September 24,—1935-Story About a Boy, Some Wild Roses, a Snake and a Spanking
The Washington Daily News—Tuesday—September 24,—1935
Story About a Boy, Some Wild Roses, a Snake and a Spanking
By ERNIE PYLE
CEDAR RAPIDS, Ia.—It was soon after crossing into Iowa, coming south, that I gradually became conscious of the wind.
I don’t know whether you know that long, sad wind that blows so steadily across the thousands of miles of Mid West flat lands in the summertime. If you don’t, it will be hard for you to understand the feeling I have about it. Even if you do know it, you may not understand. Because maybe the wind is only a symbol.
But to me the summer wind in the Mid West is one of the most melancholy things in all life. It comes from so far, and it blows so gently and yet so relentlessly; it rustles the leaves and the branches of the maple trees in a sort of symphony of sadness, and it doesn’t pass on and leave them still; no, it just keeps coming, like the infinite flow of Old Man River.
You could, and you do, wear out your lifetime on the dusty plains with that wind of futility blowing in your face. And when you are worn out and gone, the wind, still saying nothing, still so gentle and sad and timeless, is still blowing across the prairies, and will blow in the faces of the little men that follow you, forever. That is it, the endlessness of it; it is a symbol of eternity.
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As soon as I became conscious of the wind in Iowa, I was back in character as an Indiana farm boy again. Like dreams came the memories the wind brought. I lay again on the ground under the shade trees at noon time, with my half-hour for rest before going back to the fields, and the wind and the sun and the hot rural silence made me sleepy, and yet I couldn’t sleep for the wind in the trees. For the wind was like the afternoon ahead that would never end, and the days and the summers and even the lifetimes that would flow on forever, tiredly, patiently.
No, I see it’s a bad job, me trying to make you see something that only I can ever feel. It is just one of those impressions that will form in a child’s mind, and grow and stay with him thru a lifetime, even playing its part in his character and his manner of thinking, and he can never explain it.
So let’s drop the wind, and talk about snakes. There’s another impression that has come up with me out of childhood. I have a horror of snakes that verges on the irrational. I’m not afraid of being killed by a snake. It isn’t that kind of fear. It’s a horrible, unnatural mania for getting away, and it is induced in equal quantities by a 6-inch garden snake and a 6-foot rattler.
I happened to think about snakes because, in 15,000 miles of driving this year, I had not seen a snake until I drove thru southern Minnesota. And there, in less than two hours, I counted 14 snakes on the road.
Ask my mother about snakes. She’ll tell you the snake story, probably. In all the years I have been away, she never fails to tell it over again when I am there on a visit.
I was a little fellow, maybe 4 or 5. My father was plowing at the far end of our farm, a half-mile from the house. I was walking along behind the plow, barefooted, in the fresh soft furrow.
He had just started the field, and was plowing near a weedy fence-row. Red, wild roses were growing there. I asked my father for his pocket-knife, so I could cut some of the roses to take back to the house.
He gave it to me, and went on plowing. I sat down in the grass and started cutting off the roses. Then it happened in a flash. A blue racer came looping thru the grass at me. I already had my horror of snakes at that tender age. It must have been born in me. I screamed, threw the knife away, and ran as fast as I could.
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Then I remembered my father’s knife. I crept back over the plowed ground till I found it. He had heard me scream and had stopped. I gave him the knife, and started back to the house.
I approached the house from the west side. There was an old garden there, and it was all grown up in high weeds. I stopped on the far side, and shouted for my mother. She came out and asked what I wanted. I asked her to come and get me. She said for me to come on thru by myself. I couldn’t come.
She ordered me to come, and I began to cry. She told me if I didn’t stop crying, and didn’t come thru, she would whip me. I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t come thru. So she came and got me. And she whipped me. One of the two times, I believe, that she ever whipped me.
That evening, when my father came in from the fields, she told him about the crazy boy who wouldn’t walk thru the weeds and had to be whipped. And then my father told her about the roses, and the knife, and the snake. It was the roses, I think, that hurt her so. My mother cried for a long time that night after we went to bed.
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It has been more than 30 years since that happened, but to this day when I go home my mother sooner or later will say, “Do you remember the time I whipped you because you wouldn’t walk thru the weeds?” and then she will tell me the story, just as I have told it here, and along toward the end she always manages to get the hem of her apron up around her eyes, just in case she should need it, which she always does.
