Visions of the Past

Our bikes came to a halt in awe of a field of small yellow flowers laying drenched in the suspended sunlight. We were riding roads unmarked on our map of Ohio. The road system was a grid, so there was no worry of becoming lost. We went west, parallel to the highway – away from all of the traffic and anxiety – riding instead amongst a silence broken only by the subtle wavering hum of wind against the eardrums.

A flurry of red winged blackbirds, nestling quietly in the long grass was roused in a flurry, unintentionally startled by us as we passed. The hills were effectively gone now, the lingering few being inconsequential in the scope of the flat farmland stretching out in all directions. This was the first of the Midwest. A humble farmhouse and its rickety barn, its silos and trucks or tractor adorned the roadside marking each transition from one plot of land to the next, and a dark line of trees stood mediating the boundary between crops. The sky was bright blue overhead.

Ahead of us I saw our road was coming to an end with the next intersection, and we would have to decide between taking the left or the right to find the next street leading west. In our pause Justin pulled out a water bottle to take a swig. I looked down the road to the right and saw two dirty blond heads bobbing up and down, a couple kids on bicycles coming toward us.

The one in front was the smaller, maybe five years old. His face was smudged with dirt and he was draped in a pair of dirty, tattered overalls. He carried a large white jug in his left hand with the few fingers he could spare while gripping onto the handlebars.

His brother followed. He was a bit taller, overalls faded and worn to the same pale blue as his brother's, probably having been handed down from a yet older dirty blond head. The white cloth handlebar tape was mostly stripped from his old orange road bike. His seat was too high and the bicycle was too big so he rode standing erect on its aluminum pedals with his little dusty bare feet.

They rode by slowly, perpendicular to us. Forgetting their bicycles, their destination, forgetting time and place, and forgetting their expressions their identical faces stared back at us as we stood over our bicycles and bags. Mouths open and eyes empty, they struggled alike to register what it was they saw before them. I was equivalently overwhelmed at the sight of their pure, unconscious possession of countryside childhood and waved to them as they passed in front of us. They were pulled suddenly away from their confusion, became suddenly conscious of the clicking from their freewheels and remembered where they were. They both returned to pedaling, and, shyly, they waved back.

When they were a bit down the road Justin looked at me, exasperated, and proclaimed, “I want to be them!"

We followed after, a short way behind. The boys had pulled off and dropped their bikes on the left side of the road. The little one was running, almost dancing, through the wheat field, waving the big white jug side to side in his hand held high toward his father who was stepping down from the lofty seat of a tractor. Once closer, I saw his father prop the little boy up on his shoulders and walk through the field while talking to another man, his son's arms hugging tight the straw hat on his head. The older brother was up in the tractor seat with his hands around the steering wheel. He put out his right hand to us and waved once again, proud of his position and grinning brightly from the honored seat.

Across the horizon in the distance the figure of a horse drew a buggy northward. It turned and began down the road we were on, coming toward us in the left half of its lane. I could distinguish a small brown horse with a loose vertical white stripe along the length of its face leading an uncovered old wooden carriage. In the seat sat three young girls. Holding the horse's leather reins was the oldest, wearing a dress of deep magenta. A thinly striped bonnet covered her dark hair, with its rippled brim shading her brown eyes from the noon sun. Sitting beside her was a slightly younger girl who had two tight, long, brown braids running down the front of her dress from behind each ear. A third littler girl sat at their feet. All three struggled between looking at us and looking anywhere else.

Present day had fallen out from beneath me and I was gone into a time so long passed we couldn't comprehend each other. It was here before me laid out not as a reenactment, but as their approach to reality, the functional past voluntarily lived out in the current. Time seemed to progressively slow in the lessening distance between us. In the moment we passed, they politely waved, their expressions still suspended in indecision, still unsure what to think or how to look. This got the attention of a little sandy blond girl sitting on the back who poked her head up from behind them. This littlest, seeing us as we went by, turned around to face us, then plopped down, her pale blue dress and little feet dangling over the back edge of the carriage. The dreamlike sense of fantasy escaped me in a smile I could no longer contain. She didn't wave, but her unabashed eyes, so full of gravity and insatiable wonder, followed us precisely, and curiously, seeking the timeless comprehension we all were seeking, following our figures at least as long as I could watch them in the distance from the corner of my own wondering eye. The clop-clop of the horses hooves began to slowly fade behind, and a fresh breeze rolled over the fields, bending the strands of wheat. Silence curled up around us once again as the eternal sun slowly drifted through the sky.