Every couple years, I try to take a trip home in the third week of June, because I'm addicted to the long, lingering days and short, short nights that crowd around the summer solstice in the northern latitudes where I grew up.
Well, relatively northern: northern Wisconsin, where in summertime, June specifically, Lupine grow along roadsides in profuse propagations of purple and pink and the sun's westbound departure each night can only ever be described as reluctant. This phenomenon of late-lingering twilight tormented me as a little kid, having just been put to bed and expected to fall asleep when there was still a heapin' helpin' of useable (playable) daylight falling through my bedroom window at 9, 9:30, 10 o' clock and beyond. Enough light at 10, at least, to feel comfortable hanging out on the front porch a little, maybe daring to dart into the yard right to the edge of the porchlight's influence. Often, I heard my older brother and all the older neighbor kids doing just that while I was stuck in bed, trying to force myself to sleep, resenting every minute of it.
In adulthood, I've developed a certain devotion to the northern summer night's ultra-slow seduction. I'd love one day to journey way up north, past Canada to Alaska, or ideally Scandinavia, to witness a day that never ends, a true midnight sun. But for now, this third week in June spent in the town I grew up in, on the shores of Lake Superior, just a well-skipped rock across the water from Canada, will have to do. It's far enough north to provide a little savory taste.
I still think of it as a homecoming when I visit, but truth is, my hometown is not "home" anymore. I moved away several years ago. I still live in the Midwest, but not the Northwoods, which anyone who grew up in, say, northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin or the UP of Michigan will attest certainly reads Midwestern at first glance, but has its own distinctive look, feel and culture. It's never so flat or expansive here, less proud farmland, more sullen (sometimes sulky) woodland, a place where falling afternoon sunlight must search for the ground, picking its way through dense clusters of trees that obscure the view in every direction, grow right up to the shoulder of the road for miles-long stretches, and tend to be more coniferous than deciduous.
Also, the slant of daylight is different where I grew up, a phenomenon related to the curvature of the Earth and its relationship to the sun providing the light from 93 million miles away. I never noticed this until I left and started coming back periodically. Yes, it's entirely possible I'm imagining it, and yes, with the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger, I could find out for myself. But I choose to keep believing I've spotted observable evidence that the daylight shifts hue - in ever subtle gradients - the further north I travel, the closer to "home" I get.
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LUPINUS ARCTICUS - Trimming northern roadsides every June |
I've enjoyed my periodic homecomings over the last decade, always an opportunity for reflection, a little sentimentality, which like so much else in life can be beneficial in moderation, and I know I'm not the only one. "Coming home" after a long absence has been written about in books, sung about in songs and captured in movies countless times over the years, usually in a small-town context, but I would imagine the experience is the same for people returning to big cities too, because at the end of the day, it's not so much about the community as it is the person returning. Really, why should returning after 20 years to an urban stoop on an inner-city street with a fire hydrant at the end of the block hit any different than returning to a dusty main street with lots of vacant store fronts running over a ravine on the way to the softball park with a country trunk running past it?
City or country, it's your cradle, it's what you knew first and foremost for a big portion of your formative years. Coming home is really only about memories being sculpted by the hands of time, and I admit, I indulge the notion whenever I return to my hometown. Often, just for something to do during the 4-hour drive, I will write an improv movie treatment in my mind, in which I'm the star returning.
This mental cosplay is easy to do, given a) I grew up entirely in one town, and b) I didn't actually leave until I was in my thirties, which means I have not only childhood memories but a generous portion of adult memories to write into the script, to brush and primp gently in the mirror of my mind's eye whenever I roll into town and glimpse the big lake I grew up on with fresh eyes.
Something is different this time, though.
In the past, trips home were kept in balance by an agenda. I always had a reason to be coming home, something for me to do, to take care of, someone to visit or meet up with. An agenda kept me focused on the here and now, away from any seductive but ultimately disenchanting deep dive into the past, to dwelling for too long in the basement of my brain, where boxes and boxes of memories get stored.
But a paradigm shift has taken place in my life since I last visited three years ago. A lot has changed. Loved ones have passed away, friends have moved on (and passed away). My parents are gone. I have no ties to the area now, and as a result, my hometown has become a place holding only memories, rather than that crucial blend of memories with new, developing moments to emulsify the experience into something pleasant, or at least satisfying.
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NORTHWOODS THRUWAY - A Midwestern drive to be sure, but the tree line's invasive creep right up to the edge of the road indicates in no uncertain terms that you're somewhere a little more North than merely Mid or West. |
With the exception of one family member, there's simply nobody around anymore, and so I'm left only to hang out by myself and consume all those memories. And consuming too many memories is sort of like consuming too many doughnuts: the first is delicious, so yes, I'll have another one, please. And why not, you only live once, hit me again with a third!
But then I keep snarfing, turn gluttonous, start thinking that if I don't have just one more I'll be missing out. Time disappears lickety split, and before I know it, that baker's dozen of cream-filled rings, holes, ears, johns, fritters and crullers has banded together and is now forming a groaning brick in my colon.
So it is with memories, if I'm not careful: they too can form a groaning brick in the basement of my brain.
Driving around on this almost sensually protracted June evening, I'm noticing things about my town, things I was always aware of but have never really stood back and taken a good look at, not with fresh eyes. Or at least not with fresh eyes so completely undistracted by anything better to look at.
A rust belt casualty of America's industrial decline in the time I was growing up, my hometown possessed a love-hate relationship with its early 20th century hey-day, which started to fizzle out in the 50s and 60s, and continued fizzling in dribs and drabs for decades after, as each remaining mine, plant and factory closed, businesses shuttered and local schools consolidated.
Being a small town of not even ten thousand residents probably helped blunt the impact of that decline, because it never actually died completely. In certain critical ways it remained the hub of the region, and in the 90s and 2000s started trying to reconcile its past with initiatives to revitalize and re-identify in the future, a process that started with simply cleaning itself up.
To that end, the abandoned train tracks and cars, chunks of re-barred concrete, blankets of taconite pellets, unused docks and wood pilings - essentially the post-industrial jungle gym I and others of Gen X played on growing up - were removed. The shoreline was prettied up with walking trails, a marina, an historic hotel and green space holding it all together, while at the same time, in what reads to me as great irony, the blight it was trying so hard to scrub away started getting memorialized in "historic" murals on the sides of downtown buildings, depicting my town's contribution to the industrial age, to varous war efforts. The goal was to attract visitors or at least get them to stop for a while on their way to someplace else, and all of it was centered around the town's most vital and precious resource, the actual thing that blunted the impact of the decline: Lake Superior.
But it seems nothing has ever been able to stick, nothing has ever really taken root. I won't venture an opinion why, it simply never became the tourist destination it wanted to be and probably should have been, and distance to market, among other factors, has kept it from becoming a place where anything gets made.
To be sure, the news is not all bad, at least not all that different from other small towns affected by the Galactic shift in American manufacturing, technology and culture over the last 60 years. But this summer, with so much time on my hands, the decay, the dilapidation and most notably the tired slant of lingering evening sunlight revealing it, is much more apparent.
What's more, and I guess this is really the issue, when I'm out and about, I don't recognize anyone. I encounter no friends or friends of friends, no old co-workers or classmates, nobody who recognizes me and comes up to say hello; it's all young people around here now. Not kids, but young adults with kids of their own, in whose eyes I see no glimpse whatsoever of someone I may have known once. It has led me to realize it's not really the town itself that has changed. It hasn't gotten better or worse; it is, in fact, carrying on as it always has, caught somewhere in that middle place between laying down to die and standing up to keep fighting.
I'm just not part of it. I don't know anybody here anymore. It's a rattling and lonely feeling to realize your hometown has become a town full of strangers.
Being somewhere where nobody knows your name can be a pleasant sensation when you're traveling, but this isn't traveling. This is supposed to be a homecoming. I'm supposed to know people, see them around here and there, catch up a little, even if only briefly while standing in line at a convenience store, or just an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement as we pass in a Wal-Mart aisle.
But there's been none of that on this visit. The evening sunlight drapes itself damply across quiet intersections where only occasionally a car passes or a stranger crosses with a dog or a baby stroller. I feel like I'm on that big road trip, the one I've been planning for years, feel as though I'm stopped in a random town in a random state. Sure, it very much looks like my hometown. "A dusty main street with lots of vacant store fronts running over a ravine on the way to the softball park with a country trunk running past it..." But it's not my hometown. It can't be. The streets, avenues and alleys, bars, businesses and ballparks are right. But the faces are all wrong.
I'm led to wonder, for the first time ever, if I may not be back this way again.
