Looking out my Backdor: The Winter of, The Summer of, My Disillusionments

My friend Jim from Glasgow sent me a short video clip of the Little Rockies, Three Buttes, Snake Butte and the Bear Paws. Immediately, I yearned, homesick. I shared the video with friends. “This is my beautiful country.” Their response, not unexpected, “Ah, yes. Uh huh. Beautiful,” as they looked for an exit. Which brought on this following chain of thought.

To some this will sound as though I am describing two foreign countries, and I am. Both countries have disappeared.

My earliest years were spent in Indiana, not far from the Ohio River, a mile wide, where often we sat on a bank and watched tugs push three, four and five barges laden with coal or ore or other goods.

Uncle Jim came to visit. He and Dad talked late into the night. Not long after my Uncle left, Dad came upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed one night. “How would you like to go to Montana?”

“Where Uncle Jim lives? Oh, yes!” I thought Dad meant a visit, a vacation. By the time I figured out we were moving, I was horrified. Not that I had any voice in the matter. I was ten.

During the Great Depression, Uncle Jim had gone to work on a family friend’s wheat ranch south of Chinook.

He never looked back. Dad had worked for the same man, before the War. Montana had burrowed under his skin, into his heart.

By the time we moved, Jim owned a Valley farm and a partnership in an implement dealership in Harlem. Dad was going to buy the farm.

We had our farm sale on a sunshine April Fools’ Day, green grass, daffodils waving their silly heads. The following day, our car already packed, we left for Montana, in the rain, an omen if ever there was one.

I left an entire family of aunts and uncles with cousins my own age. (Uncle Jim’s children were older.) I left an excellent school which encouraged students to find ways to illustrate lessons, left all my friends, and everything I knew. I left my rock collection, the geodes, all my toys, yes, toys. When I was ten, we were still children. I was allowed to take one ‘toy’. I chose my books.

On a cold afternoon, April 5, we drove into Harlem on the old highway, along a deeply rutted dirt street, icy and banked with drifts of dirty snow. I’d never seen a more desolate, ugly town, although we had been driving through the same towns all day. Thaw was a couple weeks away.

On my birthday, I climbed on the school bus for my first day at Harlem Elementary, terrified. At lunch, a girl grabbed my hand, “Come with us. Sally and Sylvia (classmates) are going to fight in the park.” Now I was terrified and horrified.

Fight, they did, actual fisticuffs with blood. Girls! In my country, boys wrestled in play but I’d never seen a real fight.

By the end of the first week in my new school, my classmates hated me. Nobody told me you weren’t supposed to have ideas.

I was yet to discover gumbo mud which stole rubber boots from my feet, mosquitoes so thick they covered my skin. Drought. Wind. Temperatures over 100 degrees and under minus 40. A different country, harsh, a different culture, hard.

I cried myself to sleep every night that first year, remembering a softer, gentle life.

When I was 13, my Dad put us on the Empire Builder and sent us home to Indiana for the summer, a truly wonderful summer, with cousins and school friends.

Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.

There were all the remembered friends, flowers and fruit. Along with red clay dirt. And chiggers. (At least mosquitoes are visible and don’t burrow.) Copperheads in the weeds and slithering through the blackberries.

Humidity which made 75 seem 105. I had to reconnect with friends. Or not. Nothing was recognizable. People I had idolized grew pimples. Or warts. (Metaphorical.) Depending on age. On our old farm, house, barn and my swing tree had been razed to the ground to make way for a sprawling brick “ranch-style” house.

At summer’s end, we climbed aboard the Monon, transferred to the Empire Builder in Chicago, and returned home. Home. Home to Harlem, where the streets were still dirt, but home.

Nothing had changed but me. I could see with different eyes, could measure on a scale more balanced. I never lost my love for Indiana, but I knew my home.

I’ve learned to make my home in many different places. But Home will always be that harsh, hard country I love.

——

Sondra Ashton grew up in Harlem but spent most of her adult life out of state. She returned to see the Hi-Line with a perspective of delight. After several years back in Harlem, Ashton is seeking new experiences in Etzatlan, Mexico. Once a Montanan, always. Read Ashton’s essays and other work at http://montanatumbleweed.blogspot.com/. Email [email protected].