5/19- A Day of Childhood Revisited

I awoke to my cell phone ringing somewhere in my sleeping bag. My old friend Gus was calling me back from the night before to see what was up, where I was staying, and when we were going to get together. Talking with him briefly we made some plans on getting together either that night, but if not definitely by the next night. I sat up in my bivy after that leaning on my pack in the thickets of my old woods and took in the morning. It was a calm awakening.

This area that I was in was the recesses of my mind would call "the more advanced dingle". Dingle is also a word I should explain. For whatever reason, the woods in my town are almost never referred to by the townspeople as woods, but as a dingle. It wasn't until 7th grade science class when we were learning names of things like tundras, savannahs, and rainforests that I waited and waited to hear what the separation in terms a dingle was from a forest. It turns out no other town in America, that I know of including those immediately surrounding mine, call woods dingles. I wouldn't figure the answer to that riddle out until last January while traveling around Ireland. Apparently its an Irish word that, I think loosely put, means woods or forest. Anyway, it was bothering me saying woods when what I really wanted to write was dingle. So there you go.

After an hour or so of enjoying the sun on me and packing up I made my way back out of the tangled mess of vines and prickers to a puddled up dirt road. As I said above, this area was the more advanced area, meaning that I didn't really get to this end of the dingle by the Connecticut River until I was a bit older. The reason being that its cut off from my neighborhood area by I-91 and is closer to where the town dump was located. It gives the impression to an 11 year old that its more "out in the world" than my familiar tromping grounds. This tunnel regained a huge amount of significance that morning when I scrambled down over the rocks through the bramble to pass through it once again.

Staring it in the face I suddenly found myself sunk deeply into an obvious metaphor loaded with meaning and somewhat of a ritualistic transformative sense knowing I had to pass through it, with great difficulty due to my pack strapped to my back and the stream that passed through its center as it always had. I had to surpass this obstacle, that daunted me so in the first discoveries of it as a kid going the other way to the "outer world", to get back into my childhood tromping grounds and up into the streets of the neighborhood and town I grew up in and abandoned. The first time I made that trip through the tunnel was also with my Dad, who has become a huge part of this revisit home and healing of old memories.

I grabbed a staff to support myself and clung myself to the walls as I'd done so many times before years ago. It was much more challenging as an adult with 60lbs of weight strapped to me, probably the same amount of weight that I was when I first started climbing around through there. The trick to this passage is to fit your feet on the lip of tar that rises just above the water line and stablize yourself by using the bolts in the wall as hand holds. When I was younger, once my friends and I thoroughly had conquered this challenge we used to run up and down the walls hopping the three foot wide stream in the middle all the while which we termed "wacky wall walking". Clever. At 33 my hands aren't nearly as small as they were to grab those bolts, and the pack kept catching on the wall to swing out a bit, which would then loosen my foot hold at the bottom. I loved every minute of this.

The tunnel is about ten feet in diameter and passes under that dirt road, a double set of train tracks, and I-91 which is a three lane highway on both sides, so its a fairly long way. Emerging at the other end I was plunged deep into my true home. After 15, maybe even 17 or 18 years of being away from this terrain I still knew it intimately. Following the path that runs along the creek, I ducked in and out of the pricker patches, around low hanging vines that have hung low there for years, and found myself at a hook in the stream where there used to be a firepit. In its spot the morning sun was shining down like a druidic sanctuary for those who were weened by these trees. I spent a good two hours or so there just soaking in the energy from those memories.

I had breakfast in that spot as well, reorganized some things, dumped out my water from the park restroom in Stamford and pumped my reserves with these waters. As cheesey as it sounds, it was truly a holy morning for me in that sense of really finding my old severed roots again. Wandering about I found the ruins of some old forts and took some pictures of favorite spots. Feeling energized I climbed the hill out to my neighborhood and walked up the street I used to experiment with go-carting on.

Being in this mode I, of course, couldn't pass up getting a picture of the house I grew up in. This house is obviously loaded with memories and meaning for me despite that I moved out of it way back when I was 13 with my Dad. This was the physical moment that my immediate family was fully broken and began to shatter ourselves across the country as far as Hawaii. I took a few pictures of the place and ended up running into the owner, Debbie. We got to talking and I told her I had grown up here and hoped I didn't creep her out as a dirty guy in a backpack snapping pictures of her home of 14 years. Instead of creeping her out, she invited me in for a tour.

It turned out she had met my sister years earlier when she first moved in who had shown up in a similar way and also been given a tour. From the moment I entered the kitchen in the back I was struck by how absolutely tiny the place was. I had sort of expected that, but my kitchen in my apartment Denver was bigger than the one I sat in eating Cheerios for the first decade or so of my life. Each room, successively, had the same affect on me; it was like touring a colonial home but for my personal history.

As we walked through I told her stories of different places, explained bumps and bangs in the walls that I had put there, and confessed that I was the evil demon who had loaded my entire bedroom door with stickers as my sticker collection. I had wanted to keep that door when my Dad and I moved out, but alas it wasn't to be. Instead, poor Debbie was stuck sanding it off with great pains some 7 years after I left. The neatest thing, however, was that we had written on the walls in places and they had kept it. Not only had they kept it but their kids had added to them giving the house a sort of child recorded history to it. The first being my friend Tim's sister, Susan, who my parents had bought the house from in '77 writing "Susan Wenz was here". Which I followed up with "Chris Dyson was here". My sister up in her room had marked her closet with "Wendie's room until 1/9/91", and Debbie's daughter had followed in the same vain dating March of last year.

Thanking them as I left I gave them some of these website cards telling them a bit about my travels. From there I wandered down the main road in town, Longmeadow St., to my old library. I was there for the rest of the afternoon catching up on posts and Facebooking friends here to get together. By 6:30 I was ready to go, and had arranged meeting up with my friend Dave, who I'd known since I was 4 or 5, and a former roommate of mine, another Dave, but then we called him Vid. I was to meet them down at a bar the first Dave was working at on Main St. in Springfield, but first I felt the need to go around the corner and put a visit in with my grandparents, Nana and Papa.

They are buried in the cemetery of the white church that is the center of Longmeadow. I made my way to their grave, picking some flowers for them along the way. As I sat there I hadn't intended to stay long, honestly. I figured I'd pop in and pay tribute, then meander down into town. I sat there for an hour.

The sun was beginning to wane in the sky as sat and looked at their stone. I looked over the odd placement of their names being that my Dad's little sister, Peggy, who died at 9 in the '60s was in the center. Above her was Papa and below her was Nana. It wasn't by birth order or death order, and in the end I figured it must have just been convenient placement on the stone for who died when, Peggy naturally being centered then filling in the space. Then it dawned on me that all the space on it had been filled which set a disturbing reality into my head. The question just emerged; "if not here, then I wonder where Dad will go?" It brought home an issue I've thought much about but I don't think I've really hit that level of reality that he may die within the next few years.

This sank deep into me and hit a core. My intentions of travel are to go far and wide this time, hopefully South America, Africa, Asia perhaps. If I take all of that time to do that will he be here when I get back? Is this the last time I'll really be in this hometown again? How do I approach this visit with him this time with that possible reality? I called my sister.

We talked it out for a good long while. When she answered the phone she had asked if she could call me back later since she was in the middle of something, but I blurted out what I was thinking and we talked about it at length for a good half hour or so, really probing what this reality might mean for us and our relationship with him. I can't do it justice in words, but the experience was sobering and intense, but when I got off the phone with her I felt ready to leave the grave site and go meet up with some old friends.

I wandered downtown, getting in touch with another friend Becky. She swung by and picked me up taking me to the bar we hung out at. It was a brief visit with Dave when I got there since he was working, and Vid never showed up, but that gave me the time to get a good chat in with Becky that evening. We turned in early, however, since she had to work at 7:30am the next day and soon I was conked out on her couch.