-foot black king, I had yet to locate it. Burdened with directions and a great stack of greasy, smutted cookware, I set off; twilight and the thrashing scuffles it brought slowed my pace and catalysed a rapid and unstoppable haemorrhage of exploratory zeal. As soon as the campfire was out of sight, I did a bad thing: I dropped the whole lot into a big puddle and thrashed it with a stick. I was blindly rinsing off bits of cholera with what was left in my canteen when a now familiar enquiry rang distantly out through the gloaming: 'Everything OK back there?'

  Gerry had a tin of baccy in his lap when I got back, and, having hidden my load of shame in our camp's darkest corner, I pulled the clay pipe from my hat and requested a pinch. At this stage of my intoxicant famine, it was any port in a storm – even if that meant clearing a fluffy spider's nest out of the bowl to make room for my drugs. 'Mild, and a little on the sweet side' had been Gerry's assessment of the local tobacco – thus reassured I drew in a huge lungful through that dusty little tube, then coughed it straight back out so violently that my hat fell off into the fire. It was the right way to end my last full day in 1775.

  I wondered how the Frontier Reform Church would handle Sunday, and after an entirely glorious blue-skied reveille I found out. 'We might be in the wilderness,' called Butch from the fire, 'but that's no excuse to disrespect the Sabbath.' Butch had a small and very old bible in his hand; Gerry was shaving with a mug of hot water and a deeply worrisome cut-throat razor. When he was done he handed both to me without a word. I gingerly scraped the fun-sized machete down both cheeks and across my upper lip, but baulked at the more challengingly three-dimensional sections, thus bequeathing myself an Amish-effect face-girdler.

  Butch gathered us all forth to the fireside, laboriously thumbed through his bible, and in a practised mumble, began to read. The following twenty minutes included many repetitions of the phrase 'for his mercy endures forever'; at one point, Moses sacrificed an ox, and sprinkled his people with its blood. Communion followed: half a cracker and a nip of very diluted brandy.

  A year before, I would have found such an intimate religious gathering unendurably awkward. But with the sun on my back and a gentle fire at my feet, Butch's unhurried psalms seemed warmly consoling – inestimably more so than Brother Balthasar's hungover medieval dronings in that frosted dungeon.

  Contemplating the forest around, I felt a surge of reverence for the religious refugees who founded the nation – driven away from their homelands and out across a savage ocean, then pitching up in this dumbfounding virgin wilderness. If it seemed like God's country to them, I could understand why just a few short centuries on the Lord's word still rang out in the Farmer's Christian Academy, or the Antioch Baptist Chapel, or any of the bland, low-slung, motel-like places of worship that bookended every town. Later, when I discreetly commended Jacob for his fidgetless placidity throughout the service, he frowned at me a little suspiciously, then described the five-hour round trip to church that dominated his Sundays at home.

  Butch eased the Good Book closed, fixed his congregation with a probing stare, then launched into a sermon that amplified his reverential mumble to a bible-bashing bellow. 'We've all succumbed to a social disease!' he began, and in alarm I readied myself to shield Jacob's sensibilities by clamping my hands over his ears, or maybe – please no – his eyes. 'These days it's always gotta be somebody else's job to do things for you! Well, I'm not going to be holy for you – you've gotta go and be holy people for yourself!' And having expressed his fundamental disillusionment with the feckless modern world, Butch wound things up with a protracted emphysemic wheeze.

  Packing up our makeshift travellers' camp didn't take long: pots and provisions crammed into wooden chests, flagons corked, the fire doused. Squeezing four boys and their wagon into the livestock trailer was the principal challenge, and one that left me slathered in khaki awfulness. Seeing them cooped up in a cage, my principal emotion was not compassion, but relief; a companionable way with domestic beasts was another ingrained human skill that seemed too deeply buried within me to exhume. I preferred my livestock dead.

  When the others were in the pick-up and ready to go, I jogged behind a tree to decontaminate exposed flesh with the last of my wet wipes; I was finishing up when a spider – an i
nnocuous brown spider – darted into the linen haversack at my feet. Showing a marked lack of concern for the wooden utensils contained therein, I reflexively brought my right foot down hard upon the bag from a great height, and then again, and again, and again. Many stamps later, panting and wild-eyed as I extended a tentative finger towards the carrying strap, a car door clunked open and a mild voice called out: 'Everything OK back there?'

  And so we juddered off down the trail, leaving behind us a field full of ox pats, and 1,100lb of rice chaff smouldering on the embers of the road gang's fire. Watching our pasture disappear behind the oaks, I ran the historical rule over my 1775 experience. In many ways I'd gone backwards since 1578: living rough in the primeval woods, the forest floor around speckled with freshly shattered Stone Age tools and the spoor of animals long since hunted to extinction back in England. My 200-year-old shirt was still in fashion, as were the utensils in the bag at my feet, whatever remained of them. The rising sun still woke me up, and the campfire had returned as the focus of all social activity. The printed philosophy in Gerry's knapsack aside, almost nothing had changed since the Iron Age. Significantly, the principal lifestyle modification was an enhanced range of mood-altering substances: alcohol was all about unwinding, but now there were stimulants, coffee and tobacco, ingested to make men work harder and faster.