I’ve been thinking about home a lot over the last couple days.
To some degree, that’s probably inevitable. I’ve been gone for a long time now. With the new school year in motion, that’s also reinforcing the finality of my departure, and the profound change in my life that only started unfolding over the summer.
More than that, though, I think Wyoming specifically has made me think both of home and about home. Let’s start with the latter. What exactly is my home today? When you’re a kid, if you’re lucky, or maybe more accurately if you’re not unlucky, it’s concrete and specific. Often, it has been thoughtfully constructed for you by your parent or parents, and then your imagination takes it from there, imbuing everything with a mythic quality. For the same reason, then, maybe the same is true when you’re a parent. That location is so seeped in memory that the physical environment is practically sanctified, transformed into hallowed ground.
As a kid, my family moved around a fair amount. I missed out on their brief stop in Oregon, but I was there for a few short stints in California, before we finally moved to the Seattle area when I was in 5th grade, settling in for the long haul. That house north of Seattle became the physical structure that I spent the longest share of my life in, though my condo in Portland is closing in. When my parents decided to downsize, I anticipated feeling untethered, cut off from my moorings. Instead, I’ve rarely thought of the place since they sold it. Sure, part of that was my age; I had been moved out for a number of years by that point. However, looking back, I think a larger part was that I never fully perceived it as my home. Instead, home had always remained our third stop in California, a small town in the northeast called Susanville. In the grand scheme of things, I didn’t spend much time there. We relocated to Susanville in time for second grade and then departed in the middle of fifth. And yet, the memories remain vivid. Walking to and from school, chopping firewood, biking on trails, tromping around in the woods. The neighbor dog sniffing a porcupine a little too closely.
Even after we moved away, I returned. My grandparents owned property–a barn, an acre, and a trailer–on the mountain above town, so I visited with them, and then when they aged out and I aged in, I sometimes traveled there on my own to tend to the property. Susanville sits on the line between the flat and arid desert extending westward from Nevada and the Sierra Nevada mountains. The sage from the former, the pine from the latter. The palpably dry, warm air, often tinged with dust. In all of those ways, when I arrived in Wyoming, a part of me felt like I had returned home.
I departed Douglas early in the morning. Throughout this first week in Wyoming, I’ve gotten in the habit of waking at 4:30am and getting in an hour of pre-dawn walking. The days are shortening but the distances are not. It makes a big difference to arrive somewhere at 2:30pm instead of 4:30, so the trade-off is well worth it. It’s good for catching animals at their best, too. I marched past yelping prairie dogs, sounding the alarm about my presence. A pack of hairy pigs raced down to their fence to huff their interest, while a donk monitored my passage from the ridgeline, its ears at maximum perkage. Black, fuzzy cows were literally bounding through the field, creating such a sight that, from a distance, I spent a full five seconds wondering if I had encountered the largest gathering of black bears in America. Even the snakes were out in full effect, as I passed over five in quick succession. Admittedly, there wasn’t a ton of variety to the walk on a macro level. I followed Tank Farm Road, a dirt track passing north of the Platte, for most of the walk, and the general views remained consistent throughout. This is the risk and reward of walking, though–the low-hanging fruit loses its flavor quickly enough, but there’s good stuff lurking on those higher branches, if you’re willing to put in the effort.
I was most excited, though, to visit another fort. I arrived at Fort Fetterman an hour before it opened, but I figured that was just a restriction for drivers. There was plenty of room for pedestrians to slip through between the gate and the pillar, and that felt like an invitation. I’m getting pretty good at trespassing; it’s probably my second best criminal activity, after jaywalking. I suspect, though, that the security was so lax because there wasn’t much to guard. The actual fort is long gone. The two main buildings in the center of the site were rebuilt much later. What it lacked in authenticity, though, was offset by the familiar resonance of these structures. Susanville had its own historic log cabins and plank-wood buildings. Even more impactful was the unit we dedicated at school to the California Missions, devoting a week to each distinct structure. All through those years, I was immersed in stories of travel and travail, stories set in aged buildings steeped in history. In some sense, the appeal of Kearney and Laramie and Fetterman is the way they echo those childhood moments. The echoes were even more prominent in Glenrock, where I spent the night in a trailer, my first time in one since my grandparents’ in Susanville.
Of course, this whole trip is oriented around returning home. When I decided to abandon the idea of through-hiking the American Discovery Trail, in order to instead follow the Oregon Trail back to Portland, my thought was that the journey would be invested with greater personal significance if it brought me back to the Pacific Northwest. What surprises me, though, is how I keep encountering home all along the way, even if it’s this protean notion of home that keeps shifting forms. Halfway through my walk from Glenrock to Casper, I stopped dead in my tracks when I encountered a series of metal sculptures portraying emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Anyone who has walked the Camino who sees this will immediately have flashbacks to the Alto del Perdon, one of the definitive sights on the Way.
I’ve never lived in Spain, but I’ve certainly spent a lot of time there, between the many assorted Caminos. And the sense of belonging and being associated with so many places along those routes has also invested them with feelings of home, a place of some lasting, intrinsic connection between self and place.
This is, admittedly, a depersonalized way of thinking about home, stripping it of the people that make it most meaningful. When I think about walking home, I don’t envision walking through the front door of my condo. I anticipate strolling across my school’s campus and seeing everyone. I look forward to being with family again. Those are certainly the richest forms of home. But the walk has me thinking about how part of the power of home is how we carry it with us, and how we can find it where we are, wherever we are.
