Ride the Moon

One of the concerns of farms and small towns is the loss of the younger generation, who either don’t want to follow in their parents’ footsteps or can’t afford to do so and also raise a family. As the numbers of young rural families drops, the area school populations shrink. At certain times of year, in certain venues, towns like Leland and Northport can look like retirement communities: it’s as if we’re marooned in south Florida without the compensation of a warm winter and dry pavement.

Most of us would like to see more young people in our small towns, a diversity of generations rather than a monoculture, to put it in agricultural terms. On the other hand, I can’t help thinking it’s good for the high school graduates to try their wings—to go away to college or overseas or to test themselves against a big city or a different region of this American life. Whatever Thomas Wolfe thought, many do come home again, and not all of them wait for retirement to carve out lives in the places they grew up. It isn’t easy, you say? What is? “This game of life isn’t easy,” one visitor to the bookstore observed to me yesterday, “but what else do we have?”

All these thoughts crowded in on me this morning as I paged through KASIMIR’S JOURNEY, a children’s book from over half a century ago. KASIMIR’S JOURNEY, a story in English verse by Monroe Stearns, is based on an original story by Marlene Riedl first published in Germany, the 1957 American edition bright with the original author’s charming five-color linoleum block illustrations. We are not told specifically where Kasimir lives. (No doubt the young German audience for the original book would have taken it for granted he was one of them.) Instead we meet the little boy on the first page as he runs after a big yellow full moon.

“’Look, it’s stuck in the tree.
“’If I hurry up, it will wait for me.’”


Climbing to the top of the tree, Kasimir jumps onto and rides the yellow moon, now a fat crescent, over the tall buildings of a city and out over the ocean. In Turkey, he and the moon, now a slender sickle, part company, and Kasimir travels on to Egypt, through Africa, to China and beyond. He visits “Esquimaux” and Wyoming Indians, and in Mexico he sees a bullfight. At every step he is captivated and eager for more.

“’I don’t want to stop traveling,’ Kasimir said,
“’So long as there’s countries up ahead.’”

Eventually he crosses the Atlantic to Holland and from there, a short hop, arrives back home.

“And then went out in the meadow to rest.
“Of all he had seen his own home looked best.”

That’s fine. It’s lovely. It couldn’t be better. But I think it’s important not only that Kasimir came back home but that he didn’t just stay home all his life, afraid to venture out into the world. He ventured out, saw as much as he could and made it his own. Geography came alive for him, as did people with other ways of life.

One aspect of this book that seems quaint today is that of the boy traveling by moon rather than to the moon. The friendly yellow satellite that lets him hitch a ride is the moon of another era. It belonged, the moon of those days, to music and poetry. It was ours to ride to adventure. The whole world was ours to explore. This is what I wish for young people: music, poetry, adventure, and their own place in a world they have made their own.