As a young boy, growing up in the 1940s, one of my
favourite radio shows came on late at night, at 9:30 p.m., half an hour after
my bedtime, and thus could only be listened to covertly under the covers with
the radio light the only source of illumination in an otherwise blackened
environment. Needless to say, the little
orange light emitted from the small radio set I hid under the blankets was part
of the eerie atmosphere and the mysterious story being told.
The tale that stands out most in my
memory recounts a sunken boat that lies under the mud of the Hudson River. The shipwreck had been there for three
centuries and had been one of the smaller vessels that followed Heindrick
Hudson’s voyage of discovery to find the Northwest Passage. Not treasure, but something else more
valuable and powerful lay hidden in this ancient wooden tomb, something, it
would seem, that was vaguely alive, or animate in a foreboding and grotesque
way. The narrative voice spoke of a
small group of adventurers who, learning of the wreck and tempted both by the
promise of riches, fame and the sheer joy of discovery, searched charts of
colonial Nieuw Amsterdaam and journals of the future city’s earliest European
inhabitants. One of these yellowing,
fragile documents found in a secret archive in Trinity Church in Lower
Manhattan provided the leading clue, which the hardy band of intrepid modern
explorers sought to follow.
As tremulous organ music played under the deep voice of the narrator,
basso profundo, the cliché-ridden script told how the young men,
nearly contemporary with the time I was listening to this radio broadcast,
let’s say about 1949, found an entrance to a tunnel under one of the oldest
docks on the river. Though oozing
disgusting smelling mud and barely held-together by rotting old logs, the
tunnel seemed trust-worthy enough for them to go forward, with just a few
handheld flashlights to show the way. It
was likely that they would have to advance close to a mile out to the main
channel where the wreck was said to lie.
The truth is, as I have to admit, two things prevented me from knowing
what happened in this bubba meysa, although it certainly worked in
making a deep and horrendous impression on me that has lasted more than fifty
years.[i] One of these things is that the commercial
breaks every ten minutes diverted my attention, so far as keeping any
continuity of narrative logic in mind, although I was immediately caught up in
the action once again and mesmerized by the speaker’s dark, deep voice. This was similar to the way I read books:
going from page top page or paragraph-to-paragraph without remembering what
came before or anticipating what would follow.
The second thing was that very resonant and soothing voice, along with
the dark space under the blankets and the pale eerie light of the radio, tended
to make me fall asleep and miss key moments of narration and so again lose any
awareness of continuity of meaning.
This, by the way, is a habit I continue to this day watching movies on television,
especially old films, and late at night, but of course this narcotic effect may
be precisely why when I can’t otherwise fall asleep I watch these classic
movies.
At the heart of my memory sits a glimpse of mysterious figures squirming
through the mud, creeping among the skeletons of sailors who died four hundred
years earlier, and voices eerily echoing along the dark winding tunnels under
the Hudson River. If I can feel my way
into the amorphous substance of this recollection, all the real details and
contours of which have disappeared with the years, if they had at all played
themselves into a proper storyline as I lay in my head listening to the radio,
there is something there about the Indians who lived on both sides of the
river, who paddled their canoes out to see the strange vessel that had invaded
their consciousness, and the struggle that ensued, the aboriginal warriors
realizing in some way that everything in their lives was about to end. For this reason, what was frightening to me
as a child, though I could not understand either the psychological dimensions
or the historical implications of the silly narrative, was this sense of the
modern explorers intruding into the wreckage under the river, violating the
forbidden connections that should have been forever severed at the moment the
ship sank, and forcing the muddy waters of the river to yield a sense of its
own incomprehensible rage and frustration.
This tale, I remind you, was just one of many that I heard week after
week for at least one year. Like so much
else in my childhood, incidents of this sort, whether experienced at first hand
or through the medium of radio, film or books, were shaping my consciousness
and thus the course of my life in ways that neither the other persons involved
could have guessed nor my own mind articulate for most of my subsequent career;
and which only now in what must surely be the final decade or two start to make
sense.
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