Elegy for a Town I Once Knew

The town up on the plateau in the low mountains once seemed divinely placed there just for me. When I was first there, it was an oasis of calm as I navigated my storm-ridden coming of age. There was a time during my youth when it was my happy hiding place, my escape, my respite, even my fortress of solitude.

For a time, now in the very distant past, it had this unique, undefinable quality. And as more and more time passes, I struggle to recall what it was like. If that once unique quality still exists, I’m having a hard time finding or seeing it. Those emerald-green hills that once provided escape, freedom, and peace eventually turned into dark mountains with sheer walls that began to slowly close in all around me.

And I am unable to pinpoint exactly when it happened. But I can describe it. Because I remember how it used to be, a long time ago.

The summer of ‘92 was my first one truly and completely away from home. The previous one had been a disaster, coming off college graduation and biding my time until I started graduate school in the fall. I was doing as much as possible to extricate myself from two things: the grip of an overbearing childhood home and the spider’s web of the most dysfunctional relationship of my life.

As May, 1992, began, I finally felt like I had ripped myself free of those stifling and destructive situations. I had a part-time job in the morning and a different part-time job in the afternoon. I would go home for my one-hour lunch break, and it would usually consist of a rice meal that probably cost me one dollar at the local IGA. As a struggling grad student, funds were scarce.

I got off work at about 4:30, would go for a run or hit the gym, go home and change into more comfortable clothes, and go hang out at one of the venerable old establishments in town. This was the summer, and the town emptied out.

Back then the university kept enrollment at about 14,000 students and had been at that level for more than a decade. This was because it was believed that any higher number of students on the campus or in the town was unsustainable, to use a term that wasn’t in vogue back then.

This was back before the university and all the others discovered they could become money-generating leviathans, more focused on indoctrination than open debate and learning; teaching students how to think for themselves. That’s how my liberal arts professors operated anyway. And so without the students in town during the summer, everything around the bucolic town settled into this calm, open, quiet, happy hiding place.

I lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment at the end of North Littleton Street, which was located — at that time — at the far north edge of town. The road literally ended at the small complex where I resided. To the west, north, and east sat agricultural fields owned and run by the university. But in that small apartment and on its shaded, sylvan, open grounds, I felt as if I was on the edge of a veritable wilderness.

No interstate highways came near the town. The only roads in or out were a few, two-lane U.S. highways that rolled in from the hills surrounding the town to the south, west, east, and north. It was a good two-hour drive over one of these roads to the nearest city, and more than three to the state capital.

My little town had everything that I needed; small, quaint mom-and-pop grocery stores, a beautiful town square centered by the local post office, tiny bakeries and unique little restaurants, dive bars, live music on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, hiking and biking trails, lakes, rivers, and streams for boating and fishing, and its share of writers, poets, and musicians. It was an eclectic place.

Late spring rains and thunderstorms heading east would roll in off the plains and up the west side of the plateau on which the town sat like ocean waves colliding and collapsing onto a shore, unleashing their energy in torrents. In their wake, they left behind gleaming rainbows, lush, green meadows teeming with wildflowers, pristine creeks and streams rushing and brimming with the fresh, just-fallen rain, and breezy air tinged with the scent of fresh honeysuckle.

On Saturday or Sunday mornings, I would head over to my favorite restaurant, a place called Gaston’s, and have breakfast while reading the town newspaper. Gaston’s was a funky little restaurant inside an old auto-service garage. On nice days, they would raise the big roller-top doors on both ends, letting the breeze pass through. In the spring and fall, this could be very pleasant. Gaston’s had these fantastic blueberry pancakes and waffles that would literally soak up the maple syrup, and they also made the best biscuits anywhere.

The walls were lined with old and straining bookshelves that were filled with aging hard-cover books and weathered paperbacks that had the price written on the binding in pencil. The place was known primarily for its great breakfasts, but in the evening they also served a diverse dinner menu. My weekend routine in grad school, which continued into my brief professional career in the town, usually started on Saturday mornings at Gaston’s. I could spend hours — indeed, entire mornings — in there. And I did on many occasions.

Gaston’s was where I first became a writer. I still have all the notebooks I filled up that summer. And they have given me a bevy of ideas for stories. I began to fill these notebooks with musings, observations, poems, and little vignettes. I did it during my lunch break at the apartment and in the evenings while watching major league baseball games. I started carrying a notebook with me wherever I went, because I wanted to be ready if the urge hit me to write something down.

At Gaston’s, I would share my prose and fledgling manuscripts with the people who worked there and the other customers who frequented the place. It was one of the places in my memories where I slowly began to learn who I was after spending the first two decades of my life as a high school and Division One college athlete in two sports. That was all over now, and the person I really wanted to be was slowly beginning to emerge after being pent up inside for all those years.

On late summer afternoons, I would head over to the West Mountain Lounge and take a seat alone, open my notebooks, and start writing. This was back when the outdoor beer garden still existed behind the establishment. It was an enclosed area open to the sky, filled with picnic tables and ringed with some trees that provided shady relief from the late afternoon sun. At one end stood a stage where bands played most Fridays and Saturdays, and at the opposite end was an outdoor bar. But there were no bands on Thursdays. I would pick a table in the shade of a willowy crepe myrtle, open my notebooks, and write.

Within minutes, a pretty girl about my age would come out to get my order, and after she left, I was left alone again with my notebooks, pens, and thoughts. I would write page after page, just pouring and emptying out stories, many of which years later would find their way into my books.

I had finally found my voice, although I would not publicly reveal it until many years later.

I had everything I needed in the mom-and-pop grocery stores, the airy town square perched atop the highest point in the area, the little bakeries, the unique, jazzy restaurants, the dive bars, live music scene, hiking and biking trails, lakes, streams, writers, poets, and musicians, the beer garden at the West Mountain Lounge, and Gaston’s on weekend mornings.

For me, it was a universe complete.

And now, all of it is gone.

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to exile, to escape to some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” -Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. This is a very simple, yet complexly profound statement.

We can’t go home again, and we can’t go back to that place in time when everything was fresh, new, and free; that place where we were experiencing new things for the first time. We might be able to find all of that in a new place we have never been, but we will never be able to find it in one of the places from our past. After all, it’s why we eventually left those places to begin with.

Wolfe described this turning point — the moment one realizes that the place he once thought was home has been irrevocably altered — in his timeless novel:

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”

The town is not small anymore. It’s now three times bigger in population than it was when I was in school. There are over twice as many students on campus; indeed, the school has discovered it can be the money-generating leviathan so many other “institutions of higher learning” have become these days. And because the school has run out of room to expand across town, they have started building upward; new multistoried buildings and parking garages now blot out the views of the surrounding mountains that once made the hilltop campus one of the most picturesque places for hundreds of miles around. The campus is now one of the most congested places in town.

The first interstate spur invaded the area two decades ago, and the spur turned into a full-blown, complete six-lane interstate several years ago. That means there is now traffic the likes of which never existed there before. The town’s infrastructure cannot withstand the numbers, and it’s sad to watch it try to keep pace.

Gaston’s is gone. It closed well over a decade ago. In its place, someone built yet another plastic-looking business space that is usually empty, without a tenant. This repetitive construction around town of the same faux-restoration metal and glass fronted, plastic looking buildings in place of the old, classic brick and mortar architecture that used to make the town so quaint and appealing is just one symptom of what has happened over the years. It’s almost as if the current powers that be got together and decided this strange, early 21st century amalgamation of corrugated metal facades and glass was the way to go.

The little bakeries are gone, replaced by chain bagel and donut stores. All of the old, venerable restaurants except for one or two are gone. The dive bars with so much character and history have mostly shuttered. They’ve been replaced by pretentious martini bars that sell sugary, 20-dollar drinks. And this air of pretension has wormed its way into some of the patrons, who have never spent much time outside the state; self-avowed big fish in the smallest of geographic and intellectual ponds.

The old places were run down and had character; they were places to meet friends, decompress, or have a beer while writing. The food, the music, and the conversation were good. The new establishments are places to be seen and to provide people who care about such things the ability to tell other people that they were there.

And something disturbing has stolen its way in from the outside. People honk at lights like they do in much, much bigger cities. People cut you off on the highway like they do in much, much bigger areas. Businesses that were successful over many years, even decades, either suddenly go out of business for no discernible reason, except that perhaps the fickle appetites of the local patrons have changed.

You go somewhere and run into someone, and it’s the same conversation you’ve had for the last twenty years. In fact, it’s the only conversation you’ve ever had there. And it’s the only conversation you will ever have there.

Indeed, as author Walker Percy observed, “The reason you can’t go home again is because once you’re in your own orbit and you go back to the drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, the liquor store, or head back to your own orbit, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is, but it’s no place to spend a Saturday afternoon.”

The town I once knew is now gone. Despite all my efforts over the years to distract myself from this fundamental truth, it was always just a way station of sorts; a stopping point on a much larger journey that took me — and still takes me — somewhere else.

Glen Hines is the author of five books, including the recently published Of Time and Rivers, and the highly-regarded Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. He is the writer and producer of the book and podcast Welcome to the Machine, available on most podcast platforms. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.