You Can't Go Back Home . . .

Me! In the Jeep! By myself! Taking my own picture!
I am officially a loser!

There's an old saying, based not on the Bon Jovi song (which has been on a continuous loop in my head, since I started this entry, btw); rather, on some book way older that someone wrote some time ago (back in the 40's?), with the title, You Can't Go Home Again—and I don't remember who or what or when right now, and please don't ask me to look it up right now, 'cause this blog entry ain't gonna finish itself if I keep get sidetracked again, okay?! The super-simplified point of it is, you can't recreate your past. There's definitely some truth to that, but, it's not always a bad thing . . .

So, I went down to my hometown of Mt. Lake, in southern MN, on Monday and Tuesday for Pow Wow, the town's summer celebration (yeah, and don't even ask me why it's always held on Monday and Tuesday, when most people with real jobs have to work, or why it's called Pow Wow, when there isn't one freakin' mention of indigenous cultures at any point in the celebration. Because No. One. Living. On. Earth. Knows. Or. Ever. Knew. The. Answer. To Either. Question. Now, if I were mayor of Mt. Lake—which I'm not and never will be, so this is kind of a moot point, but this whole blog is kind of a moot point, so I'm just keeping with a theme here—you can bet Pow Wow wouldn't be on Monday and Tuesday, nor would it be called Pow Wow. ANYHOOOOODLES (honestly, can someone score me a month's worth of Ritalin, just to see if it'd help???), it's a long, complicated and super-boring story as to why I ended up in Mt. Lake this week, as it's been several years since I've been back, and I wasn't planning on going, and didn't even decide to go until the morning I took off, but let's just say this: I discovered that I can go back "home," even though home isn't much of what I remember, it felt for the first time in probably ever, at once deeply sad and immensely comforting. I went without any expectations, demands, or judgment—no other baggage except the eight pairs of shoes, three sundresses, four pairs of jeans, twelve pairs of underwear and sixteen shirts I packed for the two-day excursion . . . oh, and my dog. And still forgot my toothbrush.

Let's back up a bit . . . my sister, Jill, hadn't been back to PowWow in something like 14 years and suddenly, as though by a decree form God him/her/itself, decided she just had to take her kids to Pow Wow, just for the day, "for the experience," even though it's a two and a half hour drive to and two and a half hours from "the experience," even though she's teaching a summer class and is up to her armpits in work, even though I have taken Amelia at least once in her six years here on earth but she doesn't remember anything other than that Auntie Jenny had to stop every five steps to talk to someone which seriously cut into her merry-go-round ride time, even though Otto is still too young to give a rip about parades and merry-go-rounds and cotton candy, even though Amelia is involved in 18 summer activities back home, all of which started on Tuesday, at 8 a.m.—man, if I think I need Ritalin, my sister could use a constant IV drip . . . In spite of all that, Jill hounded me relentlessly, until I think I just had a lapse of sanity (okay, not true—my sanity has been lapsed for a good two years now. . .). I simply succumbed to her interminable prodding. Sometimes, with Jill, it's easier on everyone that way . . . that, and I hadn't seen Amelia and Otto for a good long while, and was a little bit desperate for kiddie face-time . . .

But, let's be real. I no longer have strong connections to Mt. Lake. I graduated over 25 years ago and high-tailed it outta town before the ink on my diploma was dry. All of my grandparents are gone. My dad is gone. My mom moved from the area over 25 years ago. I still have a few aunts and uncles and many cousins scattered throughout the area, but we have all grown older, have families and lives of our own and every time we see each other at a funeral or wedding, we say we have to get together more often, rather than just at funerals and weddings, but we never do . . . just life, happening . . .

My real interest in going back wasn't to attend the Pow Wow celebration, I must confess. I've been back a few times in the past decade to know that it isn't the Pow Wow of my childhood memories, and I get kind of sad when I see how things have changed. The midway seems smaller and grungier (my spell-check is telling me that grungier isn't a word and that I should substitute it for granger, which is even more mysterious a word than grungier, which just means "more grungy." Duh, spell-check.). The people are mostly unfamiliar. The big-kid rides that my nieces and nephews drag me on, that I, too couldn't get enough of as a kid, now make me feel like I could vomit my own heart out and my eyeballs might explode from my head. I have no true home to go back to—the house we grew up in is now abandoned, with boarded-up windows and overgrown lawn (not that it looked much better when we lived there—only thing missing are hay bales my dad so resourcefully stacked around the foundation). If I stay, I must make out-of-town arrangements for accommodations (which gets kind of complicated with a crazy mutt in tow, but thank God for my in-laws who take such good care of Rocco and me). Or, we simply go down for the day and drive back home, which makes for a very long day, and also heightens the wistfulness of the experience. I also dreaded that this time, going back would very likely be peppered with conversations of, "Where are you and what are you doing these days and where is your husband?" and I would have to answer, many times over, that my husband is dead. . .

The "mountain," from a distance, in a sea of green . . . 

Why would I purposely subject myself to such nostalgic torture? Why not let memories serve their purpose—to preserve a past life in soft focus? It's because of the name of my home town, and the story behind it that has haunted me since I was a young girl. Mountain Lake. I wrote a story about Mountain Lake for my travel writing class this summer, about how Mountain Lake got its name. Anyone even remotely familiar with southern Minnesota knows the landscape—calling anything within a 1000 mile radius of the area a mountain is a sign of serious delusion. And the lake that most are familiar with? It's a man-made body of water on the north edge of town, the deepest point being about six feet. Of all the things to call a town scratched into the soil of former tall grass prairies, why, o why Mountain Lake? For the answer, one needs to travel a few miles south of town, along a gravel road that carves its way through fields of green crops. There, you will find, rising above a patchwork of corn and soybean fields, a mound of earth rather startling in its prominence. The earth surrounding this mound is oddly more flat and level than most of the gently rolling farmland that continues beyond its parameters. What gives . . . ?

Close-up of the "mountain . . . "

This mound of earth, draped in a heavy blanket of hardwoods, was once an island in the middle of a glacial remnant lake, which flared its waters out across 900 acres. Aerial views of the area still show the phantom boundaries of the lake, dotted with tree clusters that were islands rising from its waters. The island had been a summer stop for indigenous people for thousands of years, an archeological dig on the "mountain" back in the '70s unearthed shards of pottery, bone chips of bison, stone arrow tips and other tools; the scientists believed it was a bison processing location . . . The first white settler to the area, perhaps nostalgic for his home country of Russia, decided that this island and the lake reminded him of a place back home, a mountain rising from a lake . . . in 1905, the shallow lake was drained to create more farmland, and one can walk the dusty rows of corn and soybeans and still find flecks of iridescent shells imbedded in the fields, rocks with aquatic fossils pressed into their surfaces, ghostly proof of a former life . . .

It is this story that brought me back to Mt. Lake. I wanted more details to make my story more accurate—one can make an appointment with the MN Historical Society in St. Paul, and travel into the bowels of the museum to view shelves upon shelves of artifacts found at the dig site, which I did, many years ago—but I wanted "first-hand" information about my home land. On Tuesday, I visited the Cottonwood County Historical Society where Linda, the director, had pulled a whole file of newspaper articles, a book on Mt. Lake history that was compiled for the town's centennial celebration back in 1986 (the year I graduated) waiting for me. There is even a display of artifacts on loan from the History Center in St. Paul, of the 1976 archeological dig—pottery pieces, arrowheads . . . I ran into "Uncle Eddie," who lived across the street from us, who was with his nieces (and our old neighbors), Ronda and Kendra. Uncle Eddie said that even today, if it rains hard enough, the low-lying area surrounding the mountain can flood so bad that one needs a canoe to get out (the recent devastating rains of the Cannon Falls and Duluth areas might have produced such flooding). With this visit, I believe I was able to unearth enough information to finish my story, and then some . . .

And Pow Wow itself, in spite of its name, in spite of its place on the calendar, proved to be a satisfying, comforting event. I may no longe know as many people wandering throughout the park where the celebration is held, but those we did run into embraced us as warmly like we still belong. Because we do. For eighteen years, this was my home, and there still exist fossil imprints of that former life of mine, embedded in the landscape . . . I saw cousins who gave me big bear hugs and bough me a beer at the beer garden and invited me to a tattoo party . . . a friend from high school whose dad was the same age as mine, who told a story about my dad as a freshman in high school, pulling a switchblade on a group of upperclassmen who were about to haze him into the letterman's club (I am sooooo proud of that story, I can hardly stand it—just like a scene from The Outsiders . . .). . . I learned that Mountain Lake is now home to a small community of Jamaicans who were lured by another family member who no longer lives in Mt. Lake, but for some ungodly reason, the rest stayed on and have come to love the prairie town with harsh winters . . . I visited an art gallery at the Historical Society, where a friend's mother is the featured artist with a breathtaking display of oil pastels, watercolors and collages . . . I even had the honor to be a judge at the talent contest which was the closing event of the summer celebration, a regular ol' home-grown Paula Abdul, I was (and the talent was just that—pure talent emanating from the contestants, which made the judging incredibly difficult . . . )

This might not be the town of my childhood, of my out-of-focus memories, but going back without expectations, without preconceived notions, made it an experience rich in new stories and new memories impressed into my life's landscape. And I think another part of it is, feeling still so disconnected from a world I once knew, I continue to grasp for things familiar, comforting, anything that might anchor me to a world I no longer feel a part of. It's been kind of surprising, on this f'n journey, from where those anchors appear . . . and now, the gratuitous nod to Bon Jovi. Who says you can't go home . . .