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John Sheirer
Going Home
Part 1
I haven't called it home for a long time.
One of my colleagues at Asnuntuck Community College saw me in the hallway in mid-December 2002 and asked, "Are you going anywhere for the holidays?"
"Yes," I replied.
After a short moment of silence while we stared at each other, she asked the obvious follow-up question: "Uhhh ... where?"
This is not the easy question it might seem to be on the surface. On the one hand, I plan to get into my car and drive 450 miles to a very specific location. My destination is a cabin on a small farm at the base of Wills Mountain in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Foothills of the Appalachian Mountain Range of southwest central Pennsylvania. On the other hand, there's so much more to consider than just geological formations on a topographical map or the highway lines on the dog-eared atlas under the driver's seat of my car.
This is the place where I grew up, but is it "home"?
* * *
I was born in the Bedford County Memorial Hospital in Everett, Pennsylvania, May 17, 1961. Until a few months after my eighteenth birthday when I went away to college, I lived in a farmhouse in southern Bedford County. Exactly where in southern Bedford County? The village of Madley on Pennsylvania State Route 96. Going south on Route 96 at fifty-five miles per hour, you'll see the "Village of Madley" sign. Then count to five (one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, four-Mississippi, five-Mississippi) and look in the rearview mirror--you'll see the "Village of Madley" sign for northbound traffic. You'll miss it if you blink.
You know those times when you're driving, and your mind sort of blanks out, and you can't remember the last few minutes of your drive? That's where I grew up--right there in that blank spot.
To be fair, it's not really that small. If you turn west from Route 96, you'll be driving down Madley Hollow Road. This paved but unlined road goes for miles with dozens of houses, farms, and trailers. That's all part of Madley.
If you turn east onto the dirt road, toward Wills Mountain rising a thousand feet from the valley floor, you'll pass a couple of two-story houses on your immediate right and left. About fifty yards beyond these houses is a third. It's a large white farmhouse with several old out-buildings and a large barn. That's the house where I grew up. The only other house on this dirt road that loops about half a mile back around to Route 96 is a 200-year-old cabin a few hundred yards beyond the farmhouse.
That cabin is where I'm going for the holidays.
Look up high on Wills Mountain and you'll see a stone quarry, a reddish-tan rock scar marking the top of the ridge. Until the early 1950s, this quarry was a source of Lancaster limestone used for building materials or pulverized to make cement. The official topographical map of the area simply refers to this feature as a "sand pit." Historical documents reveal the actual name was Ganister Rock Quarry. When I was a child, everyone simply called it "the quarry."
I'm climbing all the way up there too.
* * *
The people who now own the farm of my youth are named Janet and Fred. Janet grew up just a few houses to the north and knew my older brothers Ronnie and Norman. In 1985, my mother sold the farm to a woman named Miranda, one of my sisters' best friends and the older sister of one of my best friends. Miranda began some renovations to the house, but she sold to Janet and Fred in 1988 when her marriage couldn't be renovated enough to avoid divorce.
One of the great features of our farm was a small cabin that we called simply the "log house." All I knew when I was young was that the log house had been built in 1812 and that we rented it every fall to deer hunters from New Hampshire. I had no idea then why anyone would come all the way from that far north to rent what seemed to me an old, dinky cabin in the middle of nowhere, but they always came and always hung their trophy deer on hooks outside the cabin for everyone to see.
At Christmas 1999, I was visiting my sister Tam and her husband Dale at their home in Watsontown, Pennsylvania. Tam informed me that Janet and Fred had started renting out the cabin to people other than hunters on a regular basis.
"You're kidding," I said to her. My memory of the cabin was that it was wonderful from my childhood perspective when our family "roughed it" by staying overnight there once or twice each summer. But the place also seemed tiny and old and dirty. I remembered that it had basic electricity and a wood-burning cookstove, but there was no indoor plumbing, and the water sources were a very unreliable indoor pump and a pipe that my father and I had suspended from a spring fifteen feet high on the steep bank of the little stream that flowed near the cabin.
"Who would want to stay there besides deer hunters?" I asked Tam.
"We stayed there," Tam replied. "You wouldn't recognize it. They tore out all that crappy old wallpaper downstairs so you can see the original logs inside. The porch is rebuilt, and they added a modern kitchen and bathroom on the back."
I was intrigued.
"And they put in an indoor jacuzzi and cable TV," she continued.
I was hooked.
So I called Janet a few days later. She remembered me. I felt bad because I didn't remember her. When I was a kid, she was enough older that she fell into a category of mysterious people who drove cars and dated and had lives. She was intrigued that I worked as a college professor and described her experiences as a substitute teacher over the years. Within ten minutes on the phone, we were talking like old friends. That's the way the people I grew up around are--more than twenty years may have passed, and you may have barely known one another even when you lived less than a mile apart, but if you're from there, you're never a stranger.
Janet told me about the cabin. Not only had my sister Tam visited, but my older brothers Ronnie and Norman had as well. She said she'd be delighted for me to come down and stay.
Then she told me the price: $80 per night. In my teens, I would have thought this was more money than God could spare for his favorite church. In my twenties, I would have grunted but paid, trying to figure how to afford gas for the trip down. But by 1999, I had a real job and was making more money than I ever dreamed I would--of course, as a community college teacher, I wasn't rich. I just had very modest dreams.
Also, I'd been living in New England for more than ten years. The cost of living here might be what drove carloads of New Hampshire deer hunters to Pennsylvania every season. I had once paid $220 a night for a bed and breakfast room in Kennebunkport, Maine. But Janet actually seemed embarrassed by the $80 per-night fee, and she apologized and explained that they had to charge that much to make up for all they had spent on renovating the cabin.
"In New England," I told Janet, "A three-bedroom cabin would be a little bit more than that. Put a one in front of that eighty." Actually, the cabin happened to be in a tourist spot, you could easily put a two in front of the eighty, and people would pay it and wink at each other behind your back like they were putting one over on you to get such a bargain.
I told Janet that I had some time off in January, and I'd call her soon to arrange a weekend stay at the cabin. But that mythical time off, as often happens for teachers between terms, went by much too quickly. I didn't call Janet back until July of 2002, more than two years later. By then, I had started seeing a wonderful woman named Ginny, and I wanted to go somewhere special with her.
I'd seen Ginny jogging the country road by my house a few times, and we'd often waved and smiled at each other. I wanted her to stop and chat, but she never did, and I didn't want to interrupt her run by offering her a glass of iced tea or something goofy like that. But then, by coincidence, she took one of my classes at Asnuntuck. After the semester, we started e-mailing each other, and we eventually went for ice cream on our first date. Things have been wonderful ever since. We'd had a couple of weekends away together without even a hint of an argument, so I thought we could risk being together for an eight-hour drive and two nights of "roughing it" at the cabin.
So we went to Pennsylvania in August and had a terrific romantic getaway. One of the first things Ginny said when we walked into the cabin was, "The boys would love this." So we came back again in December with her to sons, Ryan, who is fifteen, and Josh, who is eight. Instead of cramming ourselves into one of our little cars, we rented a Ford Expedition, one of the most obnoxiously huge SUVs in the world. I could fit my Tracker in the back of this thing and still have room for a Ginny and the boys.
Ford actually makes a bigger SUV called the Excursion, but I can't imagine how that monstrosity can even fit into a parking space. Of course, nothing could be as bad as the Hummer, that enormously stupid military vehicle that under-endowed men are actually driving around in like idiots. They should just go ahead and renamed it "The Overcompensator."
I felt a little guilty about the extravagance of the Expedition, but we needed a big reliable car, and none of us were interested in a minivan. We even brought along a little TV-VCR combination that I got for my office a few years ago. The kids watched videos the whole way down and back while Ginny and I drove and talked. We had a great time at the cabin--hiking, sight-seeing, and mostly just hanging around my old homestead.
During that wonderful December family visit, while I rambled through a dozen stories to Ginny, Ryan, and Josh, I realized I had a lot to say about the place where I grew up. So I decided to come back alone a few weeks later and write about my life here. This time, I wasn't going to let my time off between semesters fly away. When Ginny and I realized that neither of us planned to have any special celebration for New Year's, she suggested I come back the week after Christmas. So I called Janet, reserved the cabin, and started looking forward to three days of solitude, contemplation, reflection, remembering, revisiting, and writing.
* * *
It's hard to call this place home, as in "I'm going home for the holidays."
I haven't lived there since I was eighteen. Not long after I went off to college, my twin sister June took over my room and claimed it for herself. When I came "home" to visit back then, I had to sleep in the guest room--the "spare room," as we called it.
It was an unsettling experience--sleeping in the guest room of your own home only a short time after you've left it. Looking back on it now, I can't blame June for moving into my room--although I was a little upset at the time. All her life, she had shared a large bedroom with our two other sisters, Pam and Tam (also twins), two years older than we were. I was the only boy at home. (My brothers were much older and already out of the house.) So I had a small bedroom to myself, and I counted myself lucky every minute of my formative years because I could close that bedroom door and find solitude from everyone else in the house.
Since I've been gone, the house has been sold twice, re-sided, re-roofed, and extensively remodeled. As far as I know, all of the furniture has been replaced--including the one bed I slept in the whole time I lived there. Everything has changed: the people, the things, even my favorite apple tree is gone. How can I call it home now?
Home is a little two-bedroom house I rent on a lovely country lane in Somers, Connecticut. When people ask me where I live, I like being able to say the name of a definite town and not have to play any other versions of the "where-are-you-from" game.
* * *
So when my colleague at the college asked where I was going for the holidays, I told her, "Pennsylvania."
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