Home is a place you can walk through with the lights off and not bump into anything. It is the only place where the water tastes like water and the air smells like air, where every strange sound echoes a comfortable familiarity and every room contains a world of memories.
Mine was in a place called Casnovia, Michigan. The name roughly translates to "new home," but for most of my life, it was the only home I knew. The population has held steady at right around three hundred people for about as long as my parents have lived there, and even today, it remains suspended in a sort of anachronistic ambiguity, like a rerun of MASH.
As a municipality governed by a committee of five that meets twice a month in an abandoned school, Casnovia also consists of a church, a bar and a post office. These are the common denominators of any American village. It is a place without a postcard, where the only stop light in town flashes yellow on two sides and there isn’t a fast food restaurant for fifteen miles - just a trail of empty wrappers.
Every direction is a Sunday drive, and every weekend is a reason to leave. Home is a starting point on the road to somewhere else.
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There is a general misconception regarding life in a small town that paints it as a Norman Rockwell caricature, where everyone is neighbors with everybody else and the ice cream truck is never more than four blocks away. I only had a few good friends, and none of us had ever seen an ice cream truck. I never knew my closest neighbor’s name. My brother and I had BB guns for shooting mostly things we shouldn’t shoot, and we built makeshift ramps for our bikes to jump the impossible. Only the tv antenna and the freight trains connected us to the outside world. The latter passed by at the same time every week, preceded by a telegram of barking dogs, and the former provided us with sixty-two channels of static.
If Casnovia did have a post card, it would say “It’s a great place to grow up, but you wouldn’t want to live here!” and there would be a picture of a rusted out pick-up truck, American made.
There were eighty-seven people in my graduating class, sixty-eight of whom actually graduated. In Casnovia, home was more of a genetic thing. One family even shingled their last name on the top of their barn just to ensure that somebody else might inherit their dreams. The surrounding landscape was a still life of maple trees and apple orchards with nothing but the vast unknown beyond the hills that framed the horizon. The edge of the world existed in the folds of a coffee-stained map. Casnovia wasn’t even on that map, and it would be years before I even knew that Michiganders, as we were apparently called, had an accent.
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When I was eighteen years old, my number one superpower was the invincibility that comes from being eighteen, but I could also measure time and space in terms of cigarettes. My friend Bruce lived a distance of exactly one cigarette from my parents’ house. Bruce’s room was upstairs, and it was always filled with variable densities of music and smoke. The rug on his floor was an embroidered map of the lower forty-eight states. One time, I accidentally burnt a hole in Oklahoma, and in the spring of ‘95, much of Texas was flooded with bong-water.
Conversations did breathstrokes in the heavy air as the February wind sang like sirens through the lifeless winter trees, beckoning us to someplace else. Unfamiliar and exciting combinations of words took shape within the room, like Mardi Gras, now, what if, and why not? We figured it was about two thousand miles, not that either of us had any real concept of a distance that far. All we knew is that we’d need at least a carton of smokes and probably some trail mix.
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When I was eighteen, part-time jobs were like lighters. If I lost one, it didn’t take much to get another that was more or less the same. Some were a little bit cooler than others, but they basically just served one fundamental purpose. Bruce and I both worked at Ryan’s Steakhouse, which was a buffet style restaurant about twenty miles away that catered to a clientele somehow drawn to the challenge of all you can eat. When I filled out the application, it asked what my major was in elementary school. I said middle-school prep. When Bruce quit, he stole the ashtray beside the exit. I just stopped showing up.
We hit the highway on a Sunday night. The sky was the color of warm picture tube. Between the two of us, we had about eight hundred dollars in our savings accounts, which we stuffed into an envelope labeled “Adventure Funds” in thick black marker. We placed it beneath the floor mat on the passenger side. It was no longer part his and part mine. We thought of it simply as a humble offering to the universe to get us where we wanted to go.
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Bruce had a dark blue 1974 Chevy Impala that may well have contained more metal than the Eiffel Tower. It was the only car I’ve ever ridden in that had a backseat wide enough for someone over six feet tall to lay down flat. It also didn’t lock, and its fuel efficiency might have been measured in gallons to the mile as opposed to miles to the gallon. The only sounds beyond the guttural hum of the eight cylinder came from the stock AM radio that was molded into the dashboard between panels of artificial woodgrain.
Nothing tells you more about the sociopolitical tendencies of a particular area better than the AM stations you find when passing through it. Sometimes it actually is better to stick to the interstate.
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With that, let us indulge for a moment in what may be a familiar metaphor. Life is a road trip. It doesn’t necessarily matter where you start or where you end up. Some people take the highway, full speed ahead on a predetermined course, while others take the side roads and enjoy the scenery and the strangeness. Sometimes all we have is a vague sense of direction to guide us and sometimes we don’t really know where we’re going until we get there. Every once in a while, we find somebody who happens to be going our way, but only rarely do we find anyone who is headed to the exact same spot.
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Somewhere in Ohio, which should have license plates calling it “The Rest Stop of America,” we finally did the math. Whims of the universe aside, there was absolutely no way that we had enough money to make it to New Orleans and back plus have any spending money while we were there. We also had no plan as far as a place to stay once we got there. Basically, eight hundred dollars was not nearly as much money as we thought it was.
So we took a left.
Neither of us had ever seen an ocean, a mountain, or a change in climate, so we headed for North Carolina instead. We heard they had all three there. By the time we got to southern Pennsylvania, though, the front right tire was vibrating so badly that it felt like we were approaching light speed every time one of us drove over fifty miles an hour. We had also just gotten pulled over for supposedly going eighty.
We stopped in some small town in the foothills of the Appalachians. The gas station had no signs indicating that it was full service, but before we knew it, some guy had a gas nozzle in his hand and was looking for the tank. Bruce told him it was behind the license plate and gave him the money to fill it. The attendant wasn’t even looking at the pump, but he somehow managed to stop it at exactly twenty dollars. We gave him twenty-five.
There was a garage up the road where we had the tire replaced. After two cups of bad coffee and more Reader’s Digest than I could stomach, we were headed back to the highway. I had to ask Bruce why he was laughing so hard, and he could barely catch his breath long enough to explain. Apparently, we had just driven off without paying for the tire. My first instinct was to look behind us, but by the time we were far enough away to know that there were no pick-up trucks with gun racks and deer lights hot on our trail, I was laughing, too.
Even with our free tire, though, we had officially reached the halfway point in our spending money. By all rights, we should have turned back right then if we wanted to make it home, but luckily, my third and perhaps most useful superpower was the ability to rationalize the irrational.
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At a truck stop in Maryland, we bought a compass for the dashboard and determined to take any road that would take us east. We had already seen the mountains, it was at least a little warmer there than it was in Michigan, and if we kept heading that direction, we were bound to hit an ocean eventually.
Delaware should have license plates that say “The Normal State,” or “A Good Place to Do Nothing.” Looking at the map, the entire state was only a quarter of an inch wide, so we knew the ocean must have been close. As the billboard lights came on, the city became country and the country got dark. The divided highway became a four-lane street, which eventually turned into a two-lane county road. Before long, the yellow lines began to fade, the streetlights and billboards were gone, and we soon found ourselves on a gravel road that became narrower the further we traveled along it. Within a half mile, it was a one-lane road comprised mostly of mud.
Considering the sheer size of the car, we were afraid that if we stopped, we would be stuck, not that there was anywhere to turn around, anyway. Bruce said something about how it was the kind of place where serial killers hung out and then he started to freak out a little. Eventually, we found a patch of dry road that seemed like as good a place as any to stop and smoke a cigarette. There was nothing but the dense black of night around us, and nothing but the religious rants on AM radio to break the silence. Bruce killed the headlights as not to alert the serial killers to our whereabouts.
I rolled down my window for some air and I heard something. I turned down the radio and that something became everything. About six feet beyond my window, the Atlantic Ocean baptized the shore in sudden bursts of entropy and grace. When we got out of the car, the cold salt air filled our lungs, and about a hundred feet down the road was an unlit boardwalk that extended further into the darkness. Our footsteps were like drums on the heavy wooden planks, and our tempo steadily increased as we approached the end of the pier.
Once there, we stood in silence as our eyes adjusted to the sight of the ocean, enveloping us in its majesty and the infinite nature of its patience. We did it. That was the only thing that either of us said for about five minutes. Beyond that, the ocean did all of the talking as the rhythm of its waves washed up on the rocks, whispering the same word, repeatedly.
Wish…
Wish…
Wish…
So we each took a penny out of our pockets, threw it in, then headed back to the car for the long trip home.
