Should I have taken the Road Not Taken?

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Quirky little thing, this poem. It's probably Robert Frost's most famous, largely because of the title of an M. Scott Peck self-help tome called The Road Less Travelled. In fact, I have seen people vehemently argue that that's the real title of this poem. On being corrected, selfsame people seem to want to have it legally changed, as if the original Frost title makes no sense.

It makes no sense.

How did all this get started? It's a chain, as usual. I was indulging my obsession with all things Oz, particularly the Tin Man, when a line from a ridiculous old song came to me. I thought it went, "I couldn't say anything to the Tin Man/That he didn't already know." Looking it up, as usual, I had remembered it wrong. The line was "Oz never gave nothin' to the Tin Man/That he didn't already have." The song was by a '70s group called America, known for their impenetrable easy listening songs that often seemed to cover a range of three notes.
While looking up Tin Man, I noticed another song by the same group called Horse with No Name. Oh yes, I remember that one: talk about monotony! But then that one stirred the memory of a truly passionate and tender song, Wildfire. And thus a post was born.

Way leads on to way.
If you take another look at the Frost poem, it isn't at all the way we remember it. The conventional synopsis is, "A guy is standing there in the woods and the path forks into two. One of the paths is smooth and straight and well-tended, whereas the other path is grown over with weeds, rocky and twisted. In a great act of heroism, he decides to take the road 'less travelled by'".
Then comes the capper: "And that has made all the difference."

I probably did not recognize until this very second that Frost's best-known poem is saturated with irony. That momentous existential fork in the road isn't at all what we assumed:

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same About the same? He's saying here that the two paths really aren't that much different. It's almost a toss-up which one he'll take. Eeny-meeny, and all that. So his decision to go with. . . OK, that one is really not so momentous. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. He's saying, OK, I'll take that other path next time I'm back here, but. . . I don't really plan to be back here. Ever. It's that line "yet knowing how way leads on to way" that grabs however: don't we all realize that, at a certain point in life (maybe age 50)? My process in going from a rusty old tin man to a stunning song/poem about a wild pony happened in steps or stages. Way led on to way. But this is a pretty trivial example. College leads on to career. Date leads on to marriage. One-night stand leads to accidental conception and a new human being that nobody wants. Body-smoothers lead on to a billion-dollar empire (sorry, I couldn't resist slipping that in). It's as if every decision we make, whether large or small, can divert us from the path, or even cause us to abandon it altogether. Or is it this way? This fellow is bumbling along in the woods, sees two paths that are practically identical, says to himself "OK, that one," then waxes lyrical about how this momentous choice changed his entire life. So what's he saying? I wonder if it isn't some kind of satire on the Scott Peck idea of taking the heroic path and giving up the conventional. Taking the ultimate risk. Ultimate risk? He already told us that both paths were relatively virgin. Both paths were not particularly worn down, yet not treacherous either. So when Frost concludes "that has made all the difference," is he having us on? Is it a sort of play on the heroic choice: "Look what risks I took in life! I went left instead of right!" Or maybe he's serious. Left or right can be hazardous; we simply don't know. My own personal philosophy is that anything can happen to anyone at any time. If Frost's outlook had any connection to this sort of belief, then he's saying something that surpasses irony. The title, The Road Not Taken, always puzzles and even offends people, which is why they seem to think he got it wrong. It might refer to the conventional traveler who rejects the "risky" road, but it could also mean the safe road he rejected. But why use that as the title, when it really isn't about that at all? But maybe it is. If you actually read the thing, which most people who quote it don't, it becomes clear that it's pretty much all the same to him. The paths are almost indistinguishable. Infuriating, these poets, all that damned ambiguity. The rest of us mortals have to try to figure all this stuff out. Could it be something as simple as this? Each path is going to have its own hardships, or else be boring and disappointing. Taking one over the other may make a huge difference, or barely any difference at all. If it's a path you've never been on before, you just don't know. Maybe the important thing is to put one foot in front of the other, no matter how leaden or uncertain.  Foot, foot, foot.  Get going. Now. Move.

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We'll be riding Wildfire

She comes down from Yellow Mountain
On a dark, flat land she rides
On a pony she named Wildfire
With a whirlwind by her side
On a cold Nebraska night

Oh, they say she died one winter
When there came a killing frost
And the pony she named Wildfire
Busted down its stall
In a blizzard he was lost

She ran calling Wildfire

She ran calling Wildfire
She ran calling Wildfire

By the dark of the moon I planted

But there came an early snow
There's been a hoot-owl howling by my window now
For six nights in a row

She's coming for me, I know
And on Wildfire we're both gonna go

We'll be riding Wildfire
We'll be riding Wildfire
We'll be riding Wildfire

On Wildfire we're gonna ride

Gonna leave sodbustin' behind

Get these hard times right on out of our minds

Riding Wildfire

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The shocking revelation that made me spit out my tea

Were we-all talking about the Wizard of Oz? Am I obsessed with this topic right now? A few posts ago I shared something from my childhood: a YouTube video of a low-budget, extremely weird cartoon from a series called Tales of the Wizard of Oz. I noticed a few people had posted comments along the lines of "I remember watching these in Ontario in 1961!" and "why do all the characters have Canadian accents?"


They do, but you have to listen carefully for a "hoose" or "aboot" (or "hewwwse," which is REALLY southern Ontarion, in fact right out of Scotland). I can even hear them trying to replicate the Bostonian/Bronxian accents of the actors from the 1939 movie: "If I only had a haaaaaahhhht"; "Puddem uhhhhhp."  But the "hewwwse" still pops through.

I had some idea that these were produced by a Canadian impresario named Budge Crawley, but the more digging I did, the stranger it got. Familiar names like Bernard Cowan kept cropping up (he was a jack-of-all trades announcer: "This is Bernard Cowan speaking", a hangover from radio when nobody knew who the fuck was talking).


But this! This was pay dirt, gold in my hand. Whenever I find an old scanned newspaper clipping, I have to try to blow it up (figuratively speaking). I was able to section up this yellowed old thing from the Montreal Gazette, circa 1961, so that it's almost legible.

I don't know about you, but the smudgy black and white photos that ran along with this piece remind me of that surreal silent movie Metropolis with all the identical workers trudging along in lockstep. Positively Orwellian. At best the Crawley animation factory must have been a sweatshop with slave wages, and not even Disney looking down his cheap-ass nose at you and getting his cigarette-ash all over your Day-Glo-colored cell of the witch's groovy castle.

The piece itself ain't much: it's mostly a nuts-and-bolts account of a "new" style of animation (read: cheaper than Disney's). But right in the middle of the dull grey prose came a surprise that nearly blew me out of my chair. Oh OK, it didn't do that, but I nevertheless did  a spit-take with my Red Rose tea.

Not too exciting, is it? But look at the names of the voice actors! Along with such then-notables as Alfie Scopp, Paul Kligman and Pegi Loder, we see none other than. . .

Scotty before he was Scotty! No wonder those characters said "hewwwse". I have no idea which voice impressions were James Doohan's: not the witch, surely. Not Rusty the Tin Man, nor the Wizard, who sounded like W. C. Fields. He must have voiced the gabbledy-gabbledy sound of the munchkins, or done guest spots as the dragon or Rubber Man.

The secrets of Oz never end.

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Tin Man: I'd oil him any day

Does tin really rust? Do we really care? As a kid, I was pretty fascinated with this guy. He was my favorite character, and I loved that scene where Dorothy oiled up his arthritic joints and set him free.

The Wizard of Oz came on TV once a year, and everyone looked forward to it with rabid anticipation. Even though we had to watch the whole thing on a small screen in grainy black-and-white (in fact, I had no idea most of it was in color until decades later), the so-called-blase kids of the '60s clamoured for this kind of fantasy, which was already 25 years out of date.

What the hell WAS a "tin man" (or "tinman", as he was more properly called) anyway? A lion you can understand. Even a scarecrow. But here was this mysterious metallic guy, who rusted solid while trying to chop some wood in the rain. He made squeaky little sounds that only the Scarecrow (who was really smart: hehheheheheheheheh) could understand.

(Causing my brother to say, on at least one occasion, "He-e-e-e-e-y! The Scarecrow's not supposed to be smart!" Another time, he even said, "That guy was already on. At the start. You know, on the farm." Weird.)

But it gets stranger: in the original L. Frank Baum series of kids' books, he was called the Tin Woodman. Even more confusing for kids in a relatively high-tech era. I have to confess I am still not sure what a woodman is: someone who chops wood for a living, or lives in the woods, or is made of wood like Pinocchio (no, strike that)?

But listen: this isn't where it started, at all. Back when I was trying to find images to illustrate the Dylan Thomas poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, I found myself in strange and disturbing territory.


There are some pretty gruesome images in the poem of bones cracking and people getting stretched on a rack. (This must have been written during one of his rare sober periods.) So I found myself wandering into the dark territory of Medieval torture and the Spanish Inquisition.

No, I won't get into that Monty Python sketch (though I was tempted: but it's Monday, and it would be too much work. Another time.) But when you see these things - do I even need to tell you what they were for? - it's enough to put you off your breakfast.

(Hint: this one opens out like an umbrella.)

Right. So what's the connection to the Tin Woodman? Not much, except they all seem to be made out of metal (and rusty metal at that).


I can see one of the King's lackeys oiling up this head-smasher so it would work more efficiently, or perhaps take longer.

I cannot tell you what I saw in this picture at first glance: suffice it to say that I never knew Woodie was so well-endowed. Oops, that's his arm, isn't it?

There were a lot of early stage productions (and a few silent film versions) of this story before it became a bouncy, quirky MGM extravaganza in the 1930s. Here the Straw Man, somewhat resembling a chemo patient, greets the Tin Woodman with immense affection. The two share the common trait of being inanimate, after all.

The original illustrations by W. W. Denslow portay the Tin Man as a reasonably friendly figure (despite his lack of a heart). A little on the skinny side, but MGM got that empty barrel chest just right. (Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. . . "What an echo!")

But then I found this one, which looks more like something out of a Whitley Streiber book. Is that big-headed, obviously alien figure putting his heard in, or taking it out? The tin guy's immobile face reveals nothing.

And this one, well, shit, he's a ROBOT and couldn't be anything else. I don't know how you could warm up to him or even want to apply the oil can to his seized joints. He's all cogs and gears and iron-clad Uggs, and if you look closely, he has a moustache. A sort of oven door on his chest should bear the inscription, "Insert heart here."

People made out of tin. The Borg on Star Trek. That hideous moment at the end of The Fly (the one with Jeff Goldblum) where he fuses together with the teleporter and emerges dragging chunks of machinery.

I don't know what it all means either, but it's cool.

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