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Summer of Night: A Novel
by Dan Simmons
Ratings:
528 pages15 hours
Summary
This masterfully crafted horror classic, featuring a brand-new introduction by Dan Simmons, will bring you to the edge of your seat, hair standing on end and blood freezing in your veins
It's the summer of 1960 and in the small town of Elm Haven, Illinois, five twelve-year-old boys are forging the powerful bonds that a lifetime of change will not break. From sunset bike rides to shaded hiding places in the woods, the boys' days are marked by all of the secrets and silences of an idyllic middle-childhood. But amid the sundrenched cornfields their loyalty will be pitilessly tested. When a long-silent bell peals in the middle of the night, the townsfolk know it marks the end of their carefree days. From the depths of the Old Central School, a hulking fortress tinged with the mahogany scent of coffins, an invisible evil is rising. Strange and horrifying events begin to overtake everyday life, spreading terror through the once idyllic town. Determined to exorcize this ancient plague, Mike, Duane, Dale, Harlen, and Kevin must wage a war of blood—against an arcane abomination who owns the night...
Publisher: Macmillan PublishersReleased: Jul 5, 2011ISBN: 9781429985314Format: book
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Summer of Night - Dan Simmons
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Since Summer of Night was published in 1991, I’ve received more mail, e-mail, and comments on it than on any of my other novels (except perhaps for Hyperion). What fascinates me is that the preponderance of letters are from people around the world who are about my age, who remember a childhood from the era around the summer of 1960 when the novel is set, and who have been moved to say that their childhood memories of freedom are so similar to that of the kid-characters in my novel. And then they lament that their own children and grandchildren lack that freedom. But, I always wonder, how can someone who grew up in France or Russia or Japan or Israel—all sources of these letters of recognition—have had similar childhoods as my American kids in the rural summer of 1960?
Summer of Night, while on the surface a horror novel, is actually a celebration of the secrets and silences of childhood. But it’s also a tale of a separate world of childhood that we’ve lost or may be on the verge of losing. Therein may lie one of the elements that seems to have made this novel accessible to so many people.
But what are some of the other common denominators that have allowed people from around the world to identify so strongly with Mike, Dale, Lawrence (Don’t-Call-Me-Larry), Kevin, Harlen, Cordie, and the other kids from Summer of Night?
EE-AAW-KEE!
The secret and common element, I believe, is the freedom kids had to inhabit their own worlds in 1960 … a freedom for kids to be kids in an active physical universe separate from their parents and other adults but still in the real world, a rich kid-world that, I also sincerely believe, has all but disappeared in the 21st century.
Dale, Lawrence, Mike, Kevin, and Harlen waved good-bye to their mothers (if Jim Harlen’s mother was around to wave good-bye to) after breakfast early in the summer morning and, more often than not, were out of sight and on their own until dinnertime or, sometimes, until after dark.
On page 29 of the original hardcover version of Summer of Night, I see those five members of the Bike Patrol setting off for their evening patrol
of their little Illinois town of Elm Haven:
Come on,
Mike said softly and stood on the pedals, leaning far forward over his handlebars and taking off in a shower of gravel.
Dale and Lawrence and Kevin and Harlen followed.
They rode south down First Avenue in the soft gray light, moving under elm shadow and emerging quickly into the open twilight. The low fields lay open to their left, the dark houses to their right.
Imagine a group of eleven-year-olds going out into the twilight today on bikes, staying out after dark. The TV would be blaring Amber Alerts. Helicopter searchlights would be stabbing down. The parents would be interviewed, blubbering, on the evening news.
Mike, Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, and Harlen might have been scolded when they came riding their bikes home at ten P.M. on a summer evening in Elm Haven—Kevin, with a fussy mother, perhaps scolded and interrogated the most; Harlen, whose mother would probably be out on a date, scolding not at all—but for most of the kids, it wouldn’t be a serious scolding.
As the first paragraph of chapter three of Summer of Night told us:
Few events in a human being’s life—at least a male human being’s life—are as free, as exuberant, as infinitely expansive and filled with potential as the first day of summer when one is an eleven-year-old boy. The summer lies ahead like a great banquet and the days are filled with rich, slow time in which to enjoy each course.
As an elementary-school teacher of eighteen years, I read the proclamations by so many school districts around the country that summer vacation should be abandoned, that kids should attend school year-round, and I feel sick to my stomach.
Of course the three-month summer vacation is an anachronism, something left over from when kids of all ages were unpaid labor for planting and harvest, branding and roundup, on their families’ farms and ranches.
Of course kids tend to forget some of what they’d been taught the previous school year when they have more than two months off and return in late August or early September and have to be retaught some concepts.
So what? is my response. What kind of human being in his or her right mind would trade a great banquet of summer days filled with rich slow time in which to enjoy each course—of freedom—for remembering a few more of the multiplication tables?
And, as an elementary teacher of eighteen years, I can testify that those bits and pieces of pedagogical data lost over the summer can be recaptured in a few weeks of teaching the first month of the new school year. (And I can also testify that most of the lost stuff was not really worth learning in the first place.)
But there will always be Dale and Lawrence Stewart’s waking-on-the-first-morning-of-summer sense that "the barrier of the gray school year had been raised and color had been allowed to return to the world."
Who in his right mind would trade that precious summer infusion of color and kid-freedom for a few lousy social-studies facts or lists of memorized spelling words?
THE CHICKENHOUSE RADIO
The kids in the Bike Patrol liked to gather in Mike O’Rourke’s chickenhouse. In athe novel, they did so on their first free morning of the summer of 1960.
The place no longer had chickens in it although their smell still remained. Someone had dragged in a sprung and spring-leaking old couch and some spavined armchairs. Someone else, probably Mr. O’Rourke, had stuck the empty shell of a huge old shortwave console radio from the 1930s in one corner of the chickenhouse. While some of the guys, including brilliant and overweight Duane McBride in from his farm, lounge around the chickenhouse on the first day of summer, Jim Harlen crawls behind and then into the shell of the console radio. He imitates the sound of the old radio warming up, static, then—
He’s going back! Back! Back against the right field wall of Comiskey Park! He’s jumping for it! He’s going up on the wall! He’s…
Aw, nothin’ here,
muttered Duane. I’ll try the International Band. Dum-da-dee … here we are … Berlin.
Ach du lieber der fershtugginer ball ist op und outta hier!
came Harlen’s voice, changed instantly from the excited Chicago Dizzy-Deanish drawl to a throaty, Teutonic lashing of syllables. Der Fuhrer ist nicht gehappy. Nein! Nein! Er is gerflugt und vertrunken und er veilige pisstoffen!
Nothing here,
muttered Duane. I’ll try Paris.
When I read and hear these days about online communities,
I think of Mike, Dale, Lawrence (Don’t-Call-Me-Larry), Duane McBride, Kevin, and their other friends in the Bike Patrol hanging out in Mike’s chickenhouse before jumping on their bikes again and taking off for somewhere. To me, online communities
are just more texts, more blobs of electronic ink on a glass page, just one more glass teat that the kids and grown-ups of our era can stay home and suck on rather than emerge into the light and engage with the real world. Why do today’s kids have so damned much to say and so damned little to do?
One answer may be that we’ve stolen most of the real world from them.
OUR THEFT OF OUR CHILDREN’S SPACE
The boys (and most of the girls) of Elm Haven in the summer of 1960 had a fun radius of action on their bikes:
All of their town of Elm Haven could be explored in about a mile of pedaling. The ride out east of town past the Lone Tree Tavern and down the hills and into the woods to Corpse Creek at the bottom of the hill and Calvary Cemetery at the top of the next hill was a little over a mile and a half of pedaling effort on the gravel road. Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s farm beyond there was an easy two-mile bike ride, Duane McBride’s house a half mile farther, the old quarry now called Billy Goat Hills in the woods another mile of walking behind Calvary Cemetery, the eternal mystery of Gypsy Lane another two miles or so beyond that in the thick woods.
Stone Creek, where they could swim in the deep area under the one-lane highway bridge—where the crawdads were—was about four miles out along the mostly gravel road. No problem. Jubilee State Park was about four or five miles beyond Stone Creek on the same road and a full day’s bike trip including the time spent playing in that big state park and hiking to and threatening to jump from the high cliff called Lover’s Leak (so named by the other boys because Harlen had once urinated from its heights).
In the morning, the parents didn’t ask where the kids were headed and the kids didn’t tell. It was a good policy.
So the effective unattended play range of these kids of Elm Haven on any given summer day (with good weather for cycling) was about ten miles out, twenty miles round-trip. That’s changed a bit since 1960.
I’ve tried to find some good sociological evidence on just how much that range of a pre-teenager’s roaming space has decreased in the past three or four decades, but even with the help of some far-more-savvy researchers from my friendly online forum, very little has turned up. One has to depend upon personal observation and other people’s anecdotes, and that opinion is overwhelming in saying that kids are all but prisoners of their houses, yards, and parent-scheduled activities in the 21st century.
I am looking at an interesting study by Sanford Gaster—Urban Children’s Access to Their Neighborhood: Changes Over Three Generations
—published in Environment and Behavior, Vol. 23, January 1991.
As it says in the title, it’s a study of the loss of free roaming space
for American kids over three generations, but it’s an urban study and it looks at the generations between 1915 and 1976, specifically in the suburban neighborhood of Inwood on the northern tip of Manhattan. Obviously anything having to do with kids in Manhattan doesn’t seem to connect to the freedom of Mike, Kevin, Dale, Lawrence, Duane, Harlen, Cordie, and the other kids from 1960 in tiny little Elm Haven, Illinois (Pop. 650—Speed Electrically Timed).
But it does.
Inwood’s earliest urban residents were Irish, German, and Russian immigrants. There were later influxes of Italians, Poles, Greeks, and Armenians. It was a working-class neighborhood, and a clean and decent one. The first African-American families arrived in the 1950s and by the time the study was done, large sections of Inwood were all-black so no research could be done on white kids there.
The kids in the 1920s and 1930s had it best in Inwood, in terms of sheer freedom, since their play sites included woods, construction sites, and the huge Inwood Hill Park. Then in the 1930s, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration changed the landscape forever by putting the Henry Hudson Parkway right through Inwood Hill Park, thus building a Great Wall of China right through the kids’ woods and roaming ground. (In that same project, the Henry Hudson Bridge, with all its access ramps, was built there to link Inwood with the mainland: a dubious improvement from the local kids’ point of view.)
During the same New Deal period, the wild still-accessible areas of Inwood Hill Park were civilized
with benches, pathways, lighting, sports fields, game courts, and playgrounds replacing the woods and trails. By the mid-1960s, most of the unsupervised areas of Inwood Hill Park were the predatory domain of black youth gangs. The African-American community—parents and clergy—responded quickly and shifted their kids’ activities to highly organized and supervised amusements: adult-run Little League, school programs, youth-center activities, etc.
Thus the African-American non-gang-member kids eight to thirteen were the first to be heavily supervised, their days of roaming free in woods and empty lots curtailed and then ended, and the white kids would follow that path to heavy adult supervision in all things by the 1970s. A 1920s roaming radius
of three to five miles for kids in Inwood Hill Park all but disappeared as children’s activity, largely out of parents’ fear of gangs, drug dealers, and automobiles, continued to shrink to the house, the fenced yard, and the supervised playgrounds.
This was part of the study’s conclusion:
Over much of this century an interplay of forces in Inwood has worked to restrict children’s unsupervised neighborhood activity. Most prominent were the erosion of the number and variety of places children can or may visit and the increasingly adult-directed nature of outdoor play. Neither crime, physical environment decay, nor automobile traffic are [sic] solely to blame.
In the 1920’s [sic], the rapid, almost relentless excavating, building, obliterating, and otherwise transforming of Inwood gave its children a universe of unsupervised play opportunities—pits, rocks, farms, swamps, woods, barns, mansions, and construction debris. In the 1940’s [sic], with the building of Inwood largely complete, with the population at its peak, and with the New Deal landscape firmly in place, play environments became conventionalized and supervised—playgrounds, ballfields, and, in the 1950’s [sic], housing projects.
Inwood’s 1940s experience for kids was a mirror of the environment for my little brother and me in Des Moines in 1956–57. We had a private forest preserve behind our house, wild gulch city woods
running two miles and more behind that, and those linking to an extensive forest preserve that was almost free of trails or improvements. More to the point, there was a myriad of new home construction going on around that gulch and, as any boy can tell you, construction debris
—the abandoned holes, pits, hills of dirt, partially constructed houses, even the empty construction equipment in evenings and weekends, make for the perfect playground. We celebrated such spaces by doing everything from walking along narrow boards high on the open, floorless third floors of just-framed houses to having clod fights to taping my little brother (always the daredevil of the group) up in a big cardboard box and heaving him off the top of a thirty-foot heap of dirt to land in a twenty-foot-deep construction pit half-filled with water. (Houdini-like, my little brother always survived.)
When we eventually moved from Des Moines to the tiny little town of Brimfield in central Illinois (Pop. 650—Speed Electrically Timed), the town that was to be the template for Elm Haven,
our radius of free roaming increased dramatically, and not just because we were a couple of years older. We had to bike and hike farther—almost five miles—to get out to the abandoned gravel quarry in the woods (Billy Goat Hills) to tape my little brother Wayne up in a slightly larger box and throw him off a slightly higher hill (fifty feet tall) into a deeper (twenty-five-foot) quarry quite filled with water, but it was worth the effort. (He escaped the box. Eventually. But for a long time it was just a matter of bubbles coming up to the surface of the dark quarry, then a longer time with no bubbles, and I admit that I was thinking up a wide variety of explanations-to-curious-parents to explain my kid brother’s demise. Most of the explanations involved gangs of gypsies who came out of the woods and taped Wayne up in their box and threw him in the quarry while the rest of us kids were tied up.) (It’s hard being an older brother.)
My research friends have found a relative plethora of UK-based studies on kids’ restrictions on play and roaming, and the conclusions of that research pretty much mirror the anecdotal evidence I have from friends and my own observations re: the relative disappearance of roaming freedom for kids eight to thirteen in the States.
One such article summarizing research in The Observer, Sunday, August 3, 2008, begins:
It is a scene that epitomises childhood: young siblings racing towards a heavy oak tree, hauling themselves on to the lower branches and scrambling up as high as they can get. Yet millions of children are being deprived of such pleasure because their parents are nervous about exposing them to risk.
A major study by Play England, part of the National Children’s Bureau, found that half of all children have been stopped from climbing trees, 21% have been banned from playing conkers, and 17% have been told they cannot take part in games of tag or chase. Some parents are going to such extreme lengths to protect their children from danger that they have even said no to hide and seek.
Now, I don’t know what the British game conkers
consists of, but having been a kid—and having had access to balls and dirt clods—I can guess. The study goes on to include—
The tendency to wrap children in cotton wool has transformed how they experience childhood. According to the research, 70% of adults had their biggest childhood adventures in outdoor spaces among trees, rivers, and woods, compared to 29% of children today. The majority of young people questioned said that their biggest adventures took place in playgrounds.
A kid’s biggest adventures taking place on a friggin’ playground!!?? Dale, Lawrence, Mike, Duane, Kevin, Harlen, and their friends would have never stopped throwing up at such a statement. (Cordie Cooke would have laughed heartily before throwing up.)
You’ll note in Summer of Night that even on the huge center-of-town playground that fully surrounded the giant, scary Old Central School, their favorite playground toy was a giant new septic tank that had been brought in and rolled up against the tallest slide (so tall it would be forbidden on all school playgrounds today) and the kids used that eight-foot-tall tank to play king of the mountain and shove each other off it, only to run up the giant slide and jump down on the slippery, treacherous curved surface again to start the shoving match all over.
Well, it beats conkers.
The final UK article that my research friends have come up with is titled How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations,
published in 2007, and it pretty much says it all both for England and the United States, for kids suburban and even small-townish.
The longitudinal study looked at one family and the roaming ranges of an eight-year-old, the youngest in my eight-to-twelve roaming-range interest, from 1919 to 2007:
Great-grandfather George, age eight in 1919, was allowed to walk six miles to go fishing outside of town. Most of that walk was through heavy woods down railroad tracks, back roads, and trails.
Grandfather Jack, aged eight in 1950, was able to walk about a mile on his own to the woods to play. But he played alone or with friends of the same age in the woods! Jack, like the boys of Elm Haven in 1960, spent most of his time outside and almost none in his house listening to radio or watching TV. (At age eighty-eight when the report was written, he was still a keen walker.
)
The mother, Vicky, when age eight in 1979, was allowed to walk alone to the swimming pool in town, about half a mile away. But Vicky adds, I was able to go out quite freely—I’d ride my bike around the estate, play with friends in the park, and walk to the swimming pool and school.
The son today, Ed, eight years old in 2007, was only allowed to walk to the end of his street, about three hundred yards away.
Even that is more freedom than I’ve seen local kids granted. Until he was older than twelve, the son of one of our neighbors wasn’t allowed out of the yard without adult supervision even though our old part of town,
the historical old section, was comparatively safe and small-town-feeling. When the boy finally started riding a bicycle, he did so armored like a medieval knight—wearing not only helmet but some sort of shin guards from a Rollerblade store. (How, one wonders, did Mike, Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, Harlen, and the other kids from Elm Haven survive without bike helmets? Adults didn’t ride bikes then, so there were no good examples of spandex-wrapped grown-ups hunkered over $3,500 handlebars, their precious skulls encased in several hundred bucks’ worth of helmet. The kids of Elm Haven—the kids of my generation—never wore bike helmets. Oddly enough, we knew of no kids dead or paralyzed with brain injuries. We all went over the handlebars sooner or later, but that meant scrapes and bruises, not a lifetime spent in the vegetable ward.)
Anyway, besides all kids in our neighborhood now always being as helmeted as a Nazi storm trooper if they get within fifteen paces of a bicycle, their bikes in the 21st century have ten-foot wands on them, each wand sporting an orange Don’t Run Over Me, Please!
pennant. Neighborhood boys aren’t allowed to ride out of sight until they are fourteen, and then only to the end of the block and back. Even for that modest distance—something the kids of Elm Haven would have done without thought or worry on anyone’s part when they were seven—mothers now watch their sons like a proverbial hawk.
As a sobering UK 2001 study by Gill Valentine and John McKendrick concluded:
It is not the lack of play facilities that limits children’s outdoor or unsupervised play, but parental anxieties about children’s safety. Parents feel that children are more at risk today than they were as youngsters. In all the studies of parental anxieties, the two biggest fears voiced by parents are abduction by strangers and road traffic. Yet, despite the increasing levels of worry, in reality children have never been safer.
Wait! you say. That’s in the UK. Here in America, the shrubberies are overflowing with child-kidnappers, pedophiles, crazy people, and ax-murderers!
Are they?
Statistically, American kids outside the killing zones of the inner cities—i.e., those in the American suburbs and small towns and rural areas—are about as safe now as they were in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, and on through the turn of this century and beyond. But we adults—we parents—don’t believe the kids are safe outside of our direct sight and adult supervision (even though research also shows that a lot of those pedophiles
end up in jobs giving adult supervision
in schools, playgrounds, preschools, and organized athletic programs to kids who used to roam free and unpredatored).
But the twenty-four-hour TV news announces every Amber Alert in the nation. And the movies and TV cop shows are filled with stories of child abductions, murder, torture.
Adults override their common sense—much less the memories of their own times as free kids aged eleven and thereabouts, a time filled with freedom to roam and play with other kids—and err on the side of caution.
And they make their children prisoners.
And now those prisoners, like those in a mental asylum, are kept calm and in the house by the tranquilizing drugs of cell phones, computers, iPads, iPods, TVs, texting, and other glass teats.
But, I argue to this day, and the Bike Patrol kid-voices of Mike, Dale, Kevin, Lawrence, Duane, Harlen, Cordie and the others back me up, that if you adults steal the space and time of childhood, you steal childhood itself.
THE DEATH OF A KID CHARACTER
And yet …
And yet …
One of the kid-characters in Summer of Night dies. (I’m sorry if this is a spoiler, but I won’t give any more clues as to which important kid-character.) (Other than it is a boy.)
The death of this character was very hard for me to write, and not only because it was a kid or because the death of any central character in a novel should bother the novelist, the character’s creator. More than that, even though much has been written about the effect of the death of a child on parents, there are very few inquiries—sociological, psychological, or fictional—on the death of a child on that child’s peers and friends. (One of the best fictional treatments I’ve encountered of this sort of trauma in kids at the loss of a young friend was in Weldon Hill’s little-known novel, The Long Summer of George Adams.)
Also, this character who dies in Summer of Night deeply interested me, both in real life when I knew him and in the novel where I re-created him by blending him with another dear friend of mine. One of the two real-life friends upon which I based this character was murdered.
More than that, Summer of Night was as autobiographical as anything I’ve ever written, and while the characters are fictional, they engaged me deeply. I knew even when I was writing the novel in 1990 that those characters might well pop up in later stories and novellas and novels that I would write, even though I somewhat disagree with the practice of any writer spreading his characters across separate and disparate books.
Sure enough, one of the boy-characters (who, I discovered, had lost a leg in Vietnam less than a decade after the events in Elm Haven in the summer of 1960), ends up as a priest in Romania (and one of the two main characters) in my novel Children of the Night. I was pleased to see him and pleased to see that, despite his loss of part of one leg, he was still the same generous, bold, courageous character I’d known as a kid in Summer of Night. He showed up again a few years later as a much more minor character, post-priesthood, as an unnamed helicopter pilot in the Hawaiian Islands in my novel Fires of Eden, and I was fascinated to learn whom he’d married in the interim since Children of the Night and what he was up to.
The brave little white-trash girl from Summer of Night, Cordie Cooke, whom I never expected to see or hear from again, also shows up in Fires of Eden, and she has a central supporting-character role. After my initial astonishment at learning she was very wealthy, I heard the reason for that in the tale I was telling and understood completely. Cordie was never anything if not indomitable.
In my comic-suspense-thriller Darwin’s Blade, 2000, another favorite boy kid-character from Summer of Night showed up in a primary supporting role. A skinny little-brother daredevil in the Elm Haven novel of 1960, this character was—in 2000—a six-foot-two, 230-pound accident investigator in California, running his own insurance investigation company with his wife. His sense of humor had stayed the same. (And he still hated being called Larry.
) Through him, we heard some of what had come of his older brother.
One member of Elm Haven’s 1960 Bike Patrol shows up as the central character in my 2002 novel A Winter Haunting. That character, an English professor in Montana during some of the interim since his childhood, had just lost his wife and family in a deserved divorce and was suffering a massive nervous breakdown as he decided—disastrously or miraculously, whichever you choose—to return to a haunted
farm near Elm Haven, one formerly belonging to a kid-friend of his, to write a novel.
Elm Haven and its stark surroundings in the winter of 2000 were radically different, it turns out, than they had been in the rich, warm-lighted summer of 1960. But then, this main character in A Winter Haunting remembered the events of 1960 differently than they had been laid out in Summer of Night. The supernatural elements were no longer supernatural. The unexplained and inexplicable were at last … mostly … explained.
My goal when writing A Winter Haunting was to create a fictional Mobius strip of the two novels—almost literally a twisted circular two-sided tale with, topologically speaking, only one side. Just as one can draw a pencil around both sides of a physical, three-dimensional Mobius strip without ever lifting the pencil from the paper, so the reader can read A Winter Haunting and Summer of Night as two separate tellings, two separate but equal (and strangely interdependent) realities, yet both based on a single series of events.
When readers tell me that they want to read both books and ask if they should start with Summer of Night or its sequel,
A Winter Haunting, I try to explain—not always successfully—that the second novel is not really a sequel and that it doesn’t matter which book one reads first. Either way, the other novel will help illuminate the first one you read. (It doesn’t matter where you set the point of the pencil down to trace a continuous line around a Mobius strip.)
But there is a ghost
in A Winter Haunting. That ghost is the indelible memory of a boy-character with infinite promise who dies far too young, far too violently. Whichever explanation for the death the reader accepts, the death itself is irrevocable.
Or is it?
It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who was upset when this central character died in Summer of Night. Much of the mail I’ve received from around the world since the publication of 1991 demands that I bring the character back to life.
(Whether I did that in A Winter Haunting will be up to the reader to decide.) Angry—or hurt and generous—letters and e-mails sent to me have had elaborate explanations of how this interesting (and vulnerable) character isn’t really dead but has been carried away and cocooned under one of the farm fields outside of Elm Haven. (And so forth.)
Years ago, when an artist I knew was doing a huge 125-year anniversary wall-ceramic rendition of Central School where I taught for eleven years here in my Colorado town, people would ask her, Who’s the rather sad-looking boy looking out the second-story window of the school?
It was my lost character from Summer of Night, and that was this artist’s way of keeping him alive.
KIDS AS ECONOMIC TARGETS OF OPPORTUNITY
One huge difference between the kids of Elm Haven circa 1960 and the kids of today is that the great marketing and sales apparatus of American capitalism hadn’t discovered the Elm Haven kids yet.
The most important and expensive things any of the Elm Haven kids owned were their bikes and—with only Kevin as an exception—these bikes were either handed down from older siblings or purchased used, very used, by the boys’ parents. The boys loved their bikes and needed them (the bikes did, after all, grant them the freedom to roam the relatively vast distances they took for granted) and although the bikes lay out in front yards at night without fear of theft (except when villain Chuck Compton and his toady assistant-villain Archie, real names from my past, did steal them) the boys tended to treat their priceless vehicles rather carelessly. Most specifically, the boys of Elm Haven—except for Kevin—had the habit of dismounting their bikes at high speed and allowing them to career, riderless, across someone’s yard until they finally fell over or crashed into Mike’s chickenhouse.
The other valuable thing that each boy of Elm Haven had was his baseball glove. These mitts, old and re-restrung as they were, were invaluable since not only did most of the boys play on the small town’s Little League team—traveling to nearby towns such as Kickapoo, Illinois, where dreaded pitcher Dave Ashley was on the mound—but they also played ball from early morning to late dusk for weeks on end out on the high-school ball field that was in the fields beyond Dale, Lawrence, and Kevin’s backyards, out there on the north end of town where the endless farm fields began.
But other than those treasures—their bikes and baseball gloves—the boys of Elm Haven (other than Kevin Grumbacher, Chuck Sperling, and a few other rich kids
) owned very little that wasn’t ragged or used or handed down or all three.
The boys wore their universal kid-uniform of jeans—rather stiff by today’s standards, rolled up at the bottom—and T-shirts. The only logo on any of the T-shirts was the Boy Scout–logoed T-shirt that Dale Stewart liked to wear. Lawrence and Harlen liked to wear their old Cub Scout uniform shirts, washed and rewashed to soft thinness and so short, at least on Jim Harlen, that the cuffs of the faded blue shirt barely reached below his elbows.
The idea of wearing designer labels—other than the word Levi hidden somewhere on the jeans’ buttons—would have struck both the boys of Elm Haven and their parents as absurd.
For summer footwear, the boys of Elm Haven wore Keds or high tops. Old ones. Very old ones. Socks and toes peeked out of almost all these shoes. Here the only exception was Duane McBride—who was an overweight bundle of exceptions—since Duane wore his ancient black high-top sneakers all the time. (And his faded corduroy pants and flannel shirts, even in the heat of summer.)
It should be noted that all the boys of Elm Haven, even the poorest like Mike O’Rourke, whose family had a pump-handle sink with water in the house but no other indoor plumbing and who had to go to the outhouse (next door to the chickenhouse, unfortunately for the Bike Patrol on hot summer days) even in the worst cold nights of winter, still separated their school clothes
from their play clothes.
Most didn’t wear jeans to school, although if they did, they still had a collared shirt that would be tucked in. Almost all had a pair of oxfords to wear to school—old and broken in, but, like the children themselves, capable of being shined to a gloss several times a year.
Only Duane McBride wore the same clothes and black sneakers every day.
The total wealth of one of the boys of Elm Haven’s wardrobe on a summer day would probably have been around $4.50—and that when the jeans and T-shirt and Keds or high tops were new.
To decry commercialism is the ultimate cliché. (Although I like the way young Alvin Greenman, as Alfred, the slightly overweight young janitor in 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street explains it to Edmund Gwenn (the real Santa Claus)—"Yeah, there’s a lot of bad ‘isms’ floatin’ around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism. Make a buck, make a buck. Even in Brooklyn it’s the same—don’t care what Christmas stands for, just make a buck, make a buck.")
That was 1947. Alfred—and Santa Claus—would drop their collective dentures if they saw the commercialism
of the 21st century.
My mentor during my eighteen years as a public-school teacher (and beyond that) on important educational issues was the author, media and culture critic, and indefatigable humanist Neil Postman. Although Postman died in 2003, his observations on the effect technology and cultural change has had on us all—but especially upon children—are more relevant than ever. When I was completing my master’s degree in education to become a teacher in 1971, Postman’s seminal book was Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and those who didn’t understand him thought that he was another sixties radical. Years later in 1979, amidst the chaos of those postsixties years, Postman wrote Teaching as a Conserving Activity, and those who didn’t understand him thought that he was a Reagan conservative.
Neil Postman was far more than either of those mislabelings. He was a man who understood André Gide’s all-but-forgotten statement—The only true education comes from what goes counter to you.
More importantly, Postman understood—and explained most eloquently—that childhood
as we know it is a space, place, and concept that didn’t really exist for adults (or children) until the late 18th century and which had been all but destroyed by the late 20th century. (As an artist and lover of art, I knew the first part of Postman’s equation quite well—children simply weren’t portrayed in the actual proportions of children in paintings and portraits through the centuries, at least until the 1800s. It wasn’t just primitivism in art that made children always look like shrunken adults, all with the wrong proportions of head to torso, until the mid-eighteenth century. Painters, like everyone else, simply thought of children as small adults and rendered them that way.)
That era where childhood was finally respected as a distinct time of life unto itself and one with different rules—in other words, as a period when children shouldn’t be subjected to the same shocks and demands and realities that burden adults—really came into existence after the invention of the printing press when men worked on the assumption that the information environment of children should be different—more restricted—than the information environment of adults.
That protective wall has been taken down. (Actually, I think of the end of childhood that I’ve witnessed in the last decades of the 20th century as the removal of the parents’ bedroom door. Nothing that adults, including parents, do—including sex—or think or talk or argue or worry about is hidden from children any longer.)
Our reflexive habit is to celebrate all technological and cultural revolutions in recent decades, but this is one revolution we should pause and think about.
This revolution, heralded by almost all of us (including parents), is one that has killed the kid-dom childhood so celebrated by Dale, Lawrence (Don’t-Call-Me-Larry), Mike, Kevin, Harlen, Cordie, Donna Lou, and the many other children of 1960 Elm Haven. Postman writes about this revolution that has made the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century versions of childhood as a separate and protected place problematic to the point of no longer being viable.
I refer, of course, to the ‘information revolution’ which has made it impossible to keep secrets from the young—sexual secrets, political secrets, social secrets, historical secrets, medical secrets; that is to say, the full content of adult life, which must be kept at least partially hidden from the young if there is to be a category of life known as childhood. (Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future, p. 124)
Without separate secrets and silences, there can be no protective barrier between childhood and the roughest aspects of adulthood.
The kids of Elm Haven thought they were facing terrible supernatural foes—the evil and sentient Borgia Bell in the cupola of Old Central, the dead Doughboy who had come back to haunt and attack Memo, the unspeakable Rendering Truck—but they never seriously considered going to their parents or other adults for help (with the single exception of Mike’s bringing in the young priest, which turned out to be a terrible idea).
The worlds between kid-life and adulthood were simply separate then. During the course of Summer of Night, each of the kid-characters is forced to face some terrible aspect of the adult world—raw sexuality, the death of a friend one’s own age, violence, loneliness, drunkenness—but in each case the kids of Elm Haven summoned strength from each other and from the separate place and secrets and silences that were childhood itself.
Today, children of all ages have become the targets of advertising and commerce. Instead of Levis, middle-class kids expect to wear designer jeans. Instead of generic T-shirts (or a beloved Boy Scout T-shirt), kids today wear designer labels stenciled wide across shirts as if paying for the privilege to be a billboard for some corporation. Too many boys expect to wear different athletic shoes—basketball shoes, cross trainers, court shoes, running shoes—that go for $60 and up a pair, when the boy of 1960 did every sport in his Keds or high tops. Girls put American Girl
dolls on their Christmas want lists—dolls that may cost $100 and more.
As Neil Postman wrote in 1999: "The point is that childhood, if it can be said to exist at all, is now an economic category. There is very little the culture wants to do for children except to make them into consumers. It’s only gotten worse in the decade and more since Postman wrote those sentences. (Since, as I mentioned, Postman died in 2003, he was mercifully spared the soul-sickening über-marketing Lolita-phenomenon known as
Hannah Montana" that debuted on the Disney Channel in 2006.)
For the most part, Mike, Kevin, Lawrence, Duane, Cordie, Donna Lou, Dale, Harlen, and the other kids of Elm Haven 1960 didn’t really have any money to spend, other than the random nickels for a cold bottle of Coke from the red A&P machine on Main Street where Mike’s mother worked or the occasional gumball from the dispenser in the Parkside Café during the Free Show in Bandstand Park. The great All-Seeing Eye of the Mordor-proliferating media and Madison Avenue with its army of orcs hadn’t discovered them yet. Kids weren’t yet consumers.
They were still human beings.
THE SMARTEST KID NOT ON THE BLOCK
All through the year at the end of the day at Old Central School, teachers had the farm kids line up to go to their buses while the town kids stayed at their desks, fidgeting, waiting for the lines of farm kids to file out. Then the town kids were finally released.
Farm kids and town kids. It was a serious division. The town kids spent the summer playing with each other, riding their bikes together, forming the Bike Patrol, playing ball together. The farm kids … well, most of them had chores. If there were other farm kids close enough to walk to see through the ever-rising fields of corn, they hung out with these other kids, swimming in a cow-watering hole, tossing cobs high in the corn silo, shooting sparrows in the barn with their BB guns, but mostly farm kids had a more solitary life than town kids.
The exception was Duane McBride.
Duane McBride was an exception in most ways.
He was a farm kid who lived more than two miles out of Elm Haven but through the summer he hung out with Mike, Dale, Kevin, and the other Chickenhouse kids. Duane was a member of the Bike Patrol, but he didn’t own a bike. The other boys were all lean—partly because of modest diet, mostly because of amazing amounts of daily outdoor exercise throughout the year—but Duane McBride was fat.
The other boys had little use for school because it (and their teachers) was boring. Duane had gone beyond Old Central School and beyond most schools.
Duane was mostly an autodidact and a brilliant one. With some guidance from his Uncle Art, Duane McBride had read most books, fiction and nonfiction, that would constitute a solid college curriculum. Mostly alone on the farm in winter, while his father was off drinking, Duane had learned five foreign spoken languages, his accent honed by old 78-rpm foreign-language records he’d found and checked out from the archives of the Oak Hill Public Library. He’d read the Iliad in Greek, the Aeneid in Latin, and Kant’s Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik in Fraktur German. And he had done all this before he was twelve.
Duane McBride was different in another important way.
All the other kid-characters in Summer of Night were fictional distortions and composites of actual boys and girls I knew during my few years in the tiny town of Brimfield. Duane McBride was an amalgam of two young men I would meet much later, during my four years at Wabash College in Indiana.
One of those brilliant young men that went into creating Duane McBride was named Keith N_______, a sophomore when I was a senior but many, many years ahead of me in his scholarship and general knowledge. Keith is alive and well and teaching Latin, Greek, Classics, film history, and a host of other subjects at a medium-size liberal arts university in Indiana. I’ve been asked at SF convention panels—Dan, you’ve spent time with Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Harlan Ellison, Peter Straub, David Morrell, and so many other great writers. Who’s the smartest person you’ve ever known?
And each time I have to answer, The smartest person I’ve ever known is probably a guy named Keith N_______.
Sometimes I might doubt that, but recently Keith came to my daughter’s wedding here in Colorado and as I watched and listened to him talking to other people—artists, sociologists, editors, housewives, airline pilots, linguists, film agents, doctors, drug counselors, university recruiters, video producers—always with Keith knowing so much about the other person’s field that it was as if they were talking with a fellow professional, I realized that I was correct in feeling that he was almost certainly the first among so many highly intelligent people I know.
The other half of the amalgam that was the character of Duane McBride, his first name Duane, was a college friend who was murdered in real life just a couple of years after our graduation. As founder and editor-in-chief of the underground literary publication The Satyr during our senior year at Wabash, I published examples of both Duane’s nonfiction and short fiction. It was brilliant. He was brilliant. And unhappy.
The details of my off-and-on friendship with that Duane (and our literary rivalry at college, a rivalry that existed only in Duane’s mind), as well as details of his murder, as well as my frustrated efforts to establish a writing award in Duane’s name at Wabash College, all appear in a Writing Well
essay from the archives on my Web site—http://www.dansimmons.com/writing_welll/archive/2009_12.html.
And yes, I also dislike links in print materials. Unless you’re reading this from a Kindle, it doesn’t do you much good, I admit. But just to add insult to injury, the October and November Message from Dan
essays on my same Web site were in the form of a two-part short story, set in Elm Haven, starring some of the boys of Elm Haven, and occurring—or at least beginning the narrative—during the televised Kennedy-Nixon debates on October 21, 1960.
BUT READER BE WARNED!
The events in these two ministories occur not just in October of 1960, after all the events of Summer of Night, but they also look decades into the futures of many of the main characters from the novel. You may not like that. Read these two free pieces of short fiction at your peril and only after you’ve read Summer of Night:
http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2008_10.html
http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2008_11.html
But briefly back to Duane McBride.
Part of my pleasure of creating and writing about Duane McBride was the simple fact that Duane was probably the only genius I’ve ever set in my fiction.
We use the word genius
too casually—often just to denote an especially bright person. But my focus for my master’s degree in education and further training at BOCES New York and beyond prepared me to work not only with seriously learning-disabled elementary students, but also with the very gifted.
And Duane McBride was that rarest of ava … the profoundly and globally gifted. In real life, you and I run about the same odds of bumping into an actual, functioning genius as we do coming across an extraterrestrial.
Everyone discounts IQ tests, but they remain the single best way to predict academic and professional success. After a century of measuring it, no one knows exactly what the g-factor
is that is measured in an IQ test, but—at least in Western civilization based on books and learning—that g-factor may be the major determinant on our lives.
Most of us remember that one standard deviation in such testing is 15 points. Well, assuming that most of us score somewhere around the median IQ score of 100, we’re all used to dealing with people who are a standard deviation—15 points or an IQ of around 85—below us. We even know how to conduct ourselves politely with those two standard deviations below the norm, IQs somewhere around 70, which is bordering on serious mental retardation.
A three-standard-deviation difference—trying to communicate with someone holding an IQ of 55 or below—is all but impossible. In some ways, these people are not really in the human intellectual community.
Well, the same goes for those human oddities smarter than us. We’re often impressed with those people whose IQ is a standard deviation or so above our own. We often work for people with a gifted IQ of 130 or above, two standard deviations above the norm. Most of us, whether we know it or not, will meet at least one person who would score three standard deviations above the IQ norm. For better or worse, those individuals tend to change the world.
But Duane McBride?
Duane’s IQ might have been set near 220 or so, more than seven standard deviations above the norm for intelligence, but unfortunately—or fortunately—IQ tests can’t accurately test intelligences that high. They are literally off the scale. And, in many real ways, beyond our comprehension.
I’m interested that Mike, Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, and most of the other kids liked Duane McBride so much, even though he often said things the others didn’t understand at the time. Dale Stewart, we know from A Winter Haunting, grew up to be a respected college professor and a writer, but he was always aware that, at his academic height, he didn’t know as much about things as his friend Duane McBride had when Duane was eleven years old.
Jim Harlen was probably the most suspicious of Duane, but I’ve discovered in my Election Night
stories and elsewhere that Harlen had a ferocious intelligence of his own, and it was a hurt and jealous one. It would follow its own dark path.
I literally loved the character of Duane McBride. I would have been fascinated to follow his adventures later in life, perhaps in politics, certainly in the intellectual realm. He was my Mycroft to the lesser Sherlock. He was Nero Wolfe, thinking and deducing circles around all the mere Sam Spades out there, and he had a touch of a Peter Ustinov raconteur thrown in. I would have loved to have been Duane McBride’s friend, even if only to learn from him the way I learned from Keith N_______ and the other real-life Duane.
But in the end I wasn’t surprised to learn that Duane McBride had only one perfect friend and confidante—his elderly collie Wittgenstein.
THE FREE SHOW
Life doesn’t often get the chance to imitate art imitating life. But not long ago it did for me.
A central metaphor and narrative focal point in Summer of Night is the Free Show.
The Free Show was the movie projected onto the side of the Parkside Café most Saturday nights in the summer in Elm Haven in 1960, just as such a Free Show had been part of my kid-life in Brimfield. For an actual photograph of the Free Show (nestled in with photos of the actual kids who were the templates for Mike O’Rourke, Kevin Grumbacher, Jim Harlen, Dale Stewart, Lawrence Stewart, and others) I refer you again to my Web site archives at: http://www.dansimmons.com/about/snapshots2.htm.
The last old 1960 snapshot on that page is of people on blankets and in pickup trucks, with kids on the bandstand, waiting for the actual Free Show to begin.
Well, cut to our new home, where we’ve lived since 2007. Not long after we arrived here, Karen and I—often with grown-daughter Jane’s help—initiated the Simmons Summer Cinema Series (Movies Under the Stars!). Neighbors and friends show up on frequent Saturday nights through the summer to sit in our darkened backyard (darkened except for yellow bulbs along the nearby pergola where the popcorn, lemonade, and other treats are set out on a bench) and to watch old movies digitally projected onto a huge screen we labored to set up.
Most of the Summer Cinema Series guests probably know I’m a writer, but it’s never pertinent to our backyard-movie conversations. More pertinent are the movie-trivia-contest e-mails I send out to those invited, asking the most detailed and outrageous questions about, say, Singin’ in the Rain. (At the end of this summer’s cinema series, a gentleman and lady who’d won several of these truly difficult contests presented Karen and me with an Honorary Oscar
for contributing to continued interest in the motion-picture arts. The award was a heavy thing, and we found out that they’d purchased it through a place in Hollywood that was the only licensed vendor in the United States for such statuettes.)
On that last movie evening of this past summer—hard to imagine as I look out the window and watch the sun set here not long past four-thirty on this first day of December—I said that I’d explain why we did these films. I then brought out a copy of Summer of Night and read the following passage aloud to forty-some people settling into their lawn chairs in the dusk, the kids sprawling on sleeping bags on the late-summer-scented grass—
The Free Show began at dusk, but people started arriving at Bandstand Park even while sunlight still lay along Main Street like a tawny cat slow to leave the warm pavement. Farm families backed their pickups and station wagons onto the parking-lot gravel along the Broad Avenue side of the park so as to have the best view when the movie was projected against the Parkside Café; then they picnicked on the grass or sat on the bandstand and chatted with townfolk they hadn’t seen for a while. Most of the local residents began to arrive when the sun had finally set and the Avenue under its arch of elms seemed a dark tunnel opening onto the lighter width of Main Street and terminating at the bright promise of the park with its light and noise and laughter.
The Free Show was a tradition dating back to the early days of World War II when the nearest picture show—Ewalts Palace in Oak Hill—had closed due to the Ewalts’ son and only projectionist, Walt, enlisting in the Marine Corps. Peoria was the next nearest source of movie entertainment, but the forty-mile trip was too much for most people because of gas rationing. So the older Mr. Ashley-Montague had brought a projector out from Peoria each Saturday evening that summer of 1942 and shown the newsreels and war-bond ads, cartoons, and feature attractions there in Bandstand Park, the images cast twenty feet tall on the whitewashed canvas screen stretched against the Parkside Café.
…
Now, on the fourth evening of June in the summer of 1960, Mr. Ashley-Montague’s long Lincoln pulled into the space always left open for it due west of the bandstand. Mr. Taylor and Mr. Sperling and other members of the City Council helped him carry the massive projector to its wooden platform on the bandstand, families settled onto their blankets and park benches, adventurous children were shooed from the lower tree branches and their hiding places in the crawlspace beneath the bandstand, parents in the back of pickup trucks adjusted their folding chairs and handed around bowls of popcorn, and the park settled into a pre-show hush as the sky darkened above the elms and the canvas rectangle on the wall of the Parkside Café came alive with light.
If this is your first time reading Summer of Night, I hope you enjoy the show. For those of you returning—welcome back to Elm Haven.
Dan Simmons
Colorado
Dec. 1, 2010
Note: I’d like to acknowledge Craig and Chris Wolf, James D. French, Brad Miller, William Coleman, and other members of my online forum for helping me find research data for my kids’ roaming range
comments.
These fascinating studies include:
Asthana A, Kids Need the Adventure of ‘Risky’ Play,
The Observer, Sunday 3 August, 2008;
Barnodo’s, Playing It Safe, London: Barnado’s, 1995;
Carver A, Timperio A, and Crawford D, Playing it safe: The influence of neighbourhood safety on children’s physical activity,
Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research, School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences, Deakin University, Vic. 3125, Australia Received 31 August 2006; received in revised form 18 June 2007; accepted 19 June 2007;
Cunningham J, Children’s unsupervised play is not a luxury, but a crucial aspect of their development,
Play Scotland annual conference 2001, article published 3 January 2002;
Derbyshire D, How children lost the right to roam in four generations,
Daily Mail, 15 June, 2007;
Ennew J, Time for children or time for adults?
in J Qvortrup, M Bardy, G Sgritta, and H Wintersberger (eds), Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics, Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1994;
Gaster S, Urban children’s access to their neighborhoods: Changes over three generations,
Environment and Behaviour, January 1991, 70–85;
Hillman M, Adams J, and Whitelegg J, One False Move … A Study of Children’s Independent Mobility, London: Policy Studies Institute, 1990;
Skenazy L, Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts from Worry), Web site of the same name;
Wheway R and Millward A, Child’s Play: Facilitating Play on Housing Estates, London: Chartered Institute of Housing, 1997.
The upshot of all of the above is that the current generation of parents are scared s***less for their kids, and they act on that fear by oversupervising, overworrying, overscheduling, and overdirecting their children’s lives, stealing from that younger generation the space, time, secrets, and silences that are necessary for childhood to survive into the 21st century.
ONE
Old Central School still stood upright, holding its secrets and silences firmly within. Eighty-four years of chalkdust floated in the rare shafts of sunlight inside while the memories of more than eight decades of varnishings rose from the dark stairs and floors to tinge the trapped air with the mahogany scent of coffins. The walls of Old Central were so thick that they seemed to absorb sounds while the tall windows, their glass warped and distorted by age and gravity, tinted the air with a sepia tiredness.
Time moved more slowly in Old Central, if at all. Footsteps echoed along corridors and up stairwells, but the sound seemed muted and out of synch with any motion amidst the shadows.
The cornerstone of Old Central had been laid in 1876, the year that General Custer and his men had been slaughtered near the Little Bighorn River far to the west, the year that the first telephone had been exhibited at the nation’s Centennial in Philadelphia far to the east. Old Central School was erected in Illinois, midway between the two events but far from any flow of history.
By the spring of 1960, Old Central School had come to resemble some of the ancient teachers who had taught in her: too old to continue but too proud to retire, held stiffly upright by habit and a simple refusal to bend. Barren herself, a fierce old spinster, Old Central borrowed other people’s children over the decades.
Girls played with dolls in the shadows of her classrooms and corridors and later died in childbirth. Boys ran shouting through her hallways, sat in punishment through the growing darkness of winter afternoons in her silent rooms, and were buried in places never mentioned in their geography lessons: San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood, Okinawa, Omaha Beach, Pork Chop Hill, and Inchon.
Originally Old Central had been surrounded by pleasant young saplings, the closer elms throwing shade on the lower classrooms in the warm days of May and September. But over the years the closer trees died and the perimeter of giant elms which lined Old Central’s city block like silent sentinels grew calcified and skeletal with age and disease. A few were cut down and carted away but the majority remained, the shadows of their bare branches reaching across the playgrounds and playing fields like gnarled hands groping for Old Central herself.
Visitors to the small town of Elm Haven who left the Hard Road and wandered the two blocks necessary to see Old Central frequently mistook the building for an oversized courthouse or some misplaced county building bloated by hubris to absurd dimensions. After all, what function in this decaying town of eighteen hundred people could demand this huge three-story building sitting in a block all its own? Then the travelers would
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