Between Two Worlds

By Champ Clark

WAITING FOR THE MORNING TRAIN: AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD

by BRUCE CATION 260 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

Bruce Catton is a gentle soul. Even his 13 Civil War books--while alive and ablaze with the sights and sounds of doomed men dashing up grassy slopes, or storming across stubbled cornfields, or simply slaughtering one another --are curiously gentle. There is not much blood and guts in Catton's works. Men either die bravely or they simply die. All are controlled by a civilization they cannot understand.

Now, at 72, Catton takes leave of the Civil War to recall his own boyhood in Benzonia, then and now a tiny town on Michigan's northwestern frontier. It is a land where life is still "easy and pleasant, with fish to be caught and clear lakes for swimming." Yet as Catton looks out his window, he can see the threatening white domes of early-warning radar installations.

Catton remembers his early days, when the present was pleasant and the future was not to be doubted. "Mercifully," he writes, "we could not know that when it finally came, the future would frighten us more than anything else on earth. We were at halfway house; the quarters were good, the grounds were pleasant, and there was a fine view of the surrounding country. What more could we want?"

Bruce Cation's father was the principal of Benzonia Academy, where cows roamed the campus. Yet obviously the older Catton was a man of some wis dom and sardonic humor. Once, after working unsuccessfully against a county election proposition allowing the sale of liquor, he was asked how he felt. "I feel like Lazarus," he said. Like Lazarus? Yes: "According to the Bible, Lazarus was licked by dogs."

There was also scrub baseball, in which the littlest kid was allowed to play "pigtail," meaning that he stood behind the catcher and retrieved all the passed balls. There were boat races on nearby Crystal Lake, where the air was afume with adult cigar smoke ("One of the great disappointments of my life has been the fact that no cigar ever tasted as good as that cigar smoke used to smell there by Crystal Lake"). Of course there was a high school play. In a performance of Peg o' My Heart, Bruce was called upon by the script to kiss the heroine. He did, but in walking her home afterward, he could not nerve himself to do it again.

Premonitions. On rare occasions, there were grim premonitions. One day Bruce and a friend went ski-sailing for the first time on Crystal Lake. The experience was exhilarating: "I do not be lieve that I have ever felt more completely in tune with the universe than I felt that morning." Then, without warning, the ice turned thin, and as Catton looked down he could see only the blackness of the water below. "It was not just my own death that had been down there," Catton writes. "It was the ultimate horror, lying below all life, kept away by something so fragile that it could break at any moment."

Catton feels strongly about this fragility. Forgotten but not gone are the Indians who once ruled his Michigan northland. The Indian was not slaughtered by the white man; he was simply left to "go to seed, which mostly he did with bewildered resignation." Gone but not forgotten are the great pine forests upon which the region once based its hopes for great prosperity. "The 20th century," Catton comments sadly, "is simply a time of transition, and the noise of things is so loud that we are taking the prodigious step from the 19th century to the 21st without a moment of calm in which we can see where we are going. Between 19th century and 21st, there is a gulf as vast as the ones the Stone Age Indians had to cross. What's our problem? We're Indians."

To Bruce Catton, youth is like waiting for the morning train at a junction town. That train is moving into the fu ture. But age is like waiting for the night train: "You have seen all the sights, and it is a little too dark to see any more even if you did miss some, and the waiting room is uncomfortable and the time of waiting is dreary..." Champ Clark

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