1:21am June 20, 2015

Lorax and Lake Erie reference.

So there was this line in the original version of the Lorax, which of course is the version I had (because even though I was born in 1980, most of my children’s books and toys were hand-me-downs from my brothers who were born in the late sixties and early seventies), it was discussing water pollution, and it went like this (bolding mine):

They’ll walk on their fins and get woefully weary
in search of some water that isn’t so smeary.
I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.

So… this was the first I ever heard of Lake Erie. I lived nowhere near the Great Lakes, and when I first read it I probably wasn’t in school yet, but even when I did go to school, my first elementary school didn’t teach much in the way of geography. I didn’t have a geography class until seventh grade, and only then did we learn where the Great Lakes were and what they were called.

(I now live practically right on top of Lake Champlain, which was almost a Great Lake but didn’t quite make the cut, and some people still consider it to be another Great Lake anyway. It’s interesting to me how political things like that can be, sort of like the reclassification of Pluto: It doesn’t change what the thing is, just what we call it.)

Anyway, that line being in the book taught me (or led to me learning in other ways, even if not directly from the book) that:

Lake Erie existed.
Lake Erie was a Great Lake.
Lake Erie had a huge pollution problem at one point.
There was a big environmental project to clean up Lake Erie.

Now that last one… apparently because of that last one, Dr. Seuss succumbed to pressure to remove the Lake Erie reference from later versions of the book. This irritates me on a lot of levels.

I was probably more confused about time than most kids. Meaning, I had a really weird relationship to books written in a different time, when things were different than they were at the time I was reading the book.

For instance, I had another children’s book, I still have it as a matter of fact. It’s called You Will Go To The Moon. The first lines are something like (bolding mine):

The moon is up there, far away.
No one has been there yet.

This confused me a good deal. I couldn’t wrap my head around how a book that existed now, couldn’t know about the Apollo 11 mission. I didn’t understand that a book could have been written before Apollo 11, still be around, and not be magically updated.

Similarly, in fourth grade I read a book about Helen Keller, that described how she still walks down the streets, moving her hands around in a way that helps her feel air currents and make sense of her environment. I thought “Wow cool she’s still alive.” I did not understand when people told me that actually she was long dead and the book was simply out of date. Again, I had serious trouble understanding time.

So yes, I did assume that Lake Erie was still just as bad as the lakes depicted in The Lorax. But through The Lorax, I learned about Lake Erie’s existence, I learned that it was polluted, and I eventually learned that it had been part of a highly targeted cleanup effort that rendered it much less polluted.

All of which (eventually, when I was old enough, which was long after most kids were old enough to learn this) helped me learn about the relationship between books and time, and the fact that even a book that now got things wrong due to changes since it came out, could be a valuable source of information about how things used to be.

People had been to the moon, Lake Erie had been cleaned up, and Helen Keller no longer walked down the street moving her hands in order to feel air currents that helped her understand her physical environment.

But that doesn’t mean that the books that mentioned these things needed to be updated so as to act as if they’d never mentioned it at all. You Will Go To The Moon may have been seriously dated, but it is still interesting today precisely because it was dated. Because it’s interesting to know how people used to think we would go to the moon, and how soon, and how civilians – children even – would be able to come along. If they’d changed the entire book to reflect current knowledge, it wouldn’t be the same book anymore.

The Lorax is different in that removing that line doesn’t change the whole book. But it does change something about the book. It changes children’s knowledge about how books relate to the past, and it removes an opportunity for children to learn about the history of Lake Erie.

So count me in as highly annoyed at this change. It may not sound like a big change or an important change, but it’s important to how I understood the world as a kid and how I learned about things. Plus, reading about something like “Lake Erie” in a book gave me a sense of connection to that place, which caused me to be curious later if I ever heard of the same place. I had a book called The Wright Brothers At Kitty Hawk that I never read, but you can bet that the words Kitty Hawk stood out to me because I owned the book, and that any further mention of the place made me curious in a way I wouldn’t be without the book. If I was born in recent years, I would not have had that experience when finding out about Lake Erie – I wouldn’t know it existed, I wouldn’t feel a connection to it due to its inclusion in a book that I was reading, and I wouldn’t become extremely curious about any mention of it whatsoever, including the cleanup efforts.

I also learned a lesson about books being essentially time capsules from the time they were writen, whether the book was fiction or non-fiction. This took me longer than it took other kids, and more books, but knowing the thing about Lake Erie was one of the things that helped me realize that books were essentially stuck in time.

It seems like too many things get changed just for the sake of changing them, let alone to reflect things that have already changed. Why can’t they just treat the book as if it was published in the early seventies, and therefore reflects the time of the early seventies? I don’t get this impulse to update everything. And I think it’s rarely a good impulse – I can see the point sometimes, but not here, not when kids need to learn about Lake Erie both historically and today. If they are so concerned, why not write an epilogue for parents to talk to their kids about, mentioning changes to Lake Erie, and leave it at that?