walking

The fun starts tomorrow, when very long-ago friends begin to converge here. It’s not just the reunion for a number of high school classes this weekend, but also the multi-day town festival. I’m surprised I was even able to find an empty room.

It’s a very small town, but the walks are long if you follow a snaking route up and down the side streets, which is exactly what I intended to do, and did.

Mt. Vernon is quaint, and known for being so. The college campus is hilly and pretty. There are a number of brick streets, and whole sections of the town are on the national historic registry. It generally feels more like New England than like Iowa, geographically speaking.

This may sound strange, but in the back of my mind tonight I was deeply worried about being hit by any vehicles while crossing streets. My fondest wish while growing up here was to get as far away as possible. Having incontestably succeeded in achieving that particular aspiration, I was thinking how cruel it would be if I were plowed down by a big truck right in front of my childhood home. So, I was almost inordinately careful.

The childhood home has been gone since ’97 or ’98, used by the town for firefighting practice, and replaced by a baseball complex. The baseball authorities were wise enough to preserve all of the best trees from our yard– ancient, gnarled things climbed dozens of times by me and my brothers. It sends a chill down the spine to see that there isn’t the least trace of the house anymore, but the trees still look precisely the same– their strange shapes are unmistakable.

Then on side streets to Davis Park (baseball/swimming pool), past another house, still standing, where we lived even earlier. I left it at age 4, and it’s the earliest residence I clearly remember. My brother and I foolishly played on fiberglass in the backyard once and had to go to the doctor to be bathed in whatever sort of fluid they use to remedy that. I was given a raccoon-shaped pillow in this house labelled with the words: “I’m Randy the Raccoon. I live in the woods.” My brother’s was turtle-shaped and turtle-hued and said: “I’m Tippy the Turtle. I live in the pond.” The third son was still a few years from being born.

En route to that house I passed the former short-term dwelling of Mt. Vernon’s most infamous all-time resident: Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. THE UNABOMBER. His brother was a high school teacher in neighboring Lisbon, Iowa in the late 1970’s, and Ted (not yet working as the Unabomber) lived with him for awhile. The town is so small that there can be no question that I passed the Unabomber on the sidewalk any number of times when I was, say, 11 years old. (No one realized he had ever been there until the national press began phoning in droves shortly after his arrest.)

I passed another important edifice of age 11 a few blocks later: the home of Anne-Marie R., my first “girlfriend” (in the 11-year-old sense). She chased me first, but then it reversed over time and I was more interested. I didn’t like hanging out at the swimming pool, her favorite place, so she had her friend Brenda send me to the guillotine by phone. It was horribly timed– I’d just endured a very bad week or two of the chicken pox. Anne-Marie was a very friendly redhead, but certainly took cold revenge in this case, “dating” (in the 11-year-old sense) three of my best friends over the next six months. She transferred to a different school a couple of years later and I never heard what became of her.

At a certain point tonight I noticed that my gait had become a bit unnatural. Suddenly, I realized that Mt. Vernon had reawakened in me that dark childhood rhyme: “step on the crack, you break your mother’s back.” Ritualistic chants of that sort have a magical power over children even when not literally believed, and I clearly remember going all the way to age 18 making sure not to let my shoe fall on any sidewalk cracks. I’d long since lost that useless habit, of course, but this town instantly reawakened it.

Then up “Pres Hill” (so-called because the Presbyterian Church sits on it), where my brother had a serious sledding accident. His chin slammed into the rear bumper of a car, at age 9 or 10, as my parents and I watched in horror. It cost him nothing but stitches, but could have been so much worse. Whoever parked the car on that celebrated sledding hill didn’t have his thinking cap on that day (I clearly remember who it was, but he was generally a nice guy– the father of a girl a year ahead of me).

Also the place behind a small cement factory where a strange rail car had been left abandoned long ago, like a prop from a Tarkovsky film. It was filled with tins of crackers and biscuits intended either for the army or for post-nuclear war civil defense scenarios, I can’t remember which. Some of the “bad boys” broke into it one day at age 10 or so. I walked up and watched them looting it. Luckily I wasn’t involved, and luckily I left quickly, because the police showed up and there was some more-than-parental discipline meted out in that case.

Finally back to Gary’s Supermarket for some fresh fruit. But the high school ritual (for absolutely everyone) was to go to Gary’s before school and buy a couple of doughnuts and a soda (or “pop,” as we Iowans call it). Tonight I took the doughnuts, for old time’s sake– one German chocolate, and one with blue sprinkles. In my crowd the pop of choice was Dr. Pepper. For the more rednecky types it was Mountain Dew, of course. They were known as “the chew and dew boys,” and they were not my friends.

In any case, I toyed with the idea of picking up a can of Mountain Dew tonight, but couldn’t keep a straight face. I’ll leave that mild comic gesture to any of my classmates who may care to re-enact it over the next few days.

On the whole, nothing could be more fun than exploring this place for the next few days.