Wednesday's Short Story: The Big Front Yard by Clifford Simak

Back in May I discussed another of the great twentieth century science fiction writer Clifford Simak's short stories: Huddling Place, from 1944.  But one of the first sci-fi stories I ever read was his 1958 The Big Front Yard, which I found while thumbing through one of my father's old paperback anthologies.  It also appears in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 20 (1958), published by DAW Books in 1990.  Unlike many other stories I have read over the years, it has strongly stuck with me to this day...and for good reason...

Hiram Taine is a solitary handyman living on the edge of the woods outside a New England village with his dog Towser.  The folks from the village like and respect him, and bring in their broken down televisions and other contraptions for him to repair.  One day he notices that Towser is acting as if he is smelling a rat or woodchuck...and it seems to be coming from the basement.  Later he discovers that the ceiling of the basement has been replaced by an impermeable smooth glassy barrier.  Not freaking out as I (and most people) would have done, Taine with his "Yankee sensibility" continues to go about his own business in town and returns home to find his house's front closed in on itself, completely impassable.  Going in from the back, he sees that the front windows and door open out to a very sunny desert scene...while it's still nighttime and New England in the back!  Whatever "rats" had built the basement ceiling had also transformed his house into a gateway to another planet.  Taine knows they came from outer space because Towser had picked up their buried spaceship's scent.  And the story continues from there...

When I first read The Big Front Yard as a kid, the idea of just walking through a door and instantly traversing enormous distances greatly intrigued me...even now I often joke about wanting to be able to step into a closet and come out at some distant destination, saving me the time, expense, and hassle of going through all that tedious travel.  But when I reread it the other day, I picked up on something else: there is a character named Beasly, a man whose features you might recognize in a few others you know in your own life.  He does odd jobs around town to earn his frugal lifestyle and is generally regarded as somewhat slow-witted, consequently commonly being jeered at by some of the town's kids and shown disrespect by those he works for...except for Taine, who treats him as an equal.  But as it turns out, Beasly has a special talent that has gone undiscovered for his entire life, a talent that is crucial to the story's successful outcome.  I wonder how many of us regard ourselves as superior to others whose mental faculties we deem to make them not quite "complete", when the truth is that each and every one of us are complete in our own right and deserve an opportunity for a dignified life within our society...