“I returned to my childhood home only to realize it wasn’t my home I was searching for.” -unknown
I suspect that after our summer’s long labor, on the precipice of our teenage years, we simply moved on to other adventures…or maybe sports, or summer jobs in the hay fields, or girls…something.
I grew up in a little town with three stop lights, a Dairy Shack, and a market. The nearest fast food place was a twenty minute drive from the village. I didn’t live in the village, though. A crooked seven mile ride east, on a badly patched state highway brought you to a one-light intersection with an aging grain mill and a gas station on opposing corners. I didn’t live in that dusty burgh either. Five miles further down the highway stood the house that my father built, lonely but for the cornfields and forests surrounding it. My bike and I put in many miles on that highway to visit my far-flung friends. Mostly, I shared the road with tractors, hay wagons, Amish buggies, and stray cows. It was safe, definitely felt safer than the alternative, sneaking through Mr. Cella’s cornfield (a mile across) to visit my best friend. Old man Cella never actually got us with his salt shot, but I heard the blast and saw the corn rustle enough times to decide biking was the way. I was always venturing forth.
Sometimes, we’d play in the creek where it passed under the highway. Runoff from the farms deposited tires, pitchforks, feed bins and all manner of other treasures at the mouth our “cave.” Inside, we hid from dragons and dreamed of maidens fair. I never found a magic ring, but I confess I searched earnestly for one. Sometimes we built forts in my best friend’s forest, literally our own Hundred Acre Wood. A fallen tree would usually suffice for a castle, but the year we turned 12, the year of the barn fire, we had an epic adventure. Oh, how we struggled to drag scorched aluminium roofing deep into the trees. With what devotion we quested in search of a perfect stand of four trees to frame our castle. The site selected and hallowed with spit and oaths, we labored over our Camelot. Pilfered hammers, bent nails, rust, sweat, blood, tears and wild joy went into her creation. This was my childhood.
It’s funny. Sitting here at my dining room table, dozens of years and hundreds of miles from those heroic days, the memories of building our sanctum are vital and alive in my mind. But, I have no memories of playing there. I suspect that after our summer’s long labor, on the precipice of our teenage years, we simply moved on to other adventures…or maybe sports, or summer jobs in the hay fields, or girls…something.
Five days after I graduated from Three Stoplight High School, I left town. That day, my plane (the first I’d ever been on) landed in St. Louis, Missouri; three hours later I was a soldier in the U. S. Army, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with kids from the docks of Boston, a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and a Brooklyn brownstone. Of course, I knew that these places existed; I had mental pictures of where they were, but I’d never populated those imaginings with people. Suddenly the world felt very big and I felt so small. I couldn’t have found the words then, but this experience was why I’d come. The nation poured into me, and I grew to receive it.
Some time later, I arrived at my university, still a soldier, but also a student, or so I thought. Back in Three Stoplight, the world (what I knew of it), had been so easy – academically, athletically, socially…all of it. When word went round TSLHS that I’d enlisted, an awkward, stunned silence had followed me around for a week. My friends were confused. Why was I leaving? I think everyone, my parents included, had assumed I’d go to the big state university branch campus near our home for a few years and then commute to main campus to finish my last two years. That was the path to glory where I grew up. It was the way out.
But, it really wasn’t. I had seen too many friends, older siblings of my classmates, start down that path, only to get a job at Rockwell or Owens for a summer. Fall would come around and the job felt safer and more certain than returning to school. Almost no one ever made it to main campus.
I don’t know where this insight came from. I want to claim credit for myself, but I suspect it might have been my recruiter’s propaganda. My memory of the decision is lost in the fog of years. But, it was me that pulled the trigger. One day in late March, I came home and told my parents what I’d done. It was my decision. It was probably my best decision, not because I loved being in the Army (I didn’t, really), or because I got to serve our country, or because it made me a better person simply by virtue of service. It was my best decision because, from that moment until this, my life has been self-determinant. That one decision gave me the escape velocity to get out of Three Stoplight’s orbit. At university, I discovered myself. It would be a task to catalog the growth of those years, the moments of discovery, reflection, self-examination, integration…becoming, but I can share the first of them.
I was in a sociology lecture. The discussion turned some once-influential theory of social organization and its impact on public policy in 1914. Listening, a rusty gear creaked in my head; my focus zooming out. An entire landscape replaced the stream I’d been focusing on. In a kind of panic, my mind flitted from idea to idea, testing each against what I thought I already knew. Some clicked into place, others fell away. Suddenly, I understood some (since forgotten) short story I’d been mulling over. Like the great plates that the continents ride on, I began to see how the pieces crashed together and fractured over time, not just in sociology and literature, but in everything. It was awe-inspiring, sometimes frightening, humbling, and beautiful to experience and the eruptions have rarely stopped for 30 years.
I love my Three Stoplight town. My childhood was filled with love, wonder and imagination, but I have never gone back, not to live anyway. I visit. I adore my family and feel genuine fondness, even nostalgia, for the place. But the plates never shift there. What’s true there is true there for all time, for better or worse. So, the old saying is also true.
“You can never go back home.”
I can’t. Not because home isn’t right where I left it, but because the person I’ve become is not the person that left.
“No man can ever step into the same river twice. It’s not the same river and it’s not the same man.” -Heraclitus