Roseau, part 3: Going Home

Okay, Folks. The May Pole. I’d love to get into the nitty-gritty details of it, paint a fabulous picture of a bunch of small town families with flowers and ribbons in their hair, holding hands and dancing around a pole decorated with leaves, but in all frankness I’m afraid of boring you. That, and I’m feeling rather lazy on the matter. The real meat to my story, the real angle, the truth of the trip’s purpose turned out not to be the festival at all. It wasn’t the festival, nor was it the town. It wasn’t the little quilt shop that tried to sell me quilt materials even though I don’t sew, and it wasn’t the extraordinary library that took my breath away, and it definitely wasn’t the Walleye Wagon sitting in the parking lot selling fried fish to a man who, in my own opinion, was so round and large he looked like he just stepped off the page of a comic strip. These things are, yes, part of the color, part of the flow of telling a story, but the trip went beyond what I had thought it would. I was gravely depressed, but didn’t realize it. Not yet.

After a shower, I crawled into bed at 5:00pm. I was ready to pass out the second my skin hit the sheets, but I told myself, “No. Not until at least sundown…”. So I made myself stay awake. I was exhausted. After watching four hours of television, I turned over to go to sleep. In the quiet of the dark, my mind had suddenly woke up with thoughts that had been tucked away in the back of my soul. They came out like a flood, and my eyes flung wide, wide awake. I had opened the dam at that moment, for everything that I had been locking away for days was suddenly set free. I was angry by some of those thoughts. Very angry. And then I was sad. Then I was feeling unsettled, unresolved, and it tormented me. Before I knew it I was having imaginary arguments with all the people I wanted to speak my mind to. I was saying things I could never really say in person. You would think it would liberating, but it wasn’t. It was tormenting me. I tossed and turned for hours. I cried, which gave me heartburn and made me sick.

Eventually, I fell asleep around 3:30am only to be woken by my alarm clock at 6:00am. I had no desire to sleep in. My stomach was sick with the anxiety of wanting to get the hell out of there. After plenty of trips to the bathroom, feeling completely drained and far too empty to care about anything, I packed up quick and got into my car at 7am. It had just rained. The air was still damp and muggy, and the morning was just beginning to rise and say hello to the prairies. I filled up my gas tank, and drove on out.

It was the road, Reader. I’m no amateur when it comes to road trips. I’ve driven across the country several times in my life, seeing every breed of town from this side of Minnesota to the other side of Pennsylvania to the eastern shore of Florida. The road provokes a sort of confrontation with yourself. It’s the solitude, really. When all you have is you for company for six hours, you get to talking with yourself. And when you get to talking with yourself, you open doors to darknesses that are usually left shut up in every day’s distractions. It was the road, Reader. This is where the story turned out to be. On the road.

I began to re-think my move from New York to Minnesota when I was fifteen. I have convinced myself that most of my memories of it were not tarnished by the anger of having to leave my home, that they were indeed as horrible as I remembered them. But then I started to think about the high school that I had left behind. Was my new high school really any different? And worse? No. Teenagers were just as horrible in my high school in New York as they were out here. They were just horrible…in a different way. In all retrospect, I was just a very angry, depressed teen who had lost everything. That created a sort of hatred for, well, everything. Happy people ticked me off. Peers going to family barbeques, having Christmas with their cousins, having July 4th parties in their backyard, having sweet 16 birthday parties with friends, were all things, seemingly stupid things, that were taken away from me. And when I left Minnesota in my early twenties to find these things again, I had failed. I couldn’t figure out exactly what I was looking for, but I definitely knew that I wasn’t finding it. I was ungrateful. I realized this as I was driving that long stretch on 89 with no where to stop for anything in the middle of nowhere. I was, ungrateful. I did have friends in high school. It wasn’t until my senior year that I had them, but I did have them. The church we went to showed us love and became a part of us. I fell in love for the first time, here. I met one of my best friends, here. I went to prom, here. I have good, fun memories, here. I have my horse, here. I have friends who love me, here. I have a job I love, here. I have roots now. Roots. That is what I’ve been searching for these past fifteen years. Home. All I ever wanted was home. Without a home, it’s very difficult to identify yourself. And when you can’t identify yourself, you feel this perpetual horror of being lost.

Identity. My grandmother’s death had this unexpected paramount effect on me because having seen her only a month before had reignited an old part of me that I had long ago buried. Being in New York, with family I hadn’t seen in years, had reminded me of a version of myself that has long passed away. It was like a part of my soul had come back to life, and completed me. I had been so used to being without that part that I didn’t recognize the hole until it was temporarily filled. And then, it was over. And then, my family was reunited in her death, and for the first time in so very many years did I feel an overwhelming plague of home sickness. I’ve missed that connection, with family, with blood, with knowing who I am. This, is what plagues me about living here in Minnesota. It isn’t the people here. It isn’t the ridiculous food, or the stupid mosquitoes. It isn’t the flat, boring lands. It isn’t even the arctic winters that I hate so much. It’s the loss of my relatives, my heritage, my ancestry, my… identity. Family. I feel I’ve lost my family, and I don’t have one of my own to replace it.

This thought rendered into a severe pep talk of, “Get over it, Jess…it’s not like you’re an orphan…it’s not like you’ve had your family ripped away from you by Nazis…You have plenty of people in your life who are considered family all the same…not everyone has that….be grateful…be grateful…”. My mother had always said to me that being thankful, for everything, will set you free. It is the key to happiness. But we’re human. And American. Whining is what we do best. I remember when our dog went blind, and she adapted to it because, well, she’s a dog. She was in survival mode, not self pity mode. I remember saying, “Man, it must be nice not to be capable of feeling sorry for yourself.”

But such is the way of having a soul. There is both darkness and light inside of it, and it often battles each other leaving us in great piles of illogical messes. I was in a deep illogical mess on my way back from Roseau.

I tried to be diligent about getting more photos. On that long stretch of 89, going around a giant lake I didn’t know the name of, there was a giant tower with steps leading all the way up to the top. I wanted to climb it and take pictures of the sunrise on the lake, but… That never happened. I took a picture of the tower instead. I had stepped out of my car for two seconds to take it and was completely mauled by a giant flock of mosquitoes. I was killing mosquitoes flying around in my car for the next twenty miles. Travel tip? When driving by a lake in Minnesota, don’t stop and get out of your car.

I drove on. I was feeling a deep sickness, not only physically but mentally as well. I was falling into a shadowy funk, and couldn’t quite clear my head of all the things I was thinking about. You should know, Reader, that it wasn’t all about having to live in Minnesota and missing New York. In fact, those weren’t the thoughts at all. They were other things, too personal to put into words here, but it drove me into a sort of acceptance that I was depressed, that I was confronting certain sorrows and pains that I otherwise shove away. I recognized that I was burned out from work. I recognized that I was heartbroken. I recognized that I was angry. I recognized that I still had a long way to go in repairing the ever long list of my infamous flaws and short comings that make me hate myself so much. I was trying to find compassion for certain people that have hurt me, but in doing so I was recognizing that unconditional love is hard for humans. Why can’t I be more divine? I thought to myself.

Toward the end of my journey I saw a soft, golden light up ahead on my right. It billowed and glittered in the sun, growing form into what could have easily been an angel. I wanted it to be an angel. It was so beautiful and promising. But as I neared it, it grew smaller and rounder and more dull, and before I knew it I was looking at the front of a train. It wasn’t an angel, no. But the beauty of that celestial golden glow comforted me none the less. I held up my camera, took a snapshot of the train as it passed me, and that was the last picture I took. Everything was going to be okay. The world wasn’t coming to an end. The sadness and the anger would pass, eventually. It is the way of it. Life moves in cycles, round and round we go.

It was the road, Reader. It is life. The rest of the way I said to myself, “I just want to go home…I just want to go home…”. Home. I may have actually re-built it. I pulled into my driveway with a feeling of safety, security, and peace. I don’t love Minnesota, yet. But this was a good road sign none the less.

The End