Cigarette trees and a never ending tub of pudding －たばこの木と食べきれないプリン－

Have you ever closed your eyes and imagined the world as you wish it could be?  Have you ever tried to picture Heaven?  Do you see people sitting on clouds and singing hymns?  Or do you perhaps imagine something more like a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate factory, with rivers of chocolate and edible grass?

A few years ago I remember reading about an American newspaper which had speculated on what Heaven might be like.  It had suggested that there might be public transport in Heaven, but without pollution, and with the vehicles driven by angels.  I couldn’t help but chuckle at the image.  Imagine a frustrated angel behind the wheel of a bus, driving people through a traffic jam.  “I’ve got wings, you know,” he mutters, lighting a cancer-free, heavenly cigarette.

An idea of a perfect world can be an escape for people facing difficulties in reality.  If your life is hard, you can always close your eyes and dream about how things should be.  But that fantasy will be different for different people.  For someone close to me, the fantasy of her childhood was a never ending tub of pudding.  You could open it and keep on eating and eating and never reach the bottom.  Simple pleasures for simple people, I suppose.

And what was the perfect fantasy land for a homeless man in 1920s America?  What was the image of Heaven for a hobo?

Fortunately, there is a song which tells us exactly that.  Harry McClintock first recorded “Big Rock Candy Mountains” in 1928, although he claimed to have first written it in the 1890s.  It tells of a homeless man’s dreams of paradise.  There are streams of alcohol, cigarettes growing on trees, and the police have a hard time chasing you on their wooden legs.

Here are some of the lyrics, with a description of vocabulary at the end.  Does it sound like Heaven to you, or would you prefer that magic tub of pudding?

 

An extract from “Big Rock Candy Mountains” by Harry McClintock (1928): 

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains there’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes, and you sleep out every night,
Where the boxcars all are empty and the sun shines every day,
On the birds and the bees, and the cigarette trees,
On the lemonade spring where the bluebird sings,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, all the cops have wooden legs,
The bulldogs all have rubber teeth,
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs.

 

Vocabulary:

a hymn – a religious song of praise for God or a god

edible – able to be eaten

to speculate –to guess or make theories about something unknown

to chuckle – to laugh out loud

to mutter – to say something in a low and unclear voice

a hobo – in North America, a homeless person; a tramp

a handout – something you are given as charity

a boxcar – a railway freight or cargo wagon

a cop – in North America, this is slang for a policeman or policewoman

a hen – a female chicken