I’d never contemplated how there might be a difference between winds. I’d never felt one myself, unless you counted air pushed through vents, or the fan on a treadmill. After the birthday party, I looked up “wind” and read about breezes and gales and siroccos, about haboobs and zephyrs. Great words, words to turn over in my mouth, words that spoke to nothing in my experience.
The next time I heard the song in its proper tuning, I closed my eyes and listened for the wind.
“Windy Grove”
Traditional. Believed to have traveled from Scotland to Cape Breton in the nineteenth century. Lost.
“Wind Will Rove”
Instrumental in D (alternate tuning DDAD). Harriet Barrie, Music Historian:
The fiddler Olivia Vandiver and her father, Charley Vandiver, came up with this tune in the wee hours of a session in 1974. Charley was trying to remember a traditional tune he had heard as a boy in Nova Scotia, believed to be “Windy Grove.” No recordings of the original “Windy Grove” were ever catalogued, on ship or on Earth.
“Wind Will Rove” is treated as traditional in most circles, even though it’s relatively recent, because it is the lost tune’s closest known relative.
The Four Deck Rec has the best acoustics of any room on the ship. There’s a nearly identical space on every deck, but the others don’t sound as good. The Recs were designed for gatherings, but no acoustic engineer was ever consulted, and there’s nobody on board with that specialty now. The fact that one room might sound good and another less so wasn’t important in the grander scheme. It should have been.
In the practical, the day to day, it matters. It matters to us. Choirs perform there, and bands. It serves on various days and nights as home to a Unitarian church, a Capoeira hoda, a Reconstructionist synagogue, a mosque, a Quaker meetinghouse, a half dozen different African dance groups, and a Shakespearean theater, everyone clinging on to whatever they hope to save. The room is scheduled for weeks and months and years to come, though weeks and months and years are all arbitrary designations this far from Earth.
On Thursday nights, Four Deck Rec hosts the OldTime, thanks to my grandmother’s early pressure on the Recreation Committee. There are only a few of us on board who know what OldTime refers to, since everything is old time, strictly speaking. Everyone else has accepted a new meaning, since they have never known any other. An OldTime is a Thursday night, is a hall with good acoustics, is a gathering of fiddlers and guitarists and mandolinists and banjo players. It has a verb form now. “Are you OldTiming this week?” If you are a person who would ask that question, or a person expected to respond, the answer is yes. You wouldn’t miss it.
On this particular Thursday night, while I wouldn’t miss it, my tenth graders had me running late. We’d been discussing the twentieth and twenty-first century space races and the conversation had veered into dangerous territory. I’d spent half an hour trying to explain to them why Earth history still mattered. This had happened at least once a cycle with every class I’d ever taught, but these particular students were as fired up as any I remembered.
“I’m never going to go there, right, Ms. Clay?” Nelson Odell had asked. This class had only been with me for two weeks, but I’d known Nelson his entire life. His great-grandmother, my friend Harriet, had dragged him to the OldTime until he was old enough to refuse. He’d played mandolin, his stubby fingers well fit to the tiny neck, face set in a permanently resentful expression.
“No,” I said. “This is a one way trip. You know that.”
“And really I’m just going to grow up and die on this ship, right? And all of us? You too? Die, not grow up. You’re already old.”
I had heard this from enough students. I didn’t even wince anymore. “Yes to all of the above, though it’s a reductive line of thinking and that last bit was rude.”
“Then what does it matter that back on Earth a bunch of people wanted what another group had? Wouldn’t it be better not to teach us how people did those things and get bad ideas in our heads?”
Emily Redhorse, beside Nelson, said, “They make us learn it all so we can understand why we got on the ship.” She was the only current OldTime player in this class, a promising fiddler. OldTime players usually understood the value of history from a young age.
Nelson waved her off. “ ‘We’ didn’t get on the ship. Our grandparents and great-grandparents did. And here we are learning things that were old to them.”
“Because, stupid.” That was Trina Nguyen.
I interrupted. “Debate is fine, Trina. Name-calling is not.”
“Because, Nelson.” She tried again. “There aren’t new things in history. That’s why it’s called history.”
Nelson folded his arms and stared straight at me. “Then don’t teach it at all. If it mattered so much, why did they leave it behind? Give us another hour to learn more genetics or ship maintenance or farming. Things we can actually use.”
“First of all, history isn’t static. People discovered artifacts and primary documents all the time that changed their views on who we were. It’s true that the moment we left Earth we gave up the chance to learn anything new about it from newly discovered primary sources, but we can still find fresh perspectives on the old information.” I tried to regain control, hoping that none of them countered with the Blackout. Students of this generation rarely did; to them it was just an incident in Shipboard History, not the living specter it had been when I was their age.
I continued. “Secondly, Emily is right. It’s important to know why and how we got here. The conventional wisdom remains that those who
