Woodstock Heritage Moment

Remember those lovely "Heritage Minute" commercials the government used to air?  As in, "Doctor, I smell burnt toast!" or "Johnson, sir, Molly Johnson!"  Well, I've started reading a great book about Dalton Camp, formerly a resident of Woodstock, and the "best prime minister Canada never had."  It's a fascinating book that re-tells Camp's life in the context of 20th century politics. 

Here's what he says about Woodstock during the onset of World War II:

War was coming.  You could sense the coming from beyond the earth's curve, not a distant thunder, but an eerily silent wind, a light wind that turned the leaves over, their soft white undersides showing in the sun.   People always said it was a sign of coming rain...

Walking down Lower Broadway, on a still, airless afternoon, I recall hearing Adolf Hitler's voice on radio, coming out from behind a screen door.  I heard the sounds of a crowd, and an American voice talking over it, explaining what Hitler was saying and why the crowd was cheering.  People were beginning to talk about the possibility of war now, the way people might talk about being struck by lightening - something possible, yet unlikely.

It was a summer of heightened sensation, as though the ice cream were colder, the choke cherry bushes heavier with their berries, the sun higher, the shade darker, the nights longer.  The music seemed more haunting, though we laughed longer, as if the laughter were a treasure that might soon be spent.  It was a season of small pleasures; life was anecdotal, time measured by the length of an embrace, a kiss, an early morning round of golf, by swimming naked under the railway bridge at Bull Creek, the water lit by a burning fire under a steaming kettle of fresh corn harvested from an unknown farmer's field. Seamless, sensuous, seemingly endless, one summer day folded into the next while Italy invaded Albania and the Germans marched into Danzig and Vienna.

Hard to imagine, isn't it, and yet I can imagine just what it would feel like to walk down Broadway and hear that radio.  There's a reason some things make the history books: not just because they change the world in the political sense, but because they alter the million mundane little actions that make up "life" for so many people.  We are "at war" in Afghanistan but I don't think we really feel it at home like this.