Chasing places, chasing the past

In my senior year of high school, for my pick-yer-topic college application essay, I wrote about Home - how I'd long felt like I didn't have a Home, a Hometown, a Homeplace, a Back Home.  I hadn't moved all that often, relatively speaking - I wasn't a military kid or anything like that - but often enough that where I was born, and where I was a little kid, and where I  grew up, and where I started to feel grown-up, were all different places.  Where were my roots?

A woman asked me once where I was from, and I started to cry.  That's the story I told in my essay, except then I added an ending to the story, saying I'd found a home in Harrisonburg.  Which is true, but that doesn't make it an ending.  Personal essays need endings, but stories don't always.

I don't know if our thoughts move in circles, or just the same straight line over and over again, but here I am again, back wondering about roots and homes and places.  This time I'm not thinking about one place I can claim as my own, though.  I'm looking back a little farther, to the  deeper roots laid by people born five generations before me, and here's what I'm thinking, in case you were curious:

My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, and theirs, and theirs, were born in the Philippines.  We say that makes me 1/4 Filipino. We have a long and disturbing tradition of applying such mathematics to race.  Is it equally as problematic to quantify our cultural heritage like that?  Am I Filipino at all, or can I only fairly say that my grandfather was?

My grandmother, and her parents, and their parents, and theirs, were born in rural Georgia.  Does that make me 1/4 Southern?  Or does that make me 1/4 Irish, because my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in Ireland?  Or English, because another great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in England?  Or French, because etc.?  More to the point, do I have roots in Georgia, or am I as much a stranger there as anywhere else - Ireland, say, or England, or France?

My grandfather, and his parents, and their parents, were born in the frozen stretches of Montana.  Does that make me 1/4 Montanan?  Or 1/4 Polish, because my great-great-great-great-grandfather spoke Polish, and because of that I carry a Polish last name?  If I moved to Montana today - oh god, the winters, I can't even finish that thought.

My grandmother was born in Southern California.  Her parents were born in Tennessee.  But go back far enough and there I'm Irish, too.  So I'm 1/4... Californian? Southern? Irish? Something?

If you're sitting there asking what's the point of all this, well, that's the question I'm asking, too.  Maybe there's not much point to any of this.  Or maybe there is a point, in that our history and our heritages are somehow inescapable.

Or maybe, as a third option, the truths behind these lists of people and places and dates - marriages, christenings, deaths, burials, the tiny scraps of lives that stay behind on paper after everyone who remembers a person has died - maybe the data doesn't matter a whit, but family history does.  Not the facts, but the stories we tell about ourselves and our inheritances.

Maybe it matters less whether Richard Regan immigrated from Ireland in 1752, and more that the family says the Regans are Irish, a tiny bit of history passed down long after the name of that first immigrant was forgotten.  Maybe it doesn't matter that the Domonoskes and the Huffmans moved to Montana from Canada and North Dakota, but matters a lot that the family takes pride in being descended from hardy frontier homesteaders.

But then again, maybe the facts do matter, if only because facts can reveal which stories are more legendary than others, and because knowing what's untrue can be illuminating.  Oh, but maybe not.  If I knew all the answers, I'd be sleeping in my bed at home right now, so since I'm typing on a netbook in north Atlanta, you can tell that I'm clueless.

I find it best to start a trip by doing two very important things.  The first is to prepare really, really well.  After you've done that, the second thing is to acknowledge that you're still utterly unprepared.  So yep, I'm almost entirely unsure about how I feel about the role of family history and heritage in my own life.  And here I am, trying to figure it out.

I'm traveling around the country tracking down the places my family is from, staring at the horizons, smelling the air, stepping in the dirt.  And I'm interviewing the older family that's left, and asking for stories about the lost generations, and digging a little into genealogies and old photo albums.  And along the way I'm starting to come up with - if not clear answers - at least more questions to ask.

And that's at least 1/4 of a start.

stop 1: Atlanta

I made it safe and sound (if a little delayed) to Atlanta, Georgia, where giant peaches perch atop buildings and everybody calls me "Sugar."

I'm currently hiding from the sun and hopping on a wifi signal at a Caribou Coffee in downtown Atlanta, and soon I will be taking my rental car down into the depths of rural Georgia.  A certain somebody who will not be named described this region to me as "hot, humid and mean."  Whoohoo!

Seriously, though, I am excited, so I won't spend too long typing up a blog post and I'll try to hit ye old dusty trail pretty soon.  Just a few things to note:

1. One of the conductors on my train had an accent EXACTLY like Kenneth's on 30 Rock.  I always though Kenneth's accent was completely made up, but turns out there is in fact a strain of Southern accent just like that.  File that under things-i-never-knew.

2.  I'd forgotten how surreal the Southern landscape could be.  There were times when the view out the train window looked like it was ripped out of a fantasy novel or a scifi film.  Don't know what I'm talking about? One word: KUDZU.  I didn't snap a picture but I'll see if I can sooner or later - imagine forests so coated in vines that you can't even see the trees underneath.  It's both beautiful and deeply creepy (and an ecological disaster, of course).

3. A caribou coffee employee just came by and offered me free samples of a pineapple coconut smoothie.  And then made me take two, because nobody else was drinking them.  Life is great.

4.  Does travel = freedom? Companies certainly promote the idea - my Hertz folder actually has FREEDOM written across it in giant yellow letters. Do people believe it does?  Is this an American concept?  Travel doesn't have to be linked to freedom - it could be tied to escape, to adventure; it could be seen as a mark of economic prosperity; it could be seen as a duty, or as self-improvement.  My rental car packet screaming "FREEDOM" probably has me biased, but right now I'm feeling like in America, we travel to prove our freedom - we go somewhere to prove that we could go anywhere.  Agree? Disagree? Should I stop with the national identity essentialism?

i'm leaving, on a diesel train...

Is it mandatory, when leaving on a trip, to sing this song? I think it is.

So tonight - TONIGHT! - I depart for Atlanta.  And in Atlanta I pick up a rental car. And then I drive south to the part of Georgia that is almost Alabama, and also almost Florida.  And then I will drive up to the house of my grandmother's niece, give her the regards of all my family, settle into her spare room and start trying to explore my family history and what it means to be rooted in the soil of rural Georgia.

But right now - RIGHT NOW! - I kind of need to pack. Because we're looking at D minus 1 hour, where D is the time I must Depart in order to get to Charlottesville early enough for my travel terror to stay under control.

Travel terror, n. The almost-uncontrollable fear that all of your travel plans will be destroyed because of a traffic jam, a declined credit card, a clerical error, confusion over dates, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, unexpected rebellions, train crashes, lost cell phones, airplane-goose collisions, unscheduled apocalypses, acts of God, acts of man, acts of children, or action-movie-like-explosions.  The only known remedy is to leave your house three or four hours early for everything.

Anyway, I won't write a long post now. I just wanted to let you know that I won't have email access everywhere on my trip - I might not even have it OFTEN on my trip. I make no guarantees of frequent bloggage.  But wherever I have cell phone access, I can tweet (on my 20th-century-phone, lacking a keyboard and any-and-all smartphone capabilities, but texting twitter still works!)

So check my twitter - @camilareads - or look in the sidebar of this blog for frequent assurances that I'm alive.

My bag is calling, so Camila out.

i see an epigraph in here...

The Book of Lost Railroad Photographs
Amy Beeder

Something in a locomotive, that black-clad traffic’s rush,
            something in the silver-tinted background: always
that tally of progress & catastrophe, engines wrecked
            those dark men bunched, clutching shovels, indistinct
in coils of smoke, and engines whole...


                                                                        the rumor of America
long-gone & slumbering, that even thus lost rushes on—


Read the rest at VQR online.

the next trip

So this blog will shortly become, once again, a travel blog in reality as well as in name.

I will be departing on a cross-country - or rather, country-circling - train adventure.  Yes, indeed, America has trains (True story: I had to explain this to a non-native friend, who was actually under the impression that we had no trains at all).

Along the way I'll be visiting the parts of the country where my family tree is rooted - rural Georgia, the northern reaches of Montana, southern California - and trying to gather some family stories, histories and legends along the way.  And thinking about trains, and immigration, and migration, and rootedness, and why we tell the stories about our past that we do.

That's the idea, anyway.

To prep I've been... well, I haven't been doing much yet.  Reading some Paul Theroux.  Brushing off my voice recorder.  And getting gifts from my father, from a family tree to old letters. A short list of things I never knew before these presents: our last name was originally spelled Demanowski.  My great-great-great-great-grandmother, a short, heavyset woman who immigrated over 150 years ago, had 9 children in 18 years.  Her blue-eyed husband could not read or write - though they arrived in 1852, they weren't the fleeing German intellegentsia we studied in AP US, when we memorized immigration demographics.

***

From one of my grandmother's cousins, a Catholic priest - no, not just a priest, the bishop of Atlanta! - we a letter survives.  He had never met my grandmother, but wrote to congratulate her on the birth of her fourth child, and to apologize for not writing earlier, due to his illness.  He mentioned:

"Let me say here that in every Mass I make a remembrance of "all my dear ones in all sides of the family". And, since I am an Easterner, in order to keep the heavenly record straight, I mention explicitly my good cousins (an ever increasing clan, it seems) in California.  Incidentally, I forgot to tell the Archbishop of Philadelphia, who is of Polish descent, that I have some Polish cousins in California.  However, since three of the children are red-heads, it would seem as though the Irish strain predominates..."

But just how Polish are the members of red-headed Domonoske clan?   When the Demanowskis emigrated from Europe, there was no Polish state - their passports were Prussian.

Time to bone up on my continental European history...?

intruder alert

The other day two men tried to break into my friends' apartment while two of them were there.  William, one of the roommates who was not there, mentioned this offhandedly.

"WHAT?"  That is me speaking, as anyone with a passing acquaintance with William could probably infer.  William's speech could very rarely be transcribed using all caps.

"Yeah."

"WHY?  WHEN? What did they want? What happened? Did they call the police? Did the police get there in time? Did they catch them?"

"Yup."

"YOU DIDN'T ANSWER MY OTHER QUESTIONS!"

"Oh, and it turns out one of them was [another friend]'s brother.  And he had a stun gun or something."

"WHAT?  EXPLAIN!!"

"I dunno, I think that's mostly it."

William, I concluded, is terrible at telling stories - although it must be said that withholding that last little fact made for a nice twist ending, very clever, sneaky bastard, etc.  So we went to the apartment and I went straight to the source - the friend, Patrick, who saw it all happen and called the cops.

"Yeah, somebody rang the doorbell and I looked out and didn't know him.  So then he left.  But then I saw somebody trying to break in, so I called the cops."

In despair - what does it look like when you see somebody break in? Who were they? What were they carrying? What were you thinking? What did the cops say? - I turned to our friend Annie, who took over the story-telling with an epic, action-packed, gesture-filled, dialogue-heavy narrative that, while occasionally inaccurate (Patrick was the prime witness, after all, and occasionally corrected her) had all the human drama the boys' versions lacked.  There was her, blissfully unaware as Patrick dialed 911 and watched a screwdriver stabbing at the deadbolt; there was Patrick, running outside to try to get a good look at the fleeing would-be intruders, an act that seemed to me extraordinarily stupid; there were cops, shouting "POLICE!  DOWN!" just as the script would call for, there were perps giving false names, wielding odd weapons, seeking revenge on supposedly cuckolding younger brothers.  It was a much more satisfying narrative.

I will not proceed from here to some cockamamie argument about female superiority in storytelling, although I've presented as much evidence as many pop evolutionary psychologist regularly provide in their books.  I hate evolutionary psychology so much.  So much.  I don't usually waste energy actively hating (pseudo)scientific disciplines but I can't help it.  So much hate.  I am derailing myself.

My point was simply to support a writing-related assertion: the truth is not enough.

late spring

and the world has turned a deep, enclosing green.

The road to our apartment is wrapped in the heavy scent of honeysuckles.

Yesterday I walked home from the grocery store and watched two geese and seven goslings pick their way across the road.

At night I hold the names of Russian formalists close to my chest and wonder how people learn to be happy.