The Big Crick
I moved overseas in May 2010, first to Cambodia and then to India, with months-long sojourns throughout Europe and Central America sprinkled between. Over the course of these 7+ years I have traveled to dozens of countries spread across the “developing world” on multiple continents. I’ve visited some of the most incredible human contexts, both great and horrendous, in Africa and Asia in an effort to satiate both personal and professional curiosities. Living and working overseas, particularly so far from home and whilst experiencing places so diametrically opposite from where I originally hail from, can be an overwhelming experience; it can be as exhausting as it is exhilarating.
Over the past few years I have been inordinately lucky to spend several months a year at “home”, which is to say at my parents’ house in the United States where I was raised, in a small town called Allegany in New York state. Though this luck has worked both ways, with some years finding these months stretched out due to severe illnesses or injuries, both mine own and that of family members, the resulting extended stays at the old homestead have always been reinvigorating; the return to one’s roots is an opportunity to revisit a baseline of sorts that which you can gauge just how far you have gone and grown, and how far you still need to go to reach whatever plateau you’ve set for yourself. Family, and the friends that have known you since your formative years, have the innate ability even just by being physically present to remind you of what makes you “you”, as they are the foundation on which everything else is built upon.
Allegany, again, is a very small town in rural Western New York. It’s a farming community that attracted more than its share of European immigrants around the turn of the last century, particularly Germans and Irish of whom my ancestors were most firmly a part of. From humble beginnings my family prospered thanks to the opportunities this country provided them and the work ethic that they instilled in us, the later generations. The verdant, rolling hills of Allegany and the surrounding areas served as a backdrop for these intrepid ancestors and they carved out successful lives for themselves through good fortune and great effort. The message, both implicit and explicit, was clear: fortune favors the bold; one gets only what one is willing to give.
It was in this small town that my parents planted their own roots, and spent the 1970s adding six children to their brood, the eldest being born on October 24, 1970 and the youngest coming into the world exactly nine years later on October 24, 1979. They purchased a small farmhouse outside of town and spent the next nearly half-century making that house our home.
We were surrounded by nature, and I spent much of my youth traipsing through the forested hills around us with my brothers, playing guns and pantomiming with plastic the heroics we’d see in the completely age-inappropriate action movies our dad would take us to see. I can remember many nights in our family room when my dad would show us photo slideshows of his travels throughout Asia and Europe after he’d left the Air Force. I recall being awestruck at the sheer size of the world and the differences contained therein. These experiences always stuck with me and are at least partly responsible for my own drive to see as much of the world as possible.
As children, that house and the surrounding property was our world. Our mother would often host field trips for our classes from school where we’d hike through the hills and fill animal prints with plaster of Paris. We would take inflatable rafts to the large creek (a.k.a, the Big Crick) at the end of my parents’ property following heavy rains and float for miles. We’d spend hours shooting our BB guns until nearly every toy soldier we owned was in pieces. Our yard doubled as football and baseball fields as we pretended to be Jim Kelly and Don Mattingly. We frequently lost electricity during summer thunderstorms, and these proved to be my favorite nights as we would make forts out of the household furniture under candle light to pass the time.
As we grew older, our time at home reduced. Teen years spent figuring out who we were as people rapidly flew by; college years juggling classwork and happy hours went by even quicker; suddenly we were adults and had lives and careers of our own to focus on and tend to. Our time at home became limited to the odd weekend visit or only at the holidays, whilst we each set out to forge our own paths in life.
My eldest three siblings all had children of their own; over the course of ~12 years there were 12 new members to our family. Almost organically this new generation helped us to reconnect with our home, and for the last several years we have all committed to meeting in Allegany for one summer week to simply enjoy each other’s company. Most of the activities centered around the family home: with the six Shane kids trying to share and impart the magic of the Enchanted Mountains (as the hills around this area of the state are affectionately referred to as) to the dozen new kids that are a mix of Shanes, Baynes, and Wolgangs.
Our home sat on several acres of land, which as children doubled as both our playground and source of what we then viewed as awful yardwork. As I grew older, and especially in the past several years, that land and the work required to maintain it became a great source of serenity and rejuvenation for me. I’d spend entire days chainsawing down dead trees and chopping them into firewood, hacking hiking trails through chest high weeds and brush, digging and maintaining fire pits for nights spent marvelling at the solitude and peace of nature, and creating a network of ropes and swings for my nieces and nephews to play on. At day’s end my parents would look at me like I was insane, wondering aloud why I didn’t just relax and enjoy my vacation. I could never adequately articulate that that was exactly what I was doing.
In 2015, my father was diagnosed with cancer and I came home to help my mother look after him whilst he convalesced. Anyone who’s had the horrible misfortune of either suffering through cancer themselves or witnessing someone close to you go through it knows just how challenging the experience is. The emotional toll takes a physical one, and any respite from it is welcome. At night, I would go out back and sit by a fire pit that I built next to the Big Crick and just listen to water flow by me while the fire crackled.
In 2016, whilst preparing a bonfire at one of the pits in my parents’ back field, I was very seriously injured when the gasoline added to the mildly-damp wood exploded and engulfed me in flames. Following weeks in a burn unit, it took several months of treatment and recovery at home before I could even walk again let alone return to a normal life. I just simply wouldn’t’ve recovered as well as I truly have if not for being there and with my family. But before I could return to my life in India, I needed the catharsis that could only come from revisiting where the accident happened, to touch the still-singed earth, to retrace the frantic steps I’d taken attempting to reach the creek and extinguish the flames eating me, and to see the bushes I ultimately threw myself into when failing to reach those waters; I needed to expunge the fear of that place and reclaim the love. It’s not often that one can say definitively that their best and worst memories both occurred on the same patch of land, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
My parents recently sold the family homestead, which has led to more than a little reflection and introspection. When they first put the house on the market, one of my brothers remarked that, “we are losing our center of gravity” and openly worried what impact such would have on our family. Initially I thought that was a little over-dramatic as it is the people and the memories that matter, not the physical and material artefacts that are by-products of such. But as we gathered at home this year for our final reunion there, I got to appreciate and ultimately agree with him.
I have been to some 45 countries in this world, visited hundreds of cities and towns, and interacted with thousands of people. It has been the most formative educational experience of my life, with the greatest gift being that of perspective. Of the many things that I’ve learned, one seemingly minor thing is just how fortunate my family was to have spent so much time at such a beautiful place as our home. Minor as that may seem in the grand scheme of things, my experiences there had a major impact in how I saw the world, myself, and the things that mattered most to me. I learned to marvel at the wonder of nature, to see my siblings and parents as the most critically important people that I’ll ever know in life, to appreciate the yearnings to see what else is out there, and to see the profound joy in the simple act of coming home.
As each of my siblings departed our home for the final time this summer, the goodbyes got harder and harder. The week was tinged with a melancholy blue as we ticked off our list of “finals”: a final swim in the Big Crick, a final bonfire, a final cookout, and on, and on. In the face of this, though, we made some final memories that we will be able to cherish for a lifetime together.
My final night at home I spent sitting by the Big Crick for one last fire. As the sun dipped lower and lower in the sky, I found myself looking through tears at that timeless creek. The paradox of its perpetual motion but undeniable constancy struck a real chord with me; it is the same as “home”: though things in life are ever-changing, we will always have each other and the profound memories of a life together well-spent in a paradise of our own.
