Going Home

Last Saturday, winging in to Kalispell from Seattle, I remembered why I miss Montana: the glassy mountain lakes that look deceptively shallow; the verdant hillsides and the vast swaths of pine trees; the big blue sky with the rare tufts of clouds.

And then there was the magical tour of Glacier, with the majestic, snow-cloaked peaks, unblemished and rugged, rising above Lake McDonald with the story of Mt. Cannon--an eastern couple, the Cannons, telling the disbelieving locals in the early 1900s that they hiked the peak, with a glass bottle found at the summit 100 years later containing their written names and the date--and the anthropomorphic silhouette of Mt. Brown looking like a native calling to the sky.

And then there is Hamilton itself, a rainy Wednesday morning infused with the scent of lilac. Seen from our large southern window, spotted within the natural frame of a lilac bush and two old wagon wheels, a young whitetail deer eats in the meadow against the backdrop of a barn decaying at a glacial pace.

As Dad drove us south along the Eastside Highway on Monday, my thoughts flicked back over my childhood in Hamilton, and I said, "I was lucky to grow up here."

My mom was surprised, thinking that there had been a lot of traumas in my life here that left me shy and introverted, a tendency that I am still working to overcome. There were difficult moments about my time here, yes, but in retrospect, nothing that was insurmountable.

It's true that I was something of a wallflower who did not know how to talk to girls; even at 18, my instinct for telling a girl that I liked her was to offer her all my raffle tickets at the graduation party so that she would have a better chance of winning a microwave.

As we drove towards home, I did remember some of those rough times, in particular fourth grade in 1989, my first year in Montana. We had a teacher who lost control of the class and quit three-quarters of the way through the year. One student called in a bomb threat and had his head duct-taped to a cabinet by the older teacher in the room next door. The entire class was arbitrarily given detention one day, which was heartbreaking to me, as I had always prided myself on being a good boy. That was rather appalling on the teacher's part, now that I look back on it.

My mom also mentioned that I was disinvited from a birthday party one year. Apparently the mother said that I couldn't go because I "wasn't a regular playmate" of the kid who invited me. That's an obvious bogus excuse, so either she didn't have enough seats in the van, or, as my mom suspects, the woman felt that my parents were too liberal, although how she would have found that out in a year or so baffles me, as my parents were not terribly active, politically. But I guess that is the serrated edge of living in a small town, and fortunately I have no recollection of this moment, although Mom said I took it rather badly after school on the day of the party, watching all the other kids drive away in a van.

Then there was the time in sixth grade when people called me "Delvis" due to some unfortunate sideburns. On retrospect, I shouldn't have bothered by this; Elvis was a talented and successful entertainer for many years. At the time, of course, I was just embarrassed, because it meant that people noticed something different about me. Horrors. On a related note, there was a time in eighth grade when I replied with a brusque "NO" in class when someone asked me if I would go out with a girl--it probably seemed awfully snotty on my part, but really, I was just horrified that people were teasing me with a prospect that didn't seem realistic or relevant to my life. Who would want to go out with someone like me?

I also felt a twinge of guilt for having a crush on a certain girl for a couple years, even after she spit in my friend's hair, which should have been a clear indication that she really wasn't such a nice girl at the time.

But there was nothing about any of these traumas that mark them as too horribly different from anything other kids experience--other than watching a kid have his head duct-taped to a cabinet, which was inexcusable, no matter how reprehensible the kid's behavior. And the fact was that all of these things could be outgrown, as typified by a chance encounter during my sophomore year in college.

A boy who had bullied me for several years in school happened to be passing through Missoula on his way to a job in Hawaii--as I recall--and he happened to be walking past where I was standing in the evening outside my dorm. He took the time to come over and shake my hand and strike up a conversation, which I found actually atoned for the years of torment.

And Hamilton was and is a pretty nice place to spend time. I remember riding my bike down the hill and across the bridge into town to buy orange soda at The Little Store or go to Chapter One Bookstore. I remember playing basketball with Vaughn in the summer at the schoolyard. I remember the classmates in my junior year art class who really helped me emerge from my shell--John, Jeff, Alix, Brandy, another John. I remember exploring the river bottom with Tom. I always had enough to eat and never went without shelter. There were no gangs.

Coming home feels like a deep exhalation removing the accumulated stress of day to day life in San Francisco. As with most idyllic places, you do have to leave to find your way in the world, but it is not true that you can't come home again. You certainly can, at least for a little while.