Sunday, October 19, 2008

Rear view mirror..

My wife and I traveled to Oregon a couple of weeks ago to attend my nephew's wedding. Oregon is her home state where I met her thirty years ago. I lived perhaps the worst thirteen years of my life there from age five through seventeen. We hadn't been back in over ten years and when we did go the last time, we visited her neck of the woods and not mine. I haven't been to the town I grew up in, or the old homestead(s) in over thirty years....and for good reason. Lots of demons floating around those misty, fir laden hills. The serious kind that cause grown men, grown hard from hard living and afraid of virtually nothing short of loosing a loved one to wake in the night soaking with sweat from a nightmare. Not the typical nightmare where you're being chased by Sindbad with a bloody scimitar and your feet are stuck in muck and can't run...or toothy monsters coming out of the black night....these are merely recollections of clips of actual life. I wake up from a dream (nightmare) where I am once again twelve years old standing tall next to the wood stove in the family room that was the only source of heat in our house, waiting to hear the crunch of gravel in the drive and the subsequent thump of boot on the wooden steps leading up to the front door. Knowing that there was a greater than not chance that I'd wake up at some point in the next few minutes wondering what the hell had just happened to end up flat on the floor. Or a worse scenario (you get used to faking unconsciousness after a bit) a three hour marathon lecture about what kind of an abomination to God you are by being born and how you'll never amount to anything worth running over on the road. Sometimes my younger brother and I would sneak off and hide in a tree fort we built high in the Douglas Fir trees for a couple of days just to let the swelling die down before we came back...knowing that we'd get it again for disappearing. Anyhow...those are my childhood memories. For the last thirty years the vision of those places has melted into my soul and I've seen those demons from the perspective of a five, ten, fifteen year old boy. They seem to loom so large in my minds eye when I think back. Distances seemed so great. Though only eight miles from our shanty shack home to school, in those days when you had to walk those eight miles if you missed the bus...it seemed so very far. The specters of my past fears seemed to encompass all of my childhood and young adult memories. Later when I joined the Marines and learned that the hard knocks of life had actually given me a jump on boot camp...wasn't anything those drill instructors could do that could have surpassed what had already been done...no fit of yelling, no browbeating, no face in the dirt or physical, emotional stress test that could be thrown against me could compare to the experience of chasing my step dads truck down in the middle of the night while he was running off scared because headlights were seen down the road from where we killed one of the Woolies beef calves. Or trying to find him after he ran off and left me with three hundred pounds of elk we were dressing out in the middle of the night after poaching it because park rangers were moving in on the scene, firing signal shots into the hill we were on unawares of our presence. I was ducking bullets and slapping leather before I was fifteen. You say riiggghhtt! Come look me in the eye some night when I wake up in that cold sweat.....

So we went to Oregon to marry off my nephew. We had the grandest time. Not too often that my lovely bride and I get a chance to get off by ourselves. If you started at the beginning....you'll know we have four kids. I say kids because they will always be my kids. But the fact of the matter is, no more babies around here. My youngest just turned fourteen yesterday, my God where have the years gone? My oldest two are twenty six and twenty five respectively, about eighteen months apart or so and almost eight years in between them and the youngest two. As my daughter notes in her blog...( love that word!...sounds like a grunt only a man could make) we will have been raising kids for almost thirty years by the time the youngest graduates. The opportunities to get alone with my wife for more than a few minutes at a time are few and far between. We flew out to Oregon on my son's parent pass (he works for an airlines) into Portland, rented a car and drove to my wife's brothers place first. We visited for a bit and then moved on to her sisters house. Staying the night there we drove down the Oregon coast to Coos Bay where she was born and conveniently, coincidentally one of her best friends from her childhood now lives. Thirty years had slipped passed us but we were still able to sit there for several hours, over a wonderful meal, and talk about love and life. I really enjoyed myself and I know she did the same. We spent the night in a local motel and moved on the next morning to my old stomping grounds. I'd have to stop right here and interject that if you've never taken a drive up or down the Oregon coast in early fall, you are missing one of the most beautiful experiences you will ever hope to encounter. And then to drive over the passes of the Cascade mountain range through dense rain forests, again is almost mind bogglingly and heart stoppingly beautiful. Pages could be spent trying to create a picture of that beauty.
We moved on into the town where I grew up. Saw the old school, dented the fender of the car turning around in one of my old bad boy haunt spots and drove passed the grocery store where I stole my first candy bar and lived to regret it. Eight miles down the road running parallel with the tracks that I walked a time or two after missing the bus or so I could get home after wrestling practice (no socker momma rides here) towards the homestead that I recall the most vividly. And it's gone. They put a freeway interchange that centers right smack down the middle of where the dog house used to be. No house, no crummy barn falling down with mucky corals and ninety seven railroad tie posts that it took me three years to dig post holes for by hand. All gone and good riddence. Worst of all though, the three trees that supported our tree fort refuge were gone as well. I could have cried over that. But what would you expect after thirty years? On up the road to the spot where my greatest humiliation in life occurred. Thirteen years of fear, hate and desperation congealed into an attempt to escape that led to two weeks in jail and the final severance from a rocky childhood. And it all seemed so small compared to the image in my mind. I choked down that last lump of self loathing and drove on up the freeway to an earlier town we lived in and the family actually moved back to after I left for the Marines. Cottage Grove. If you've ever seen the movie Animal House, the one with dearly departed Baloushi, you've seen Cottage Grove. The famous parade scenes were filmed downtown. We cruised around there for a few minutes and then stopped by the house where my folks lived when I returned from boot camp. Where they looked at my uniform, my ridged demeanor and stated...bullshit....you'll still never amount to anything. We turned around in the drive and moved on up the road towards the turnoff that would take us over the mountain....into the present and my nephews wedding, visiting with the brother who experienced that hell on earth with me, and I ultimately left to his own resources out of shear self preservation. As we got onto I-5 heading north I looked in my rear view mirror and saw that little town right where it belonged...

1 comment:

Rachel said...

I'm glad you started this blog daddy. 25 years and I am hearing this from your heart for the first time in my life. I love you and you know that! ~R♥