View from the North 40: Goodbye Brock Creek Road, farewell Garrison Junction

Some moments, those profound life moments, come at you like a truck wreck in the making, in slow motion, from a few miles out.

You always knew that the road would be slick ahead, but you thought it wouldn’t happen for many miles. You thought maybe, when you got there, you’d spin out a bit or take out a reflector or dent a guardrail or some equivalent mishap. But you assumed you would drive away from the crisis relatively unscathed, maybe have to fill out an accident report, file a claim, but definitely keep rolling.

Then out of nowhere a semitractor-trailer is jack-knifed across the roadway and sliding at you at a constantly accelerating speed and all the exits are blocked so you just go ahead and say it out loud, “Well this sucks,” because, to your surprise, you see you’re in for a first-class hurtin’ and it is going to leave a significant mark.

The wreck is upon me.

Last weekend I visited for the last time the place that is the closest thing to an ancestral home that I have. Papers will be signed next week, money will exchange hands and my parents will be homeless for two days as they migrate 260 miles northwest and a stranger moves in where my family left off.

The stranger will eat and sleep where my memories play, laugh and love. And my family center will come untethered as the last residents in my family line move away from 46 years on that plot of land and more than 130 years of occupation in the Garrison area.

Both my grandparents had grandparents who moved to the area. Other of my paternal ancestors came to the area in the next few decades.

Stories about the family I didn’t know were about immigrating by ship, having left esteemed jobs or snuck away under sketchy circumstances that meant never visiting the home country again, stories of ranching, gold mining, cross-country horse drives, hunting and hell-raising. The stories began with phrases that said “in this town” (that sometimes no longer existed), “up this gulch” or “along that creek there.”

They gave me a place in time and the world, though we didn’t have a piece of land that had passed down a branch of the family tree to now.

In fact, Interstate 90 and the on/off ramps linking it to Highway 12 sit atop most of the original town of Garrison along with my grandparents’ first home together on the corner and the log cabin next door where my great-grandmother lived. I was 7 when they all moved, but every time I take that exchange my eyes find the ghosts of their homes, “right there,” my mind says, and the memories flood in.

My grandparents and great-grandmother packed up and moved out from under progress to two homes side-by-side up Brock Creek Road.

Grandma and Grandpa’s second home sat at a jog in the road that was the closest thing to being the house on the corner again as they were going to find, and a fortunate location for the warm-hearted guy that came to be known as the Mayor of Brock Creek.

My great-grandmother walked down the slope of her yard and across the dirt road to poach fish from the creek — because she could. And I suspect the fish tasted better for it.

The rest of their lives played out there with the neighborhood growing, bringing new friends, and the old friends still visiting to tell the tales and eat and drink and laugh and play loud, dramatic card games.

Those traditions continued when my parents moved in to caretake their aging parents and even after the honorary mayoral title passed from father to son and many a card game was replaced by equally loud and dramatic Wii bowling. The door was always open and the food and drink and love for everyone.

I never lived there, along any of the creeks or up a gulch or in one of the town-named places, but it was always home.

Until now.

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I feel a bit orphaned at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com.