Apparell'd in Celestial Light

The opening lines of William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Early Recollections of Early Childhood":

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light....


These lines of Wordsworth's give me pause.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, I grew up in a miasma. The stream, or river, that ran through Kellogg was not apparell'd in celestial light. It was grey with sewage and mineral waste. The apparell that hugged to the dwarfed trees and modest houses and struggling lawns and grassless fields of play in Kellogg was the apparell of lead smelter and zinc plant emissions.

As Silver Valley Girl wrote, this smelter smoke was unforgettable and many of the pleasures that came with being young, swimming in the city pool, playing ball, riding our bicycles, running from one place to another, playing tether ball on the Sunnyside elementary school playground, they were all accompanied by a burning in the chest and often with a sore throat.

But, Wordsworth's poem explores how the unconstrained mind of the child makes the world a wondrous place and that the world loses this magic as we grow older. Wordsworth suggests that childhood is a time of our lives that we might want to recapture in the sense that our imaginations were more alive and our perception of the world much less filtered.

I've been told that I have a romantic view of Kellogg. I think it's true. When I was a kid I'd see the sun trying to make its way through the thick Smelter Smoke and I experienced it as one of those pictures in the Bible when God is represented as sunlight breaking through clouds and the sun's rays become pronounced.

I saw the sun breaking through the Smelter Smoke as the smog apparall'd in celestial light.

My young mind was not constrained when it came to the rocky hill a block and a half behind our house. I didn't think about the fact that it could be vegetated with larger trees. I experienced it as a large hump to conquer. I experienced the large lava plugs that protruded from the hill as fun playfields on which to test my balance and my arm and hand strength as I climbed them, hoisting myself up one crack in the small volcano to another.

When the sun broke through the Smelter Smoke I experienced the rocky hill and the scrubby vegetation and volcanoes as apparell'd in celestial light.

Of course, I know now that the way the sun played upon the pollution, sometimes colorfully, sometimes with pronounced rays breaking through the smog was not celestial. I know now that that pollution was harmful. It was poison.

And yet, this knowledge has done little to diminish the experiences I had as a young boy in Kellogg. Indeed, every common sight to me did seem apparelled in celestial light and I haven't been willing as a man in his fifties to let much of that celestial light become dimmed.