The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness. For instance, I can remember my mother’s tantalizingly brief account of the murder on the Tonawanda Creek Road in the direction of Rapids only a few miles from our house but I can’t fit this memory into a sequence of memories of that drive, that day, that week or even that year; our memories seem to lack the faculty for chronological continuity, in which case an episodic and impressionistic art most accurately replicates the meanderings of memory, and not chronological order. What is vivid in memory is the singular, striking, one-of-a-kind event or episode, encapsulated as if in amber, and rarely followed by the return home, that evening’s dinner, exchanged remarks, the next morning; not routine but what violates routine.
    Which is why the effort of writing a memoir is so fraught with peril, and even its small successes ringed by melancholy. The fact is— We have forgotten most of our lives. All of our landscapes are soon lost in time .)
    WHEN MY FATHER TOOK us on Sunday drives, it was more likely that he would take us much farther, as he drove faster; on Transit Road, which Daddy traveled all too frequently, he was inclined to drive above the speed limit, and to pass slower cars with some measure of irritation. My sense of maleness, based solely and surely unfairly upon my father Fred Oates, is that the male more than the female is inclined to impatience.
    Where Mommy drove us on country roads never very far from the Tonawanda Creek, that cut through her childhood, as through mine, and fixed us comfortingly in place, Daddy had little interest in the familiar countryside of Erie County, apart from his visits to Lee’s Airfield. The landscape of Fred Oates’s boyhood was Niagara County: he’d been born in Lockport, in the least affluent area of the small city known informally as “Lowertown,” and had lived in Lockport all of his life until he’d married my mother and came to live with her in Millersport. (There had been an earlier domestic life in Lockport, about which I knew nothing, and which had always seemed to me romantic, as it had to have been short-lived. Only a scattering of snapshots allowed me to see my young parents,an infant bundled in their arms, photographed in a waste of snow behind a rented apartment in Lowertown near the canal. Where we lived before Millersport —was the terse description. Before we came to live with your grandparents. )
    Daddy’s drives may have reflected his restlessness. The same restlessness that motivated him to fly airplanes, even to experiment one summer with a glider at Lee’s Airfield. (Gliders are far more dangerous than small aircraft and Daddy may have had some close calls with this glider, about which my brother and I would not have been told.) Though Daddy did not drive slowly past houses and name to us their inhabitants and hint to us of the mysteries of lives within, yet Daddy’s drives into Niagara County were more interesting than Mommy’s drives in Erie County, as they were farther-ranging, and fraught with the kind of urgency my father brought to most things.
    Daddy liked to follow the Erie Barge Canal westward in the direction of the beautiful turbulent Niagara River or eastward into hilly Orleans County, in the direction of Brockport and Rochester; he liked to drop in on a small airfield in Newfane, where he had friends; he liked to drop in at the Big Tree Inn near Newfane, or the Inn at Olcott Beach on Lake Ontario; there was the excitement of the Niagara County Fair at the Fairgrounds, and the excitement of volunteer firemen’s picnics scattered through the county where food and drinks—especially beer—were served. Daddy’s drives were not without direction like Mommy’s but intended to bring him to places where, when he approached, voices lifted happily—“Fred! Jesus, here’s Fred