We went down to the windy grove
Never did know where the wind did go
Never too sure when the wind comes back
If it’s the same wind that we knew last.
Nelson’s essay arrived promptly on Monday. It began “Many examples of history repeating itself can be seen in our coursework. There are rulers who didn’t learn from other ruler’s mistakes.”
I corrected the apostrophe and kept reading. “You know who they are because you taught us about them. Why do you need me to say them back to you? Instead I’m going to write about history repeating itself in a different way. Look around you, Ms. Clay.
“I’m on this ship because my great-grandparents decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives on a ship. They thought they were being unselfish. They thought they were making a sacrifice so someday their children’s children’s children to the bazillionth or whatever would get to be pioneers on a planet that people hadn’t started killing yet, and they were pretty sure wouldn’t kill them, and where they’re hoping there’s no intelligent life. They made a decision that locked us into doing exactly what they did.
“So here we are. My parents were born on this ship. I was born here. My chromosomes come from the gene bank, from two people who died decades before I was born.
“What can we do except repeat history? What can I do that nobody here has ever done before? In two years I’ll choose a specialty. I can work with goats, like my parents. I could be an engineer or a doctor or a dentist or a horticulturist, who are all focused on keeping us alive in one way or another. I can be a history teacher like you, but obviously I won’t. I can be a theoretical farmer or a theoretical something else, where I learn things that will never be useful here, in order to pass them on to my kids and my kid’s kids, so they can pass them on and someday somebody can use them, if there’s really a place we’re going and we’re really going to get there someday.
“But I’m never going to stand on a real mountain, and I can’t be a king or a prime minister or a genocidal tyrant like you teach us about. I can’t be Lord Nelson, an old white man with a giant hat, and you might think I was named after him but I was named after a goat who was named after a horse some old farmer had on Earth who was named after somebody in a book or a band or an entertainment who might have been Lord Nelson or Nelson Mandela or some other Nelson entirely who you can’t teach me about because we don’t remember them anymore.
“The old history can’t repeat, and I’m in the next generation of people who make no impact on anything whatsoever. We aren’t making history. We’re in the middle of the ocean and the shore is really far away. When we climb out the journey should have changed us, but you want us to take all the baggage with us, so we’re exactly the same as when we left. But we can’t be, and we shouldn’t be.”
I turned off the screen and closed my eyes. I could fail him for not writing the assignment as I had intended it, but he clearly understood.
“Wendigo”
Traditional. Lost.
Harriet Barrie:
Another tune we have the name of but not much else. I’m personally of the belief “Wendigo” and “Windy Grove”are the same song. Some Cape Bretonians took it with them when they moved to the Algonquins. Taught it to some local musicians who misheard the title and conflated it with local monster lore. There’s a tune called “When I Go” that started making the rounds in Ontario not long after, though nobody ever showed an interest in it outside of Ontario and Finland.
If we were only to play songs about things we knew, we would lose a lot of our playlist. No wind. No trees. No battles, no seas, no creeks, no mountain-tops. We’d sing of travelers, but not journeys. We’d sing of middles, but not beginnings or ends. We would play songs of waiting and longing. We’d play love songs.
Why not songs about stars, you might ask? Why not songs about darkness and space? The traditionalists wouldn’t play them. I’m not sure who’d write them, either. People on Earth wrote about blue skies because they’d stood under grey ones. They wrote about night because there was such a thing as day. Songs about prison are poignant because the character knew something else beforehand and dreamed of other things ahead. Past and future are both abstractions now.
When my daughter Natalie was in her teens, she played fiddle in a band that would be classified in the new DB as “other/undefined” if they had uploaded anything. Part of their concept was that they wouldn’t record their music, and they requested that nobody else record it either. A person would have to be there to experience it. I guess it made sense for her to fall into something like that after listening to me and Gra and Harriet.
I borrowed back the student fiddle she and I had both played as children. She told me she didn’t want me going to hear them play.
“You’ll just tell me it sounds like noise or my positions are sloppy,” she said. “Or worse yet, you’ll say we sound exactly like this band from 2030 and our lyrics are in the tradition of blah blah blah, and I’ll end up thinking we stole everything from a musician I’d never even heard before. We want to do something new.”
“I’d never,” I said, even though a knot had formed in my stomach. Avoided commenting when I heard her practicing. Bit my tongue when Harriet complained musicians shouldn’t be wasting their time on new music when they ought
