5/18- Going Home

Waking up in the bivy again was quite sublime. I will say that I did miss it.

I got up around 7am or so which I was a bit surprised at. I had thought with all these days of sleeping on beds and lazying around I'd likely sleep in until 10 or 11. Either way, I took my time getting up and out of it, then took my time some more getting my things together and heading out for breakfast.

The park was so beautiful stretching out as a peninsula I figured I'd go to the peak and eat some oatmeal out there. I did exactly that, and once I got out there to a nice bench I thought I recognized the name on the plaque as a relative in my genealogy charts. It had been Joseph Selleck's cemetary that had been donated, and though I know Selleck is a family name that was in this area, I don't think that guy is direct to me.

After my meal it was a bit cold so I headed back toward the city with the aim of figuring out what was going on with the trains. Todd and I had talked the night before about his ticket switching and we went back and forth a few times then as well, finally settling on leaving the damn thing alone. Amtrak was only a mile away, if that, and I was applying that lesson of forgetting about being the intrepid adventurer and just get to Springfield.

Some checking around gave me funky prices in scheduling. To take Amtrak from Stamford to Springfield was $56. To take Amtrak from New Haven to Springfield was $18, but only if you left at 10:30am. The other train was at 1pm and was $31. To take Metro-North from Stamford to New Haven was $6.25, but got in at 10:51am. I opted for the Metro-North option hoping that Amtrak would run 20 minutes late. It did perplex me though that I could get to Springfield for $24.25 rather than $56, and why there was a $38 difference between stations that are 60 miles apart. Which ever.

When I got into New Haven it turned out Amtrak was not late, but $31 plus the $6.25 was still a hell of a lot cheaper than $56. I then asked if there were any other trains leaving that day for $18 and it turned out there would be one at 7:22pm. Happy with that, I left figuring I had a day to explore New Haven.

At a map at the station I located the town library and made my way there, getting there about 11:20am. It didn't open until noon and I'd remembered from that map a cemetery a little distant, but not too far from the library. I started making my way to there thinking it'd be neat to look up dead relatives there for my genealogy, but after a block I changed my mind realizing I have no notes and the library computers will likely fill up. I went back and wrote out some postcards instead as I waited.

I was correct to consider waiting. By the time noon came the lonely steps that had one other guy on it when I started waiting were filled with people who funneled in at the opening of the doors. I did manage to secure myself a computer, though, for two hours where I sat and typed out a post of the weekend at Mama's. When that time ran out I wondered upstairs and found a really interesting book on Socrates by Plato. It was a collection of his dialogues which I sat for the next three or four hours pouring over.

It was just about 6pm when I decided my eyeballs hurt and I needed to leave. The train would be leaving in just under an hour and a half so I figured I should return and secure my ticket there and maybe get something to eat. It turned out that train was scheduled to be half an hour late. Either way, I got the ticket using my sisters gift certificate, then picked myself up a bagel and coffee. I sat and wrote in between making calls to Loreli for her birthday and my Mom to say hi.

The ride up was lazy as well, but welcome. I made a few more calls and got through to my friend Maria out in Denver. She told me she was working on a dilemma at the moment and that I had called at the perfect time to help her work it out a bit. Hopefully my advice was helpful, but I don't think its any surprise to anyone reading this that I told her to follow what her gut tells her and just prepare as best you can for whatever obstacles that path looks like it will have.

Getting into Springfield was an eerie event. Since leaving home after high school back in '94 I've been back to live once, and that was the following year for the summer. I had taken a year off between high school and college and, through a strange series of events, ended up living out in Hawaii for five months. I really didn't like it there, due to the depression I was in, so my return home was over anticipated and my stay felt like dropping back into a ghost town. I've never felt at home here since that '94 departure, which is why since then I've always claimed New York as home.

My relationship with my Dad I've also talked a bit about here, but it really has come to bear now when I stepped off that train. I won't get into the strange events going on right now, but the Cliff Notes are that I'm not going to be staying at his house while I'm here in Mass, and will likely only be getting a brief visit in with him despite his recent health problems. I don't know enough of the rest of the story to really say any more than that at the moment, and I've often been wrong on my assumptions I've drawn in the past.

Stepping off that train, into this dark, old city lit by dangling street lights and neon signs in bars only to illuminate the boards in so many of the 1900's era buildings downtown, it was fully impressed upon me that I was stepping into a dark end of my past. On the train up I had also been doing some writing about what seemed to be the feeling in me about going to Springfield was and it rang loudly as closure. What that will end up meaning, if anything, remains to be seen.

I had friends in the area who I could have called as well, not to mention other family like my cousins and aunt, but the impression that I was there on my own really sank in knowing that no one knew I was there, and know one would be there to pick me up or bring me to their house. I also had a strong compulsion to sleep out in the woods I'd grown up in that night. I needed time to myself to process a lot of these things, and being in those woods, I knew, would feel like coming back to the home I grew up in. I called my friend Gus, who is the oldest of my close friends and the one I've been most anxious to see while up here.

I threw on my pack and headed down the empty main street of Springfield, filled only with the bug eyed headlights staring past as I made my way back to my woods. On the way I stopped in at a place I would go occasionally in high school, Antonio's Grinders, to get some food in me. I was starving as well, which was probably what was getting at my mood a bit. I chatted with the lady behind the counter a bit, then, after I ate, I crossed under the highway and made my way to the train tracks. The tracks would lead me down to my woods, so I followed those down in the dark, found my bearings at my old spots I knew, and dashed into the woods.