Going Home

They’re teachers and teamsters, pilots and preachers, foremen and farmers. Lots of farmers. They’re the kids with whom I misspent my youth. We gathered this past Saturday night, some of us, forty-five years after we graduated from high school. For the first time in thirty years I attended my high school class’ reunion.

US Highway 212 was once called “The Yellowstone Trail,” two lanes of asphalt that carried American moms and dads, with the kids in the back seat, on vacation. Driving on this August Saturday I wasn’t on my way to Yellowstone, nor was this a family vacation. I was going home. To the little town on the prairie where I grew up. The names of the towns through which two-twelve passes – Cologne, Sacred Heart, Danube – say much about the first settlers and their descendents. In those places, and in Madison, where I grew up, there were Norwegians and Germans – and a few Swedes. Lutherans and Catholics – and a few Congregationalists. There were Swensons and Henrich’s, a few Petersons and lots of Fernholz’s. Still are, I suspect.
Social hour was at five, dinner at seven. I stopped at the Pickett Fence Motel in Dawson; I’d be there overnight. Madison has a motel, but it’s fully booked by wedding revelers. The white clapboard Pickett Fence is one the kids in the back seat would have vetoed all those years ago. No pool. After ablutions there, I headed over to Madison.

It’s a town of 1700-something; that was 1900 twenty years ago and 2200-something a couple of decades before that. Main street’s decline exceeds the population drop. It was transportation, the railroad, then highways and cars that created these once-vibrant small towns on the prairies of the Midwestern United States, and it is ultimately the same gasoline engine that has shrunk them. When I was growing up, farms were still a half section – maybe a section (that’s 640 acres) – but growing fast. We were at the end of decades of a farmstead in every section, and of families with a half-dozen kids. Inexorably, over the years, proportional to the number of acres you could plow in a day (and to the trend to 1.3 kids per parent set) the farm population has fallen. It’s that fall that’s ravaged small town America. No one is to blame, it’s not a political thing, it just is.

I visited the cemetery after turning off State Highway 40 from Dawson, passing places I lived, and friends lived, on the way. My father, his parents, and an aunt and uncle are buried there. As I walk through headstones toward those family graves, I’m struck by all the names I recognize, people who filled my life not-so-many years ago. A druggist, the proprietor of a five-and-dime store, both businesses now also gone from the town’s main street. The publisher-editor-writer of the town’s weekly paper. My chemistry teacher. The parents of close friends, the mothers who mixed Kool Aid for us on a hot summer day. Too many graves of young men and women near my age. Just months after Jeannie’s passing, it’s another sobering reminder of my own mortality.

I’m eager for this, I’m there ahead of most. Others arrive. After a moment’s hesitation old friends and acquaintances are recognized. No one bothers with “you haven’t changed” – that platitude of three decades earlier can no longer be said with a straight face.

Rudy looks as good as any of us, and is as settled, too; satisfied and successful. Kids are through college. Lee is our master of ceremonies, retired from teaching and waiting for a liver. It’s unclear if the liver will be on time. Ed is missing some lung – a lot of lung – and (like me) has a failed heart valve. He exercises but with the help of oxygen. Harlan, his twin brother, died soon after the last reunion, five years ago. We’re told of others who aren’t well.

Those there seem happy enough, though. Marc farms fish and nuts in California. He’s successful, in his business, in his family, in his life – you can just tell. My mother told me that “Nettie (Marc’s mother, now gone) was very, very proud of that boy.” Forty-five years later it’s clear she had good reason.

George is a preacher – perhaps minister is more descriptive, recently a hospice chaplain – can you think of anything more emotionally draining? He’s moved to South Dakota to be nearer family. George and his wife don’t eat the roast beef on their plates. George has St. Olaf college and Harvard University on his curriculum vitae, which might be adequate explanation for the diet.

My closest childhood friends aren’t here, and some are nearby enough to have made the trip. Charlie, Stan, Ron (a recluse, I’m told), Rick was in the class behind, but died a few years ago. Arvin is far enough away, in Pennsylvania, that I didn’t expect him. That these are missing is too bad, but not really important; I thoroughly enjoyed those who were here. I have no idea if I’ll see another of these gatherings, but I know now the effort is worthwhile.

The line says “you can’t go home.” It’s wrong, you can. It’s not the same, not by a long shot, but it is an experience of great personal value. It’s a trip that I highly recommend.