Bon Jovi says you can, but what happens when the home you had is not there?
I headed up to The Pas, in Northern Manitoba this summer to see the place where I lived for two years. It is a place that made an impression on me, which seems to be quite beyond my mom. I can't tell you the number of times she asked why I was going back to "that place," a haven for flies (horse and black) and mosquitoes that use your arm for a runway.
The short answer is to do research for the stories I am writing, but the long answer is quite a bit more complicated.
Living up there was difficult at times...for all the reasons you would expect: I missed my friends, my grandma; it was cold; the bus ride to town everyday was brutal and boring. But it was also hard to fit in. My memory is fuzzy, but it seems to be full of the strange things my town friends would do...I couldn't seem to figure out how to step lightly.
Luckily I lived at the airport, where I did have good friends, and lots of fun. I snowmobiled, curled, cross-country skied, explored the woods and the lake to my heart's content. It seems now that I had unprecedented freedom to roam. I had boundaries, but I was rarely checked up on.
The lake is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. It ranks right up there with Moraine Lake in Alberta. Moraine Lake is static though, calm, dark blue. Clearwater Lake changes, sometimes within seconds from a bright, calm and calming crystal blue to dark, angry indigo. It's untrustworthy in a way.
Maybe the allure didn't hit me until I heard about the now (in)famous murder of Helen Betty Osbourne. How could such a horrible, despicable event happen on the shores of such natural beauty? How could so many know what happened, who had done it, and yet not feel they could say anything?
To look back at the place through a lens like that has to make it more interesting. And to return now, where our little airport community has been disbanded and scattered to the wind, leaving only driveways that lead nowhere, broken sidewalks strewn like tombstones and trees that delineate empty lots...well the whole thing just begs to be looked at, turned over, analyzed.
It was hard realizing this was one place I've lived that I could not show my kids. Like Hadrian's Wall in England, or Castle Campbell in Scotland, what was there, is now gone.
A gas station-convenience store-pub now stands on the loop where we waited for our bus. Bags of empty beer cans sit out behind the building on the very place my friend's dad used to park his big Suburban.
So many people say "you can never go home again." In this case, it is too true.
Book of the Week: Well, kind of on a break from reading...an old favourite- On Earth As it Is by Steven Heighton (especially Translations of April)
Song of the Week: "Til I Am Myself Again -Blue Rodeo (Or one from my The Pas Era-Jessie's Girl)
