In the Allegheny Mountains of Northwestern Pennsylvania, outside of a tiny town called Tionesta, if you take a gravel road back a couple of miles, you will find a small cabin with a big screened-in porch at the end of the road that settles into a hillside, overlooking a manmade pond stocked with native fish. You’d see a salt lick to the north and south of the cabin, gleaming from squat stumps and attracting the crepuscular neighbors and a few stray porcupines. There is a field of clover for the deer, a fire pit with grates above it for roasting hand pies (Wonderbread and butter with a heap of canned pie filling in the center) or making “hobo” dinners (a less PC name for vegetables stacked in tin foil). Tucked around the woods are small forts built of plywood and logs, and often have makeshift fences built by 12 year olds. A spring runs from the mountain above, down to supply the cabin, and draining into the lake, which overflows to a stream below that, and empties in a larger tributary into the Allegheny River. On the gravel road you took, you may be slapped with birch branches as you drive by, some stripped of a twig or two where a little hand has removed it and chewed it down to the pulp, letting the sweetness of the green pith sap flood the tastebuds as a tie-over til lunch or dinner. You may also see blackberry bushes stretching their brambles toward you, daring you to trade the reward of the fat, bursting berries for a few pricks in your skin. There are three fingered alien hand leaves of sassafras, waiting their turn to have a piece of their roots dug up and boiled into a blood thinning winter tea, light pink with milk and sugar.
Veer off of the main gravel road and its treasures, taking a left onto a footpath after the first high meadow– the only place on the mountain where enough cell phone service can be garnered for a midnight phone call to a boyfriend back in civilization, if you can steel yourself against the rustling of leaves and trees in the dark. Go near the mound that is colloquially known as the fox den (and for good reason– foxes are often spotted here). If you choose this path in August and maybe early September, and if you look down among the scrubby brush, before your eyes land on the soft pine needles below, you will be rewarded with an abundance of huckleberries. At first, you might not see them. They don’t shimmer like the blackberries, and often have a matted, muted tone to them, blending into the small green leaves that protect them. But once your eye is trained, suddenly a kingdom arises from the late summer green, and your mouth will salivate and pucker and pop with the stunning delight of a warm huckleberry. They are at once the taste of summer and the harbinger of fall, a burst of daylight as the moon is rising.
If you fill your pockets and don’t become too greedy, neatly plopping one or two at a time in your mouth as you walk, you can take this back road– this well trodden path– all the way down to the cabin without ever touching the road. It’s easy enough for me, as I’ve taken it a hundred times, both in my body and in my mind. I’ve taken it at night and in the day, in early morning and at dusk. This is a path that has formed the shape of my shoes and the roundness of my desire to return– a desire as full and poignant as a huckleberry.
In early September, at the break of the weather from summer to fall– I love a good break in the weather– I traveled this road again for the first time in two decades, on a small wooded path in Long Beach, Washington, where an accretion of land meets the Pacific Ocean. Halfway to the dune grass, the path splits, and a rusted chandelier hangs on a low hanging branch, beside which is a huckleberry bush as tall as I am. These aren’t the scrubby spreading kind of my childhood, but the taste is the same. Each morning and evening I took this walk for a week, grabbing a few huckleberries each time, leaving plenty for the bears behind. I took a few extra and clumped them lavishly on my oats one morning, with real maple syrup from my friend’s trees in Vermont– another well trodden path. I luxuriated in the simplicity of time, how it is not linear or singular, but circular and plural and not confined by place.
I would like to reduce the sensation to nostalgia. I would like to diminish this exploration as a self-indulgent journey into the past. But I am not listening to the Spice Girls records (well, most of the time) and I am not squeezing myself into old JNCO jeans, or even swooning over the sight of an old yellow Ford Ranger like the one I drove through high school and college.
I am finding the back roads of myself. It’s more trepidatious, as it requires not only a journey back, but a new path forged forward.
In a white house on a hill by the Connoquenesing Creek outside of a small shut-down steel town 45 miles north of Pittsburgh, you will see a light on in the east facing gable, warm and early and laced with white curtains. Climb into the room, and there is a captured attic bedroom with a sloping ceiling next to a twin bed, mauve and magenta carpeting that splits into baby blue at the doorway. The walls are a pale pink, and covered with drawings and writings and handprints of a teenage girl and her two best friends, who spent a whole sleepless night painting and eating snacks and having one last stab at childhood while looking into the dark open mouth of their graduation.
The shelves are lined with books and journals filled to capacity, the dresser topped with trinkets– pink glass bears and dried roses– from ex-boyfriends, and the closet stuffed with CDs both bought and gifted and rotated evenly in the prominently displayed stereo in the next room. In the glow of this morning, you will find a teenage girl huddled under her blankets, a white cup with a rainbow streaked across– her mother’s favorite mug– of black tea, tan with milk and sugar resting on the nightstand her father built beside her. On her lap, a half filled journal, black faux leather with an illustration of a blue iridescent feather quill on the front. It cost more than $30, and she saved for weeks to buy it at Barnes & Nobles, checking every weekend that it was still there. Once purchased, she did not hesitate to use it. Empty books are meant to be filled, not cherished for their clean start, as eventually, a clean start is only the burden of not starting at all. Next to her is an open Bible, somewhere in the Corinthians. This is likely her third or fourth time through this book. She sometimes wakes up with nightmares about Nebuchadnezzar and fires from the book of Daniel, or with visions of swords and horses from Revelation, but she persists, and is determined to crack the code of herself through this singular text. She won’t find out for several years that this text was created by people– men– who knew nothing about the sacred heart of a spiritual seeker, and especially nothing about women, and that in fact the text she was reading was not meant to help her, but to imprison her– to keep her in line. But this vignette has little to do with that. It has everything to do with a warm lamp and a curious spirit.
This back road of myself has been recently reopened. I’ve exchanged coffee for tea; Marcus Aurelius for the Bible; a journal I’ve made myself– a complicated historical stitch and handmade paper– for the mass produced one I determined special. This road is comfortable and confronting, with few guard rails and several connecting dirt roads. It’s slow, full of potholes and speed bumps, and dappled with a forest of thought that makes me believe the outside world is out there, up there somewhere. But it isn’t intruding right now. Here, I can almost breathe again.
Taking these back roads has softened me. This year, I’ve steeled myself against the loss of my dog, against a long 5 month tour, against a neurotic and destructive presidency, against the nagging feeling that I will be hardened forever and then I will die. I’ve been hesitant to open up these channels in fear of becoming unproductive, overly sensitive (again), or simply silly. These are the roads I have resisted, for fear of being trite or repetitive. I’ve tried to judge myself less and let the feeling take me where it will. It’s hard, especially while trying to protect myself from old wounds or opening to new disappointments and hurts. I’m trying to be zen, for Chrissake. So, I’ve been trying to remember that I don’t begrudge myself for taking the dirt road back to my house in New Hampshire– why would I begrudge myself the wooded path that brings me home to myself? This is not merely a foray into saccharine sweet memory, but a practical route to the life I’ve been gifted. Every experience a footstep, every footstep a road.
And so now it happens sometimes like this– that I find myself in Tacoma, Washington, and on the recommendation of a new friend, go to a local bakery. This bakery, named after a favorite bird from another familiar back road, has all the offerings a physically and spiritually hungry woman could imagine– cinnamon sugar focaccia, lavender blueberry cake, tart lemon bars. And, something I haven’t had in over two decades, kolache. I ordered a sundried tomato and pesto to share with my Someone, heated. I felt the warmth of it as we carried it back to our truck, readying ourselves for Portland traffic ahead. When I opened the brown container and opened the wax paper, cutting softly into the hot kolache, a smell drifted from it as familiar as my left hand.
“This smells like my mother’s pepperoni bread,” I said. And then I started to cry. Rather than forcing it back or expounding, I simply let it linger, walked the full path of the memory, and let it bring me back to where I was standing, on a sidewalk, in Tacoma, Washington– an entire country from where I first knew this smell. Then, I got into the truck and ate it appreciatively, thinking of the hundreds of meals my mother had made– some specially because they were my favorite. The allowance of this internal journey gave way to an allowance of forgiveness– for my mother and for myself– for the meals we missed, too.
This is the nature of rediscovering the back roads. Home is not stagnant. It is always shifting, always changing. If you try and catch it and hold it tight, it will become hostile, stone, bitter– a poor man’s recreation. But continue to move, keeping walking and believing in the road home to yourself, and it will change with you. It will reward you for your steadfastness. It will welcome you back. It will soften the resistance, and you will find home again.
Quartz from Pallets 