Home Bittersweet Homecoming on a Country Road

We grew up on the other end of the continent, though when we were kids, it seemed the far side of the world. The roads didn’t have lines down the middle; some didn’t have asphalt. When our dad left for work, we’d trail him as if he were going where no dad had gone before.

“Where’re you going?” we’d demand, and he’d lean out the window and say the one joke guaranteed to make us laugh. “I’m going to California!” he’d yell, tearing down the driveway. “And I’m never comin’ back!”

California. Even the name seemed enchanted. California, home of Bob Barker and the Beverly Hillbillies and Ozzie and Harriet. California, where they had beaches and palm trees and summer nights that weren’t thick with mosquitoes. California, where people went and didn’t bother to come back.

Growing up in that place, a place I left in my 20s vowing never to revisit, California represented everything that was frustrating and imperfect about the life we knew. Nobody in California, we were certain, lived in trailers or said “cussint” for “cousin.” Nobody nattered on about ovaries and dentures. Nobody swore at you.

On summer evenings, I’d get on my bike, a bike unlike the perfect bikes kids probably rode in California, and ride in a sullen loop, down to the two-lane blacktop and back, down and back. The dusk was green, the heat like water. The crickets were raucous. The road lay like a ribbon as far as a young girl’s eye could see.

I would pedal and coast and daydream that the Beatles had gotten lost and needed directions, or that I was not on a bike from which the handlebar streamers were missing, but in a brand-new convertible with a tankful of gas.

I am speeding West, I’d pretend, and I am not on this country road that begins at the Grange and ends down by the railroad. I am going to California. I am never comin’ back.

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“Mama, is this where you grew up?”

The 6-year-old is peering out the window at a skinny, rural Eastern blacktop. She is tanned and blond and wearing little board shorts that kids can’t buy at the local Kmart, but that surfer girls wear all the time back home.

“This is it,” the teenager tells her, although neither of them have ever seen it. As any self-respecting California girl would be, they are fascinated and horrified.

“What’s up with all the lawn ornaments? What’s with all the cemeteries? Think they could fit in a couple more trees?” Periodically, the teenager and my husband break into the banjo theme from “Deliverance.” I don’t know whether to sing along or cry.

If I could focus, I might point out that this is how much of America lives, that I inserted this side trip into our vacation because I wanted them all to see the other side of the continent, of me, of our family. But focus is impossible, as any transplanted Californian who has gone home again will tell you. You can only sit tight and try to absorb what you see.

There it is, everything about you that you thought you could outrun: the smell of the hot, wet summer, the orange of the polluted sulfur creek. The house that once was yours, so imposing then, sold now to a guy who graduated two years ahead of you in high school. He left the garage door open and messed up the driveway. What can he have been thinking, to leave the yard in such a ruin?

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I look at the car window and catch my reflection: a middle-aged woman, her eyes wide, her mouth soft, her face a little distracted by the ruckus her kids are making in the back seat. She is thinking that this road once seemed to go on forever. She is wondering what “home” really means.

Is it this familiar/foreign place? Is it her new home on the far side of the world? She is remembering, with a smile, her faith that the very miles held magic, that a perfect version of herself awaited, if she could just get to the end of that country road.

She is reminding herself that everyone is from someplace, and in Southern California, two out of three are from someplace else. Maybe a million people a year return to times and places that once seemed to swallow them as sleep swallows a child on a summer night; maybe a million people a year taste the bittersweet loss that is the price of seeing those memories again, through grown-up eyes.

You’d think that would prepare a wanderer for the shock of going home, but it doesn’t. We all travel solo; we all go where no wanderer has gone before.

I am speeding East, I think, and I am on this country road: It begins at the Grange. It ends down by the railroad tracks. So funny, to go all the way to California, only to realize how much of your home could never leave you. So Californian, to be goin’ back.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. She can be reached online at [email protected]