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You Can't Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe wrote, "you can’t go home again." Well, I tried. Home for me was the farm in Oregon where we moved when I was six years old. It consisted of 35 acres of cultivated land and 100 acres of forest on an island in the middle of a river. This island, totaling over 600 acres, covered with a dense growth of virgin timber, criss-crossed with smaller streams, and with no one living on it, was a never- ending source of fascination for me, and it drew me like magnet. Once I had crossed the river on my raft I was in a world of my own, one that belonged completely to me. I could at will be Robinson Crusoe; with my friend Friday (actually a small dog), we spent hours on end exploring the hidden mysteries of my island. Sometimes I was Tarzan and I actually swung through the trees in a manner that in reality was extremely dangerous; but to me was the height of adventure. But the part that had a profound and lasting influence on me was just sitting quietly on the bank of one of the small streams in the forest and watching the sunlight filter down through the trees, turning the various shades of green into a kaleidoscopic paradise. If I sat there long enough, still enough, quietly, not moving, this dense, silent forest would suddenly spring into life with all sorts of animals and birds. In the course of an hour I once saw a fox, a beaver industriously cutting down a small tree, a muskrat swimming to within inches of my foot, a tiny green tree-toad hopping up onto my hand, a deer drinking from the stream, a duck swimming with her babies, birds having a singing contest and my dog and I, all part of this enchanted island which belonged to me and I to it. Is it any wonder when my wife and I were married I wanted to share this experience with her? I had told her about the river and the trout leaping the little waterfall, of going down the rapids on my raft, and most of all the dense forest on the island. And so, I was going home. As we approached the farm my excitement mounted when I began recognizing farms and houses along the highway. Finally I spotted the sign announcing the gravel road that fronted our farm. I was now exactly five-tenths of a mile from our front gate. I noticed the gravel road had been paved. I was surprised to learn the front gate was no longer there. Then I discovered the old house was gone, the barn was gone, the orchard was gone. My parents had sold the farm about ten years previously to a man with a bulldozer who used to build roads in the area. With his bulldozer he had completely leveled the small hill behind the barn and pushed it into the gully that used to carry away the spring floodwaters. As an ex-farmboy I was forced to admit these were beautiful level fields. But the thing that really troubled me, was when I looked in the direction of the island, the forest was gone. In fact I even had trouble finding the river because even it had been moved, deepened and narrowed. In fact it now looked more like an irrigation canal running between two plowed fields. I just stood there a long time looking at what had once been that magnificent wild river, and slowly, sadly, I knew what Thomas Wolfe had meant when he said, "you can’t go home again." But every once in a while I hear a chorus of birds singing and once more in my memory I go back again, my dog Friday trots by my side, and we explore my island. And then, I know once more that I am home. (This was originally a 1980 speech for Toastmasters.) |