Country Roads

I was born in the Northwest and live there to this day.  I like it here and have said before that it’s a great place to live and raise a family.  I suppose I could have lived other places and I have lived other places briefly, but I keep coming back to the Northwest.

When I was seven, my Dad put us all in the family car as he drove the moving truck and we moved back east to live near his family.  He is from Ohio and West Virginia, specifically Steubenville, Ohio and Wheeling, West Virginia.  For all I knew, we might never return.

I’ve never heard the story of what got all this started.  I don’t know if it was simply that my Dad missed his family or was tired of living in Spokane or if there was some other reason.  All I knew at the time was that suddenly there was parental discussion about us moving away.  A long way away.

I’m the eldest of three kids, so my sister was five and my little brother was only about two, so it’s not like we were really involved in the conversation at all.  I never got a chance to ask what my mom thought of moving away from where she was born and had grown up, surrounded by her brothers and sisters and family.

As is often the case in remembering things from that long ago, it’s really more a series of vignettes than it is a continuous memory of that time.

One vivid audio memory is that John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” seemed to be playing constantly on the way there.  Looking it up, it turns out that while it came out in 1971 on his album “Poems, Prayers and Promises”, by the summer of 1972 when this took place, it was huge, reaching #2 in the US.

If you’ve indulge me, the lyrics are still stuck in my heads for parts of it and I suspect they were at least peripherally related to the trip there.

Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver, Taffy Nivert, and Bill Danoff

Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze

Chorus:
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, Mountain Mama
Take me home, country roads

That damn chorus will be in my head for the rest of my life because of that trip.  I probably couldn’t tell you another John Denver song or sing lyrics, but that one … That one is stuck in my head forever.

We hadn’t traveled far from Spokane at that point in my life.  Short trips to nearby lakes was about it.  This trip, however, was across the Rockies.  I don’t recall the car but I do recall feeling like we were crawling up twisty roads where at any moment we could plummet down the steep sides of the roads and that made the trip feel like it was dangerous and exciting.

As I said, my Dad was driving the moving truck so that meant we kids were in the car with my Mom.  I don’t remember this vividly, but I really don’t think she enjoyed the drive.

The trip took us something like three days but I really only recall the daytime trip over the Rockies.  The Rockies, if you haven’t been there, are an amazing range of mountains whether approaching from the East or the West.  Highly recommended if you get the chance.  I bet the roads are significantly better than when we crossed them back in the early 70s.

Another visual that stuck with me was when I saw my first oil pump.  At that age I recall that they looked like giant ants constantly bobbing and pecking at the ground.  I imagined giant, prehistoric animals as we saw them.  We saw dozens of these on the trip and they became a favorite thing to spot and another image that I associate with the trip.

When we arrived we met with lots of my Dad’s family.  I recall cousins I’d never known of – though now I know they were second cousins or more removed than that.  I had cousins named after months.  May or June.  My Dad had aunts that were named Aunt Zube and Aunt Zelm.  Old as the hills, but sweet.  My Dad had a cousin named Dwayne who was was born deaf and never learned American Sign Language but had developed a very successful way of communicating through signs and vocalizations.  No one had any trouble understanding him though I suspect he’d be hard pressed to make himself understood outside that immediate area or to folks outside his immediate circles.

I recall visiting family that lived in a house with no inside bathrooms.  An old home that obviously had been built up on expanded over the years.  I had previously thought this could not be a real thing because if you lived in Spokane you had plumbing, so the idea that someone had an actual outhouse was about the coolest thing I could imagine.  I remember they had actual toilet paper out there and I was disappointed that there wasn’t a Sears catalog.  My Dad said that was just in case of emergencies and only in the winter.  I never knew if was kidding with me or not.

At another family’s home I got to go out and bring home the cow at dinnertime.  I don’t recall exactly how that worked but I do recall having a small plastic dart gun and somehow thinking that that would make a difference if the cow gave me any trouble.  I didn’t have a lot of experience with farm animals at that time (nor a great deal more now), but I do recall being just a bit terrified at the size of the cow and how unlikely it was I was going to be able to persuade the cow to do anything the cow didn’t want to do.  I think I had a handful of corn or food, though, and once the cow figured that out, she followed me home with no trouble.

That same family had a pen filled with small yellow chicks.  In my memory there were probably 20-30 of them, but it might have been half that.  I asked if I could go in the pen with them and my Dad said I could.  In fact, he said, if you can catch one of the chicks, you can have it!  I recall trying for probably 15 minutes to catch a chick, the entire time my Dad was laughing as hard as I’d ever seen him while I tried to catch a chick to no avail.  It was like they were greased lighting.  If I laid a hand on one, they’d shoot out of my hand like a watermelon seed from between your fingers.  Of course, I didn’t want to hurt them, so I was being careful which meant the advantage was decidedly on the side of the chicks.

That summer was also the only summer in my life where I got experience fireflies.  Some call them lighting bugs.  They use bioluminescence to attract mates.  Their butts light up and go out. They’re very active as dusk on a summer evening in some parts of the country.  I recall trying to catch them which was made more difficult because their read-ends would light up and you’d chase after and often before you got to them they’d go out again.

We’d try and catch them and put them in jars with grass to have a little lantern.  But, we were always supposed to let them go before we went inside so they could go on about their business.  I really wish we had lighting bugs in the northwest.  That might be, more than anything, the thing I miss most about living back east for that time.

Eventually the school year rolled around in early September and I started the second grade.  I don’t recall much about that but I do recall that it wasn’t very hard.  I was reading actively at that time and it seemed the rest of the class was still working out the basics.  It was the same with Math.

I heard, years later, that my teacher had my Mom in for conferences about half way through the year and as I recall the story, the teacher told my Mom “You have to get him out of here.  We just don’t have the resources to challenge Darrin the way he needs to be challenged.”  I just recall thinking school was pretty easy that year.

I recall my sister Judy and I trying to make bird’s nests out of grass and mud.  I don’t know why, but it was a fine idea at the time.  We were both pretty disappointed when the birds were not interested in the homes we had made for them.

While we were there, we shared a house with my Aunt Matt (Madelaine) and her daughter.  I don’t recall much about the house other than it was large, white and rambling.  It had a large wrap-around covered porch that was great to play on and under.

I got my mouth washed out with soap the one and only time when we lived back East.  As I recall I was watching Mr. Magoo (Google it kids) on television after school with my four years older cousin who had been tasked with babysitting we three kids.  In this particular cartoon, Mr. Magoo was bumbling around and bumped in to a wall that had a donkey’s head mounted on it (for reasons).  When he bumped in to the wall, the mounted head fell off an on to Mr. Magoo who proceeded to bumble around even more hilariously.  I swear that in the cartoon, Mr. Magoo said something along the lines of “I feel like such an ass.”  I remember laughing and saying that he looked like an ass, too.  Boom!  I got my mouth washed out with soap.  She didn’t even check with my parents!  I found this to be terribly unfair because if there’s one rule a kid should be able to count on, it’s that you can say the same things that people say in cartoons!

Eventually, whether because my Dad found the reality of being back home different than he’d expected or perhaps the job prospects were less than he’d hoped or maybe my Mom told him what the teacher had said, the decision was made that we were returning to Spokane in March of that next year.

That trip constituted the longest period of time I’ve lived away from the Northwest.  I’ve also spent a few months in northern Florida, just enough to figure out it wasn’t for me.  So, I suspect, I’ll never have my Dad’s experience of feeling a need drawing me back to where I come from.  There will be no John Denver song, no lyrics tugging me back.  And that’s okay because I’ve been able to live here and be happy here, raise a family and enjoy this area and visit other areas and come home back here.  It’s a good base to come home to.