Something Occurring by the Side of a Road

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Children playing by road near school house, Kansas (?), c. 1942

I Hide and Seek

Along the roadside it appeared the children might have been playing a game of hide and seek. Passing cars slowed down as the people strained to see what these children were doing, kneeling with their heads hidden beneath folded arms, or lying motionless as if playing dead by the shoulder of the road. At a quick glance it looked as though they might have been hit by cars. But the bodies were scattered at a certain distance apart. The impression that they were playing a game was in the mind of the beholder, it was possible this was a misinterpretation. A theory of games is not the same thing as a game; in order to understand the progression of a game it is not necessary to have a game theory. If it is possible to make a false move in some game, then it might be possible for someone to make nothing but false moves in every game. The person passing along on the road would have no idea.

Road out of Romney, West Virginia,1942/3

II History Lesson

The Sunray man wearing the spectral white face of carbon black may not after all be a visitor from a scorched and vacant dead world beyond our solar system. You whistled soundlessly in the sleepless dark and he came, as in a dimly remembered children's game.

When you played hide and seek there was a secret excitement hidden within the game, the private knowledge that, should you be lost, it was he who lay in waiting, he who would find you.

Worker at carbon black plant, Sunray, Texas, 1942

III But Then

in the hard white northern distance of the clouded morning the school bell tolled.

The child who was found in the game of hide and seek discovered he did not know the language that was being spoken by the other children. He may well have known some other language or languages, but the babbling going on around him in the here and now, that to him seemed a mystery, a bafflement.

Behind every tree in the immediate vicinity of the confused child was concealed another bewildering uncertainty. Branching off in several directions from the point where he stood a labyrinth of conflicting paths beckoned equivocally. And so it seemed to the child he had no choice but to hold perfectly still and remain completely silent. It is at this point that from behind the nearest tree emerges the waiting figure.

Landscape, Northeast Utah, April 1942

Photos by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)