Once Upon A Time, Etc.

I spent much of my early life looking for fables, and can remember the days when the spring woods would be full of them. If you climbed back up into the bluffs above the Bitterroot creek and nosed around under rocks and in the shady areas beneath the stands of big oaks, you’d find fables growing wild by the dozen and burrowed in the roots beneath the trees.

Some afternoons, after the sun had faded beyond the rolling hills to the west, I’d hike back home with a burlap bag full of fables. My boots would be caked with mud, my back would be aching, and I’d be exhausted from all the sun and fresh air, but I couldn’t wait to empty that bag on my kitchen floor so I could look over my recent acquisitions.

I once lugged home a bag full of squirming trolls. On other occasions I pulled from my sack a turtle with wings like a dragonfly, and a tiny pirate ship full of mice. Yet another time I found a stooped and tiny man with flowing white hair and a long beard. Fairies were nesting in his beard. The old man was both a fable and a repository of fables. He sat at my kitchen table and told me the story of a giant who once upon a time went about with the moon in a pack on his back. On windy days he would fly the moon like a kite in a meadow full of wild flowers.

One late afternoon, the old man related to me in his squeaky little voice, as the sun set and darkness descended, a hawk was perched at the edge of a long valley, admiring the spectacle of the giant’s luminous kite hovering above the meadow. The bright object, the hawk thought, made such a nice addition to the night sky.

As it sat there taking in this quiet scene, the hawk saw an arrow suddenly strike the giant squarely in his chest. He toppled straight backwards, and then the hawk witnessed the giant’s huge feet rising momentarily like a seesaw before disappearing again into the tall grass and flowers. And as the giant fell, he lost his grip on his kite’s tether and the moon drifted skyward, growing ever smaller as it rose, until it had assumed its now familiar place in the heavens.

With its keen and beady eyes, the old man told me, the hawk also saw a cat (wearing a little red felt hat and in possession of a bow and a quiver of arrows) dash off into the dark woods at the edge of the meadow.

I always inspected and interrogated the fables I brought back with me from the woods, and I also unfailingly released them before I retired for the evening. Some of the fables I found in those days would leave me dazzled and mulling for days and even weeks. They changed me, and changed the way I looked at the world and my place in it. They made me want to live to an old age.

As I grew older, though, it became harder and harder for me to get back there to my old fable hunting grounds. My life was crowded with work and other responsibilities and obligations. When I did manage to get away to the bluff country I found that the fables were increasingly difficult to find, and eventually they seemed to disappear entirely. Again and again I returned home empty-handed and numb with disappointment.

I have since read that fables have become almost completely extinct in America, or have been reduced to little more than grim little lessons, morals without the magic. It is my understanding, however, that patches of fables still survive in parts of Latin and South America, in obscure corners of Eastern Europe, and in small pockets of Africa and the Middle East, and I hope to one day venture to some of these places in search of that old lost magic of my youth.