They enter the room alone or in clusters. A new school year is beginning—and with it, this art history class. Some students glance in my direction. Others look around the room, taking in its contours, looking for escape routes, imagining, perhaps, what pasts and possibilities this place contains. They're the ones I find most interesting. Like me, I suspect, they know how formative a seemingly ordinary place can be.
Bill and Ruth, my parents' best friends, lived in one such place: a small wood-frame house surrounded by acres of cow pasture and filbert trees. When I was little, we'd drive from Portland to see them. Their house—invisible from the public road, much older than the close-packed suburban ranches and split-levels of my weekday Oregon landscape—seemed impossibly isolated. Yet during my pre-Internet childhood, it was the best-connected house I knew.
We'd arrive mid-morning and do farm things, most of which involved turning plants and animals into food. We braved sharp thickets hunting berries. We ground apples in an ancient wood press, collecting the juice and feeding the mash to the cows that came running for it. I'd poke around the manure-scented barn, wondering if the blank-eyed Herefords there thought of more than they let on.
Dinner, often featuring some part of one of those inscrutable bovines, would come and go, and the adults would settle in to play cards. I'd ask Bill if I might go unsupervised up to his room. A quiet man whose tattooed arms suggested a rowdier youth, he'd smile and say yes.
Bill's cluttered, windowless room had knotty-pine walls, a low ceiling, a whiff of tobacco and mildew. Photos of people I didn't know (some of whom looked vaguely like our hosts, only much younger) and of a German shepherd named Pirate (his name written in ink directly on the photo) were pinned to the walls, alongside antlers, a Japanese officer's sheathed sword, a rifle or two, strings of many-colored fishing lures and bobbers, and a large print on fabric of a Native American man whose eyes followed me—unsettlingly at first, eventually with reassurance—around the room. This stuff, the traces of an otherwise well-known and much-loved adult's life before I came along, was fascinating to me. But what really drew me to the room was the radio.
A venerable, tube-fired shortwave in a colossal wood cabinet, the radio was the size of a Smart car. Its round, numbered face lit up as soon as you switched it on, but it took another five minutes for the tubes to warm and for sound to issue from its body. It was worth the wait: washed in warm static, beamed from settings remote and obscure.
The content was usually indecipherable. Had I been told that I was listening to Soviet manufacturing reports or Brazilian detergent commercials, it would have made no difference. What I heard was magical and rare—sharing nothing with the blather that came from our own living-room television. The radio's emissions provided evidence of a world whose vastness and variety, whose potential for experience and encounter, was only just beginning to dawn on me.
Years later, as a student of art and architectural history at Stanford, I traveled to many of the places I'd first encountered in that room. I took the measure, inside and out, of many of the world's most admired buildings. Around this time Bill and Ruth moved to the city. Their old house was sold and torn down, but Bill recreated his old room in their new house. The new room wasn't quite right—for one thing it had a window, with all the street life, sunshine and fresh air that admitted—but Bill's things were there, including the radio.
After Bill died, Ruth kept the room as he left it. I always stop in for a look when I visit her, and the place still makes me wonder. This, I've found, is a quality shared by all the best-appointed rooms, however large or small, carelessly or artfully built, wherever they stand and for whatever purpose. They hold worlds within their walls, and give glimpses of things otherwise unseen, things to carry.
Keith Eggener, MA '93, PhD '95, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is the author, most recently, of the visual sourcebook Cemeteries (Norton/Library of Congress).
