Looking across the street the neighbor’s newly acquired camping trailer is on display, hitched to the car on this Friday morning, ready for a weekend get-away after the school day ends and the neighbors are free for a few days away from household routines. The trailer dates to the 1940s, after war-weary veterans and workers sought recreation far from the regimented structures of company or military service. This is a street of houses dating from 1939 to 1956 and was occupied initially by people directly touched by the global violence of those wars and in support of those wars. So in one sense the camper fits the street of houses, built in the same decade for the same generation. Apart from the vinyl cladding that has been added to many of them and another generation or two of roof shingles having been replaced, the camper and the houses do belong to a bygone era together; it is the new model cars that are out of place.
At first glance, though, most viewers would see the camper as the antique and the houses and cars as modern or present-day. That is because the houses keep getting updated with antennas, cable and broadband services, innovations in lawn care or landscape features But the product cycle of cars and campers is so rapid that each one can be roughly identified by decade or year, all too soon out of fashion or left behind as new models come up for sale. By hitching together these two things born 75 years apart it creates a sense of being out of sync; of a time traveler from grandparent or great-grandparent times making a cameo appearance today. And yet, looking around, there are so many reminders and physically perduring parts of the past all around, once you begin looking for them. Perhaps it is the cinematic sleight of hand that causes people nowadays to believe that one scene cuts to another scene without any trace or connection or relationship. But empirically speaking there are still physical marks, consequences, and implications from the various regional and international armed conflicts, as well as caused by natural disasters that once filled the headlines for many days and now have been displaced by other news. Good deeds and initiatives leave traces, too, if one knows where to look for them: public improvements to the landscape or the community services, or at the interpersonal level — those small actions that alter a person’s life for the better.
So while this car and camping trailer initially triggered a chronological shock of “out of place,” upon further reflection it is perfectly normal and perhaps desirable that old things with a serviceable life should be kept current, in good repair, and proudly be put to use instead of being discarded to occupy valuable landfill space. Incidentally, the fluted foreground column is a distant echo to the ancient Greek public buildings like the Parthenon. So not only does the physical fabric of bygone times persist, but also the concept or imitation of earlier designs can point to the past amid the present, offering some connection when so much else washes away in the frequent and ever more powerful tides of change that are coming to be regarded as normal.
