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Somewhere off Frederick Road, 9:45 p.m. last night June 5, 2007

Posted by Merujo in life, love, Moline, the past, travel.
2 comments

There are times when I really do miss my Midwestern hometown. I miss being able to climb a hillside on a warm summer night and see a sky with no city lights to obscure the stars. I used to ride my bike from my parents’ house to Prospect Park, a generous square of green a few blocks away. The park had a pond where folks skated in winter. I never could skate (which meant I always passed on the pizza and rollerskating birthday parties at SkateLand) – at Prospect Pond, I just sort of skittered and fell and then crawled back to the pavilion. I’d nurse my wounds by the fire pit while my sister or my friends glided over the pitted, bumpy ice.

The public school band program held concerts in the park on summer evenings when the community musical theater guild wasn’t performing in the converted roundhouse on the opposite side of the pond. Once, that building had been the end of the line for the trolleys that ran down the brick roads of Moline.

That was long before I was born – decades and decades before. But when I was a kid, there were still a few brick side streets that hadn’t been paved over. The worn trolley tracks and faded cobbled blocks were fascinating to me – I loved the sensation of riding my bike over them. My tires would hum on the bricks as I rode to my friends’ homes or over to the thrillingly steep hill that led downtown. I’d fly (dear god, I can’t believe how fast I’d be going) down to the Mississippi and catch the bridge to the Rock Island Arsenal, in the middle of the river.

I used to ride wide laps around the arsenal, where my father worked. It was also where one of my mother’s Alabama relatives was buried in a Civil War cemetery of Confederate prisoners, lost to yellow fever or spotted fever – I can’t remember which. The tidy lines of white stones in the adjacent national cemetery – where, now, my father is buried with a measure of my mother’s ashes – meant little to me then. I was just a fat kid on fast bike, zooming past the dead, past the park where officers’ kids played on gutted, decommissioned tanks, down to Colonel Davenport’s house and back home. I remember making the ungodly steep trek up 16th Street, walking my bike back to uptown Moline, past the five and dime where my sister and I once bought a huge bag of small rubber monsters and plastic banjos to decorate our Christmas tree (don’t ask.) Past the VFW and the funeral home (where I held my breath as I peddled by, ridiculously afraid I would smell the dead), through the alley by the seed and feed and the elementary school, over the singing bricks again, back to my neighborhood and the park with the pond and the roundhouse.


When I was a teenager, Prospect Park became a place of mischief and make-out sessions. I recall one night when some of my friends – a year ahead and already off at college – came home and hunkered down by the roundhouse, looking out at the lights of Southpark Mall. One of them had procured some really awful weed and they tried to smoke it, using a birthday card envelope as rolling paper. I passed, thanks. In retrospect, it’s hilarious, especially that they’re all now college professors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, parents – pillars of the their communities. (Okay, one of them is a personal shopper at Marshall Fields, last thing I heard.) They were the best and the brightest our high school produced, and there they were on an old swingset, lighting up a pink Hallmark envelope – and failing miserably. Mostly, we’d just sit in the swings or ride on the little “spin it yourself” merry-go-round until we were hideously dizzy, yammering away and wondering what life would be like once we really left town.

Some of us landed in New York. Others, Chicago or the Twin Cities. I ended up in London, then Moscow, and now, DC. Others came back home to nest, getting married, raising kids. They found contentment back where we started.

My high school boyfriend (himself now a respected scholar at one of America’s finest universities) and I would have rather innocent make-out sessions on that roundhouse hill, kissing, snuggling, watching the stars. Of course, finding out he was having less-innocent make-out sessions in the same place with a guy when he wasn’t with me did put a damper on my feelings about the park. My older self tells me had I not been so naive, I might have noticed some things back then – like the fact that most straight high school boys wouldn’t have been satisfied with such innocent stuff after a year of dating. I was a rube when it came to romance. Still am.

Did I mention he’s now married to a gay square dance caller named Chi Chi? Yeah. For real. He married a guy named Chi Chi. Go figure.

I wrote this, by the way, in the parking lot of a strip mall in Gaithersburg at 9:45 at night. I should have been home, doing laundry, doing dishes, working on my book. But I’m not. I felt acutely alone last night. Afternoon thunderstorms gave way to a cool summer evening, and it made me think that I should be on a hillside somewhere with friends, talking about the future or just shooting the shit. Or maybe, on a hillside with a straight boyfriend. Not just shooting the shit.

Truth is, I’m growing ever more hermit-like as I grow older. I just don’t have many friends here in the DC area. Initially, I did, but most moved away. I have friends scattered around the globe, and I keep in touch with them through the Internet. I check my blog stats and see what friends have come by to visit. I see Madame Ambassador dropping by early in the morning from her Central Asian enclave, along with friends in Australia, with a jump on my day. Friends in Norway and Germany swing by, and, following the sun, the East Coast rises, the Midwest follows, and dear friends Way Out West join in. Some I’ve only seen once or twice in a decade-plus online.

It’s okay, I suppose, to not have a core group right in town. I know my being broke is a bummer for anyone who wants to socialize with me. I feel bad for the Sasquatch, for instance, having to hear me whine, gripe, and fret (mostly fret) constantly about my finances – or my health, and I don’t like being a burden – socially, emotionally, or financially.

But sometimes, I miss having people to hang out with on the merry-go-round or watch stars with me on a grassy hill. (Eating DQ Dilly Bars and drinking ice cold water, of course.) Then again, around here, I’d have to find a park that was safe enough to sit in at night, and far enough from the lights of the city to actually enjoy. And I’d like a straight boyfriend, please?

For last night, the strip mall parking lot was okay. It was well lit enough for me to feel safe (except I did move when I saw a well-fed rat running toward the Boston Market outlet.) I had a big Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee. I was fairly certain I could see a star (unless it was actually just a light from the lot over at the Burlington Coat Factory), and the train whistles were dopplering from the tracks behind the fairground.

And I guess, some days, train whistles and a cup of joe is all you need.

Right?

Why "Church of the Big Sky"? May 3, 2005

Posted by Merujo in family, mom, Montana, the blog, the past, travel.
8 comments

About seventeen years ago, I took my last really big trip with my mom. Growing up, our family traveled all over the United States. My father did some sort of semi-clandestine work with weapons and such for the U.S. Government (and hello to any shadowy people reading this!) He spent a great deal of time going to proving grounds for tests (when he wasn’t overseas using his handful of passports… hmm…) My mom, faced with solo summers riding herd on her pile o’ children, popped us all in the car, which, by the time I came on the scene, was a hideous, enormous army green Chrysler station wagon we called “The Tank”, and she took us all over the United States. We had a little blue trailer, covered in really old school peely decals from all the states and national parks we’d visited.

All the kids were Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and we were very adept at packing the car (unlike my father, who, if allowed to pack the roof would lose at least one suitcase on I-80) and experienced at wilderness camping. We’d travel West and South, usually chasing after my father, who would briefly join us in between missile tests at White Sands or burying aliens in Nevada (okay, I made that second one up, but who knows?!?) We had bears invade our campground, encountered food-stealing hippies, and once (before my time) even killed a Great Snowy Owl who unfortunately flew into our car. (My traumatized oldest brother was told that the owl was “napping.”)

All in all, it was an awesome way to spend summers as a kid. Mom was up for anything. That last trip, back in 1988, right after I graduated from college, was different from the rest. Mom was no longer keen on tent camping. She and my father had purchased a motorhome (a Mallard, god help us) the year I graduated from high school. In fact, they delivered me to college in Minnesota in that thing. It was fairly humiliating, especially when my father, who learned how to drive in a tank in WWII, drove over another parent’s car directly in front of my dorm. I wanted to die.

My parents, it turned out, just wanted to ditch me and get the hell out of Dodge. They’d been raising children since 1945, and they dumped me, high-fived each other, and took off. This is before cell phones, remember. I didn’t hear from my parents until the week before Thanksgiving, other than postcards from my mother. I still recall my favorite:

“Your father drove the Mallard into a row of gas pumps in Salt Lake City. I hope the owner doesn’t press charges.”

Apparently, he didn’t. My father had an amazing gift for BS’ing people. He must have put his silver tongue into overdrive on that one.

After my father’s death in 1986, the Mallard was completely paid off through the wonders of the “credit life”. For two years, while I studied overseas and Mom adjusted to life as a widow – and got used to some major physical changes after cancer surgery the same month my father died – the Mallard just sat in storage at the RV sales lot, over in the less desirable part of the Quad Cities, by the harness racing track and the prison.

When I graduated from college, Mom wanted to travel again. In fact, she arrived in Minnesota for my graduation in that damn Mallard and whisked me away a mere hour after the ceremony was over. (That was a little traumatizing, actually, as I didn’t get to say goodbye or have any Hallmark moments with any of my friends.)

Within a week, we were on the road. I hadn’t done much driving during college, and I was rusty. But, with Mom suffering from arthritis and her vision less-than-perfect from diabetes, she wasn’t up for much time behind the wheel. With us, we had one of my sisters – freshly and bitterly divorced, her petulant teenage daughter, and her young ADD son.

This made for a jolly time.

Here are the highlights of that trip:

  • Visited world’s largest cement buffalo

  • Listened to niece bitch about separation from first serious boyfriend

  • Visited Wall Drug (we wanted to see the “bowling cat” but it had died shortly before we arrived)

  • Listened to niece bitch some more

  • Visited Devil’s Tower (made obligatory Roy Neary/mashed potatoes comment and did impression of Francois Truffaut)

  • Threatened to throw niece out the back window of the Mallard

  • Got really, really depressed by the tribal-run campground at Little Big Horn

  • Called ex-brother-in-law and begged him to take daughter for the summer

  • Camped at gorgeous Lolo Pass in Idaho

  • Finally snapped and smacked niece in parking lot of Lolo Pass campground

Well, you get the picture. My niece, who is now married, has two kids (and suffered a stroke at 30) and still talks about me walloping her on that trip. She likes to tell people she seriously needed someone to smack some sense into her, and, apparently, I was the one pushed to the edge far enough to actually do it. (She was awful. Really. Ask her.)

Eventually, we ended up in Montana. We’re not really sure how or why, but there we were. By then, my niece had settled down and we were just in awe of the absolute majesty of nature. I decided that I wanted to live there. Now, of course, Cher and Dennis Quaid and half of Hollywood have bought up most of Montana, so I think those dreams are dead, but a girl can dream, right?

Looking for a place to spend the night, we came across a KOA campground in Bozeman. Bozeman is a town bubbling with natural hot springs. You know the steamy Brad Pitt/Julia Ormond “doin’ it in nature’s hot tub” scene in Legends of the Fall? That’s Bozeman. The campground actually had a swimming pool filled with sizzling hot springs. It was fantastic. No matter what had ailed our traveling party, it all melted away (no, I did not drown my niece.) We didn’t want to leave, and ended up staying a few days.

During our stay, we took drives out to just soak up the views. We’d find ourselves to be the only humans for miles, with only the occasional moose or big horn as company. One day, in the middle of nowhere, in fields of emerald green and brilliant yellows, surrounded by mountaintops, we came across a tiny church. It seemed so out of place, yet was so striking against the stunning backdrop. I dubbed it “the Church of the Big Sky.”

For years now, I’ve talked about going back there. I used to joke with my mom all the time about moving there and taking her with me. Only half-joking, she’d reply, “I’m ready! Let’s go!” When she was miserable and blind and dying, I used to tell her to imagine that we were there, and still, she’d whisper, “Okay, let’s go.”

Not to be morbid, but I’ve long thought, when I go, I want someone to take my ashes up there and just let ’em fly.

Today, on a whim, I typed in “Church of the Big Sky” on Google. And you can only imagine my amazement when this popped up as the very first link. I’d put the picture right here in my blog, but I don’t want to disrespect this gentleman’s rights.

But that’s the place! That’s my “Church of the Big Sky” up in the middle of nowhere! I’m tickled pink, blue, and purple to be able to show it to people, so they know I’m not nuts. So, if you find yourself wandering through Montana and you come across this little church in the wilderness, stop and think some good thoughts. For yourself, for a friend, for the world. Take a look around and just revel in how beautiful nature is.

I swear, if I find that Cher or Dennis Quaid has built a coffeehouse next door, I will have an enormous bone to pick with them…

And, if I haven’t bored the crap out of the five people reading this, mabye I’ll tell you the story of the rest of that trip, driving down guardrail-less mountain passes in the rain and playing “Duel” with the psychotic trucker in New Mexico while all the scrub brush around us is on fire.

Good times. Good times…