A Place To Call Home

My parents closed on a home in Des Moines today. Not that it means anything to you, and in reality, it really shouldn’t mean much to me at this point. They’re moving from my hometown, a nearly dead rivertown whose manufacturing heyday came and went a long time ago. With that, most of my friends moved away from it, as most tend to do in small towns filled with limited possibilities. The heyday was perhaps at the beginning of the twentieth century when the dam was built, turning the rapids of the Mississippi into electricity thanks to the (then) largest hydroelectric power plant. President Theodore Roosevelt stopped in town to recognize its importance and plant an elm tree. The tree died a few years later, symbolic of the direction that the town itself would face.
I wouldn’t have considered that to be the heyday. For me, that would have come while I came of age in the town during the 70’s and 80’s. The demise started around the time I left for college, but there was still some charm left to explore. That charm ended fairly abruptly when the various factories around town, the prime source of revenue for most of the community’s residents, began to shut down. They were replaced with even lower paying service jobs and the ridiculous lure of casino work that floated downstream to other states once they began to loosen the gambling morality resistance.
And it was around this time that I did the unthinkable: I moved back into my hometown and bought a house. It was on the river and it overlooked the Mississippi, eyeshot away from that hydroelectric plant and built shortly after its construction. As a matter of fact, the huge stone walls that surrounded my “Brokedown Palace” were mulled from the Mississippi River bottoms as they built the plant and dam.
Divorce and other circumstances forced me to move, and the distance between my hometown and me shed a new light on my old digs. I no longer was frustrated at the lack of progress that my former community leaders seemed to portray. It was instead replaced with pity, the epiphany in knowing that things there would never change and, sadly, the beauty that it once possessed would continue to crumble and never realize its fullest potential.
But growing up there, man, you couldn’t have asked for a better place. With equal parts small town niceties and river town rebellion, you got an opportunity to examine how both sides lived during a time when sowing your oats was considered a rite of passage. How we survived sometimes is beyond me.
For example: that power plant that you see is literally built in the middle of the river. During the winter as kids, we would dare each other to walk on the frozen surface of the river to see who could get the closest to touching the walls of the power plant. To test to see how “safe” the ice was, we would throw a ten pound rock in front of us to see if the ice cracked. It made perfect sense at the time.
A friend of mine got within 100 yards of the thing before I begged him to come back. I was scared shitless that he would fall in and it would have taken me at least 10 minutes to climb back up the bluff to get help if he did.
We also had BB gun wars down there in the summer. Someone had the bright idea that we should start a game of shooting at each other, guerrilla-style, with actual bb guns. It ended the moment someone brought a pellet gun because, I don’t know if you know this, pellet guns can actually break the skin and lodge themselves inside your body.
We also smoked a lot of pot down there. Not at the age, you would expect, but starting at the ripe old age of 11. It started when we’d steal the cigarettes from our parents and sneak off down the bluff to share the smokes with each other. One of my best friends was Mormon who had an older brother that angrily broke away from the family and his faith. My friend, the youngest boy in this family, went to his new apartment and stole a good 1/8 of weed out of his supply. Apparently, he was selling dope to help make ends meet. Anyway, he told us of his conquest and we all went to 7-11 to buy rolling papers before retreating to the bluff to take our first hit of weed. It took us forever to roll the thing, but after snuggling a bit of pot inside of three EZ Wider papers, we lit up and experienced…nothing. Yes, it’s true: none of us felt a thing, but we all acted like we were stoned off our ass. I decided to light a fire and, in my “enlightened” state, I looked down to see how my entire pant leg was on fire. Not comprehending the “stop, drop and roll” technique, I ran screaming down to the river and quickly submerged my smoldering pants into the dirty water of the Mississippi. I burned a little bit of hair off of my leg but was even luckier that I didn’t burn the entire bluff down, particularly since there was little rainfall that summer and the fall leaves had fallen, leaving a sea of dry matter all over the ground.
Even more amazing was how my Mother never noticed that I was missing one pair of Levis.
There are tons of stories like this, and that is what I’m thinking about as my parents begin the process of packing my childhood home and move to a fucking townhouse association in Des Moines. This is in addition to the house they have in Arizona…also in an association…which makes them officially retirees.
I don’t expect them to stay in a dying community and I completely understand the reasons why they had to move. But it’s a strange feeling knowing that I now won’t have a hometown to return to and that every place they live going forward will have this feeling of unfamiliarity each time I visit.
In more ways than one, I can never go home again.