We’ve packed for a lot of trips in our life together. Long trips to Jamaica and England. Shorter trips by train across America to Vermont, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Colorado. Car or camper trips to Glacier and Monument Valley. Our epic trip on Hwy. 20 from Newport, Oregon to its other end in Boston, Massachusetts. Personal trips to Houston (Lydia) and China (me). All were significant in their own way. The China trip took me to Tian An Men Square on a fateful day in June of 1989. The Hwy 20 trip took us to the town I had grown up in and left 40 years before. Many were first time experiences all were memorable.
We’ve just finished packing for our next trip. We’re going back to the town I grew up in for a 50th high school reunion. Casper, Wyoming is a place that I used to think of as home, a belief I held for many years after I left there. I don’t think that way any longer. While I am interested in seeing what has become of my old friends I have another interest that touches me more deeply. My kids are joining us in Casper. They have never been there; they’ve never seen the context of my childhood. Growing up, my kids lived in proximity to their mother’s childhood home. They visited her parents in the town in which she grew up. They learned a background setting for childhood. My parents, on the other hand, moved often. When we visited them, it was in some town I had never lived in.
So, now I have a chance to show them my childhood, the many houses we lived in, the schools my sisters and I attended, the mountain I camped on, the spot on the mountain road hill where I apparently ran over a deer carcass on my bike and woke up a day later in the hospital (A friend rode all the way in to town to tell my parents and call an ambulance. In the excitement, Dad jumped in the car, leaving my mother behind. Apparently this did not please her), the lake where a friend drowned on my first Boy Scout camp.
All of this came to my mind this week as Lydia packed the camper, our home away from home here in Oregon, for the next three weeks. See, the reason we got a camper in the first place for our travels is that Lydia and I are homebodies. We like to have our “things” around us as we travel. Don’t get me wrong, we can and do travel without the camper ‘bus’ and survive quite well. And we love traveling. It’s just that, when we are on extended stays on the road, we do not feel the need to get back home so quickly if we have some of home with us. That being said, the point is that, while I am eager to share my childhood surroundings with my kids (ok, kids who are 40 and 44), to give them an idea of where I came to be who I am, that place is no longer my home.
I am certain that I will not be the only person traveling back to Casper after 50 years. Wyoming was not a place many of us aspired to stay in the 1960s. Still, there are some friends, I am sure, who remained, who have watched the town grow and change with the vagaries of the oil business, and who still call the town home. I confess that at times I used to yearn return to the place where I began, to wander some of the streets in the dark again, like the angst filled teen I once was, but that is not a feeling I have anymore. Home is a little town in Oregon now, with the girl I’ve spent the last 48 years with. Occasionally, it is also a twenty-five foot camper where I bring a bit of home with me.

The Road