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August 13, 1962 It was on this day at the town of Firedrake, in the Cockburn County Consolidated Public (CCCP) School District, that Daniel Webster McCasoway officially entered the educational system of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Firedrake was a small mining town located between the floods of the Tradewater and the Green. Although Firedrake was not especially famous for any particular thing, the internationally celebrated folk-singer John Prine would later mention many of the towns around it in one of his most popular songs. In this fashionable song, Mr. Prine nostalgically boasted of the many times he and his father utilized handguns to shoot empty pop bottles in the Green River near an old prison somewhere between Paradise and Rochester. When Daniel McCasoway was six years old, he stepped on one of those broken bottles. The sharp glass sliced through the tender tissues in the arch of his tiny foot, severing muscles, nerves, and blood vessels, including the lateral plantar artery. Within minutes a bright red stain snaked its way fifty yards or more through the gently swirling waters along the bank of the river. The massive loss of blood caused Daniel to go into shock almost immediately. By the time he reached the hospital with his unconscious son, Adam was nearly in shock as well. Twenty-seven stitches were required to close the wound. The injury troubles Daniel occasionally even today. Ultimately, this unfortunate event imparted him with an inordinately sober appreciation of the indiscriminate absurdity of existence. That is, in the height of his vulnerability and youthful innocence he was rudely confronted with the bitter reality that he lived in a universe where a person could cavalierly and capriciously deploy firearms to break glass in a place where children are known to swim and then turn around and unabashedly make millions of dollars singing anti-establishment, environmentalist protest songs about it. A green metal sign at the city limits of Firedrake, like the hundreds of analogous placards posted throughout the Commonwealth, tantalized tourists with the official population of the village, a modest 500 individuals in Firedrake’s case, but offered little useful accompanying demographic data. Daniel always wondered why they even bothered with the signs in the first place. Who would actually use such information? People searching for a town to live in perhaps? “Gee Honey, here’s a town with exactly 500 people, just what we’re looking for. Let’s stop and see if someone will sell us their house!” However, perhaps the most obvious sociological statistic omitted from Firedrake’s sign, was that of the semi-multitude of citizens said to reside within the corporate boundaries of this rustic community, at least a third were devout Marxists, or Neo-Stalinists who had infiltrated the local school system and other public institutions with zealous effectiveness. Their paradigmic influence on the impressionable young McCasoway would ultimately leave an indelible scar on his intellectual gestalt far more debilitating than the injury caused to his foot by John Prine’s pistol-shattered pop bottles. For example, when the school principal, Mrs. Koryenko, learned that Daniel’s parents had already taught him to read and write, she seemed very suspicious, but otherwise cautiously tolerant of the situation. However, when she learned that Daniel had also received instruction in U.S. History, up through the Korean Conflict, she insisted that he be re-educated prior to admittance into in the standard classroom environment. This mostly involved spending a good deal of time without food in a poorly lit and extremely cold room in the school basement listening to Noam Chomsky recordings and memorizing passages from Frederick Engles pamphlets. When Daniel was in the third grade Mrs. Koryenko enrolled him in a program that she fondly referred to as Young Pioneer Summer Camp. At the time this news seemed unremarkable to him. After all, summer camps for children were known to be practical traditional activities, intended to encourage self-reliance, good citizenship, and healthful vigor. However, what he did not know was that the program she had signed him up for was actually called Caribbean Youth Gulag Jamboree, an affair that reportedly attracted thousands of American students annually. He spent the next three months in Cuba hacking sugar cane with a corn knife and attending nightly lectures by a woman who looked like Che Guevara. Other than an occasional dramatic tirade against DDT use, he found her speeches to be almost copies of the Chomsky recordings he had been forced to hear while locked in the school freezer. For his efforts he received a small portion boiled carp fins every other day, a yellow ribbon embossed with a likeness of Fidel Castro, and an incurable case of malaria. |