I’m sure I was a falconer. I can see the bird, its talons gripping my glove as it prepares to spring into air and float in a magical circle around me. After the falcon returns to my outstretched hand, I will go, as is my wont, to the tavern called The Dancing Pig, and listen there to music. Aye, and I will lift a flagon, and ¼

What is it with the past? Why do so many people want to live there? I don’t mean last year or last decade. I mean a hundred, five hundred, a thousand or more years ago. The Arizona Renaissance Festival has two weekends left in its stint east of Apache Junction, and I intend to go there for one of them. As I have every spring, save two, for the last 17 years, I’ll make that insanely long trip in the hope of glimpsing some small insight into what it might have felt like to live half a millennium ago in the Europe that was home to my forebears.

I’ll probably be disappointed, as invariably I have been before. Jousters, jesters and gypsies from Renaissance fairs appear in still publicity shots to be the mystical avatars of an era. In 3‑D reality, they turn out to be–duh–just people doing their jobs, and always with a wink. The promotions make it look like you’re stepping into a drama starring Joseph Fiennes and Helen Mirren, and you end up in an Adam Sandler farce.

It wasn’t always like this, say those who know. In the early days of the Renaissance fair movement (the late ‘70s and ‘80s), living out the life of a knight or lady was a serious avocation. To be a knight then meant developing a crest, mastering weapons, learning a little Latin perhaps, and writing poetry in perfect meter to a lady love. It was a kind of devotion.

Though the era evoked was a different one, I’ve done this gig. For two years in my twenties–itself a bit of a trek backward in history–I was a member of Tucson’s Fifth Cavalry. With a group of other crazy people, I reenacted encounters of the Civil War and Indian Wars. The Fifth kept a strict code. Uniforms, weapons and horse tack were exact duplications of the era. We rode hard‑seat McClellan saddles, fired single‑shot carbines, practiced heaving heavy sabers from horseback, and when we encamped, the tents weren’t rain‑proofed because rain‑proofing is a 20th‑century invention. Somehow, it rained every time.

Every man in the Fifth Cavalry maintained that he joined in order to feel what it must have been like to live in the 19th century as a cavalry trooper–the same time travel offer that gets people to the Renaissance Festival. I doubt any of us succeeded in our aim. Once, doing picket duty at 2 a.m., smelling a fresh breeze from over the Chiricahua Mountains, hearing the horses snort and paw, I thought I felt a shift, as if the stars had suddenly gone into reverse and taken me back, if for a moment, to 1885. Later that morning, I chalked the experience up to the Cavalry’s diet of strong coffee and hardtack biscuits.

There was one event that did succeed in taking me back, though it was not really a Cavalry experience. Every once in a while, a trooper would bring out a guitar and we’d sing songs of the day. “Garry Owen” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” did more to send me back a century than any number of charges at the gallop, sabers drawn.

Wearing yesterday’s clothes and copying yesterday’s speech patterns won’t let you live the lives of those who came before us. To get at how people feel, look at their paintings; listen to their music, read their books. Want to transport back to the time of knights and damsels? Listen to Owain Phyfe’s elegantly performed CD, “Where Beauty Moves and Wit Delights,” available at nightwatchrecording.com. Or catch the multi‑talented Owain performing ye olde musick live at The Dancing Pig–yes, it’s a real place–at the Arizona Renaissance Festival.

We are all time travelers, but the trip goes in one direction only. The arts freeze moments for us from along the way, whether it’s a song from 1600 or a poem from last week. They fulfill the longing we have when we go to Renaissance fairs or join the Fifth Cavalry. They connect across cultures and across time, as nothing else can do.