Whenever we go on a long car ride, say to Target, we always take an audiotape with us. If the trip is extra long, say to church, we take five or six audiotapes. The choice of subject of these stories is always a struggle, with me leaning toward mysteries that will keep me white-knuckled on the steering wheel and Joe preferring some sort of nonfiction account of important people who are long since dead. No sense in wasting brain cells, is his feeling on the subject of mysteries.
So, like any wise couple, we compromise and get what Joe likes. Usually these stories involve one of the founding fathers, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or George W. Bush. One time, I rebelled and got a story on the founding mothers. What's good for the gander is good for the goose, is my feeling on the subject of founding parents.
The trouble with these books is that they all tend to be extremely boring. Five miles down the road, we are singing rousing drinking songs ("12,000 bottles of beer on the wall...") over the audiotape just to stay awake.
But our most recent story, about the Mayflower, did have some redeeming features. For instance, Indians. You can usually count on tales of Indians being pretty exciting, especially if the tale is told by white people. There is never any balance of opinion in stories about Indians and settlers. Either the Indians are portrayed as bloodthirsty savages preying on helpless families and eating their children for supper, or the white people are the ones perpetrating atrocities on the helpless Indians with alcohol, guns, or smallpox, sometimes all three. In these stories, the only good white people are those who have gone over to the Indians and decided to live with them. You never hear that there might have been both bad and good Indians, and both bad and good settlers.
But this story was kind of different. We learned that there were both bad and good Indians, at least in Massachusetts, even before the arrival of the Pilgrims. So the bad Indians cannot be blamed on the Pilgrims. These particular Indians had apparently been bad for thousands of years. No one knows exactly how long, because any smoke signals that might have told us have long since evaporated.
Anyway, we also learned that there were far more Indians in Massachusetts when the Pilgrims landed (quite by mistake; they were actually trying to get to Manhattan, where the women insisted there was better shopping) than we had ever realized. I had always pictured a handful of Indians emerging from the forest to welcome the settlers, leaving the bad ones behind for the time being. But apparently there were all kinds of tribes in the area, some with as many as 20,000 people, and with interesting names like the Narragansett, the Samoset, the Erector Set, and the Neiman Marcus Set.
This history of the Indians stayed with us as we vacationed on the New Jersey coast. At least, it stayed with Joe. One night as we sat overlooking the ocean at a restaurant, he wondered aloud if the ancient Indians knew about the ocean.
"Knew what?" I said, coming out of my musings about whether the woman on the beach with seven children was the mother or grandmother of the children (none of whom were Indian). Whichever was the case, she looked tired.
"Well, that it wasn't just a big river," he explained.
"Oh, I suppose they went exploring it a time or two," I said. He nodded.
"And then," I said, warming to my subject, "when they ran out of clean underwear, they turned around and came back home."
Come to think of it, our own ideas of history are much more interesting than what you learn on these audiotapes. So maybe we should make our own story. And throw in a little mystery to keep people awake.
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