Home is a tiny, four letter word but sometimes it is an amazingly huge concept. It can hit you hard to realize that you are homesick for so much more than a building where you have eaten, slept and locked out the rest of the world. It can also suddenly surprise you to turn a familiar corner far from that building and suddenly feel “home healed” breathing in a breath that is satisfied, content and at home.
I think repetition and familiarity can build that sense of being at home, even while traveling. When I was a child, we lived in a pretty huge area that we considered home because we had family spread out around us in thirty miles in more than one direction. We lived in Cody, but two of mom’s cousins (who were more like brothers and actually double first cousins) lived on farms near Powell and Meeteetse and we had a routine of going to both places and having them at our house a couple times a week. We did sleepovers, or big sessions of canning sauerkraut and asparagus and corn. We went trick or treating and celebrated Thanksgiving feasts. We held each other through funerals and cheered each other in concerts and school plays.
The whole Big Horn Basin, Greater Yellowstone area felt like home because my grandfather, and his brothers were born there, living in log cabins built where later the Dam would flood and create a lake. They were trappers and farmers and family men. They explored deep into the Rocky Mountains and hunted and fished and trapped and drove the mail by stage and then car. During the World War 2, gas rationing days, my Grandfather and his wife and only child, (mom) went to Yellowstone and basically moved in, camping there for a summer when almost no tourists came.
From Red Lodge and Cooke City, through the Beartooths and Sunlight Basin, our family hauled loads of coal, took pack horses deep into the Thoroughfare, bought and sold furs and antlers and scrap metals. I grew up loving and fearing the natural area. Everywhere we went, my family knew a happy and tragic story of the things that had occurred there. Those blended stories seeped into my bones and I can’t go anywhere without remembering both the joy filled times and the losses. Camping at a campground where we also went for a Jr. High field trip I remember that my mom’s class field trip ended with a boy drowning in the North Firk River. Admiring Table Rock, I know that a man rode his horse up the gentle slope in a blinding blizzard on his July Birthday, and rode it off the steep cliff side and is buried with his horse under a nearby stone. I know about the child who fell into the hot pool and when they forced an eruption only bones were left to recover, and about the girl whose parents wanted a picture of her having a bear lick her face, so smeared honey on her cheeks. I know when I go see the falls in the Grand a canyon of the Yellowstone about the young girl who wandered off, who returned shortly after her parents sent her brother to find her, but her brother never came back, instead slipping and plunging into the canyon.
I know the turns in the road, the names of the rock formations, the best fishing holes, the compass points in my mind assume I am standing in Cody so I always tell myself, “Heart Mountain is North, Beacon Hill is East, Carter Mountain is the South and The Canyon is West.
And as I grew up, and then grew older, the home places stretched. For thirty years we drove from Ashland/Crescent City to Wyoming and there are so many spots on those roads we learned and took to heart. Coming around a bend or dropping down a hill, we know the taste of the breakfast at that restaurant and the sound of the river at that campground and the little playground near that hotel. We know the aching lonely beauty of the Winnemucca to Lakeview high desert and the hot white blinding reflectivity of the Boneville Speedway and the Salt Lake. I find myself feeling the same bittersweet knowledge of people who lived and died in many local places along the Smith River and in the Redwoods here. Brutal murder, tragic accidents and a huge deliberate massacre blend with memories of school field trips and family camp outs.
Once I read a novel about a woman who knew she was dying and assembled the tickets and arranged places to stay and had her ashes and 5 pairs of red converse shoes delivered to five of her friends with instructions on five places to scatter part of her ashes. She left stories about why those places were important to her. I loved the story but I don’t need the ashes scattered. I already have places that have become a part of me, my extensive home, kind of like the song says, “I left my heart in San Francisco” and I am grateful I have gotten to travel extensively and repeatedly through beauty which grew familiar but never grew old.
I left my heart in Wyoming, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Beijing, Xiamen, Santiago Atitlan, Ashland, Salem, Splash, Lagoon, Kennywood, Oregon, California including Disneyland, Catalina and yes San Francisco (Tiburon) and everywhere my boys and their families are.
https://www.amazon.com/Annie-Freemans-Fabulous-Traveling-Funeral/dp/0553382640