Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind . . .

It was, I believe, in sixth grade that the class took a daylong trip to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. This was the biggest field trip we had ever taken and it required signed permission slips and packed lunches. It was also, if memory serves, the first time I ever actually rode a school bus. I was a town kid, and had always walked to school or had been driven by Mom in our third-hand Plymouth the half mile or so when something was bleeding.

In a minor way I was intrigued by the school buses, and the seeming comradeship of the kids who rode them. They seemed to have a unity that those of us who walked home alone or with one, maybe two friends never got to form. Plus, when a rain storm had turned the back roads to mud, or a heavy snow storm had blanketed the area, the farm kids would come straggling in at 9:30 or 10:00 or even 11:00, and then they would get to leave correspondingly early for the long slog home. We town kids had to be there on time, and stay until the regular last bell because we could walk to school. I thought it was highly unfair.

But after our trip to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village I didn't find their life quite so romantic. The buses were drafty, noisy and uncomfortable. The seats seemed to have been designed especially to cause the rider to slide off in random directions at the slightest bump, change of direction or variation of speed. The rest of the time you were being thrown against your seatmate who always seemed to be the kid in the class with the most suspect hygiene.

When we finally got to the museum complex, probably just a bit over an hour's drive, we spent the rest of the morning touring the the museum proper. Even now, fifty some years later, I cannot describe its impact. The closest I can come is that it was the most godawful, boring place I have been in to this day.

I have no doubt that its collection is an important history of transportation, and American life in general during the industrial revolution, but the excitement and drama is of the kind that only dedicated researchers and scholars would appreciate. For a sixth grade boy it was one dusty buggy or steam tractor or icebox after another, taken out of context and kept enough out of reach to render close inspection impossible. Couple that with a tomblike silence completely unnatural in a building that size, and lighting you might expect to find in a crypt on a day of mourning and you begin to see how completely it failed to engender any enthusiasm.

There were no exciting, little dioramas like in the Natural History Museum in Ann Arbor. There, in glass cases or behind windows, were little displays showing cavemen bringing down a mammoth and how a spear thrower worked; or what an Iroquois village looked like and how the women used grinding stones to make their flour. At the Henry Ford Museum, not a thing. Nothing to show us how this bit of dirty wood and metal functioned, and perhaps played a vital part in farming the prairies, or in the Wright Brothers' experiments. Just a placard with the device's name, perhaps a small, very cryptic description of its presumed function, and most predominately, the donor's name. Never before or since have I looked forward so much to just sitting outside and eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The afternoon spent in Greenfield Village was much better.

First, we were outside in the sunshine when walking from one building to the next. That did wonders to dispel the gloom of the dark, Victorian interiors. The buildings we could go into had the shadows, odors, and feel of an ancient great-aunt's house where one never spoke too loudly, moved too quickly or felt too deeply about anything; and if you were very, very good you were allowed to sit on the front porch looking through an ancient stereoscope at faded scenes of a tourists version of Egypt. You were always warned that this rickety stereoscope had, indeed, been your great-aunt's absolute favorite toy when she was a little girl, so please no rough-housing while it was a three county area.

Second, there were occasionally people doing what would have been done when the building was really where it was supposed to be. What they were doing wasn't always crystal clear to us, but they were doing...things. More importantly, they were talking to us. Telling stories of apprentices having to get up at 4:30 in the morning to make sure the office would be ship shape at 7:00. I didn't always understand the story, I was usually on the outskirts of the group where the sound was thin and didn't carry, but I got enough to know that nobody in their right mind would want to live like that again.

My one favorite place was a quasi-blacksmith's shop or farrier. Given the title, it really didn't seem to have much to do with horses. What it really had to do with was making as much money as possible selling blacksmith and farrier related items and still steering clear of horses as much as possible. In this case it was making rings out of horseshoe nails. We were buying them up by the cartload, and the really cool part was they were all rumored to turn your finger a quite satisfying greenish-black when you wore them for very long.

After being awarded our custom made genuine horseshoe nail ring we then made our way over to the Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop and Edison's Menlo Park Lab. I found these to be terribly sad buildings. Great drama and genius had performed within their walls, but that was in other places with other spirits. These buildings belonged somewhere else. The air that had filled them when they were filled with the excitement of discovery was Ohio and New Jersey air, and while they could have had very useful lives in Dearborn they had been taken apart, shipped hundreds of miles, and then reassembled. To the casual observer they were the same buildings, but deep in their framework they were different.

You cannot move a place. Perhaps it is cheaper and more efficient to care for those buildings, and the others around them, in one place; but once you have dismantled them, taken them away from the places they were built for, and had other, newer strangers rebuild them they are only the shadows of what you were trying to preserve. They may look the same, and the be built of the same boards and bricks, but they are no longer the same.

About fifty years later the comedian Steven Wright would say: "I have the original hatchet Washington used to cut down the cherry tree. Of course I've had to replace the handle . . . . and the blade, but it takes up the same space." These poor buildings don't even take up the same space. They have become stage props instead of historic places.