150907 September 7, 2015

O Brave New World

"Als das Kind Kind war" *

Rainer Klauss

LHS '64

My mother roused me from sleep. Then: a heavenly coolness, the crisp, fresh sheets of my upper-berth cocoon, the lambent light of morning—those remain the few, fragmentary sense memories of my awakening shortly before my family’s arrival in Huntsville in the spring of 1950. We had traveled by rail, perhaps boarding a streamliner or some other diesel passenger train in the far corner of Texas in El Paso that then raced off with us through the day and night to the Heart of Dixie.  I was four-and-a-half years old.

Everything else that happened to me immediately following that awakening and for an indeterminate time thereafter is irretrievable. Gone but not strictly forgotten: I was simply too young to process and remember much of what happened around me during those early days.  It’s almost as if I fell asleep again for a month or lay in suspended animation.  Anyway, until the fog lifted, I stuck close to my parents. I knew we weren’t in Ft. Bliss anymore, but the strange new world around me only gradually came into focus as my powers of perception and cognition grew, and as I saw and experienced more of my surroundings. 

        Upon arrival, our parents had to deal with the myriad complexities—domestic, social, and professional—that accompanied starting up in a new place, but so much was fundamentally novel and different for them (and the children) as a result of this last migration. In Ft. Bliss, we had resided in a sheltered enclave that came to be called “Little Germany,” a group of medical outbuildings of the base’s Beaumont Hospital that had been converted into apartments and work spaces. The families lived close together, and the men strolled to their nearby labs. We may have arrived more or less en masse in Huntsville that spring, but released from the scrutiny, restrictions, and sub rosa nature of our existence in Ft. Bliss, we scattered throughout the city and found whatever lodgings we could.   This new-found freedom and dispersion—living alongside Huntsvillians—brought forth the necessity and willingness to assimilate, to become part of the citizenry. 

The picture above (downloaded from William Hampton’s comprehensive Facebook archive of historical Huntsville photographs, “Huntsville Revisited”) portrays my family’s first abode in this city, Longwood Court Apartments on Longwood Drive, then in the south part of Huntsville. The view is SSE.  We lived in the detached unit on the left. Brandon Street cuts a long diagonal to the south just east of the complex. The bottom of the bright flaw in the left corner of the photo points directly at Whitesburg Drive which, barely discernible among the trees, heads toward and then skirts the far hills beyond (behind which Jones Valley lies hidden). The picture purports to be from the early 50s, but I would date it earlier, maybe 1949. Although it’s hard to see them because of the size of the picture, the bushes adorning the buildings seemed to be bigger when we lived there; I recall hiding in them.

So much was suddenly new to us and part of our daily lives then. No longer able to take a short walk to work, the men drove or carpooled to Redstone Arsenal. Finally they received the opportunity to apply their expertise and determination to the advancement of American rocket technology. The wives had to learn how to deal with the multiple challenges of life in a new environment. We were soon immersed in the bustling and complex culture of a small Southern city, which was already in the process of tremendous change.

  The Gulf service station at the corner of Longwood and Whitesburg, just down the street from the apartment complex, fascinated me early on.  Its herald, the bright orange disk with the blue lettering (War Eagle!), caught my eye—even though I couldn’t read what it said. We owned a car by then (a blue ‘49 Kaiser-Frazer with external sun visors—like metal eyebrows), and that convenient establishment became our “fillin’ station.”  The allegiance to Gulf stations continued for many years. Their colorful maps guided us on vacations to Florida, Tennessee and elsewhere, the stations provided rest stops and gas wherever we traveled, and this youngster and his brothers quenched their thirst with many a cold Co-Cola under that bold sign.

        Above us at Longwood Court lived another family of Germans.  Mr. Bauer and my father had been co-workers since the late ‘30s, and our two families often got together at Ft. Bliss. Their two boys matched-up in age to my older brother, Dieter, and me. Shortly after moving to the apartment complex, the Bauers and several other German families bought land on Monte Sano.  On weekends, they began clearing their properties and building houses. My father sometimes pitched in with the work, but the rough site was no playground for free-spirited kids. The lots were crawling with snakes.  It almost became a ritual for a while, that when the Bauers got home from their weekend labors, Dieter and I dashed out to their car. Mr. Bauer unlocked the trunk and revealed the grisly sight: among the tools lay two or three copperheads or rattlesnakes, neatly decapitated.  I edged close enough to get a good look and tap the rattles cautiously.  After the Bauers completed the house, we visited them often on Panorama Drive.  Numerous rattlesnake skins decorated the boys’ bedroom, the rattles intact and prominent.

        I learned English, which can often be the most daunting obstacle to assimilation, with ease.  Dieter had been bi-lingual for a couple of years by then, and my other teachers were the American kids I played with at the complex.  My new vocabulary grew as mutual curiosity called forth a need to communicate. Self-consciousness or effort played no part in this matter.  It just happened.  By the time we moved to a rented house the next year, I already had a Southern accent.

        For my fifth birthday, my father crafted a fort out of small pieces of pine for me, gluing and bracing the pale strips together. The gift included a plastic set of cowboys and Indians, brandishing weapons and ready to tangle. The frozen-action figures had probably been purchased at Kress’s or Woolworth’s. Those were not my first toys, of course, but the ensemble was the first I was really conscious of--where I sensed and then got lost in a child’s deep immersion in play, a stretch of the imagination.  There stood my own small world, a replica, one could say, of the early days of Ft. Bliss, when the soldiers of that frontier outpost did their best to protect the territory from marauding Apaches and Comanche.

        I have no doubt that I experienced that uncanny awakening sixty-five years ago.  It was a transcendent moment comprised wholly of simple earthly pleasures—suddenly there, reveled in (almost unconsciously), and then gone as I was fully rousted out of bed to play my part in the big day.  It was a small gift given when I was too young to grasp its specialness.  Even now I wonder.

        Coda: As I wrote this piece I thought of a trope (common theme) from science fiction. Colonists are traveling from planet to planet in search of a habitable world where they can thrive and foster their generations.  In a diaspora of sorts, they’re evacuated in steel machines from a war-torn environment and transported to a strange, near-desert planet, where they’re quarantined. Then word of another, more suitable environment for them comes from on high. They depart on other steel machines and arrive at a verdant, welcoming planet. The natives and the colonists then find common cause in building a bright future—including space ships. It’s a sketchy start, but a book could be written about it. 

* "Als das Kind Kind war”—When the child was a child. The epigraph comes from Wim Wenders film, Wings of Desire (1987).

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