Going, Part 3

I am driving past road signs bearing some of the most iconic place names in the U.S.: Valley Forge, Gettysburg and Hershey (which has a billboard that says, “The Sweetest Place on Earth.”)

Each is pivotal to a big American epoch: Revolution, Civil War, obesity.

And I’m driving through my own past. I’m imagining my car is at the tip of a knitter’s needle, about to close a very big loop.

When I was less than a year old, my family moved from the Lansing area to Dayton, where my father got another job in radio. I grew up and went to college in Columbus. The first 20+ years of my life were spent mostly on the stretch of Interstate 70 in western Ohio.

I have not passed through here since graduation day, 1992.

That day, I threw my diploma on the passenger seat of my car and drove west. I remember the feeling of finally acting on a dream that began before I was eight years old. My teacher in 2nd-grade art class asked me why I always drew pictures of mountains.

“That’s where I want to go,” I said. And I lived in the West 15 years almost entirely in Colorado and the San Francisco Bay Area. The mountains remain, though, the place I want to be.

But before I get there I have to cross the mid-West and the great plains.

I wonder how much of this road I’ll remember from my trip more than 18 years ago. Not a lot, I’m guessing.

But as I cross the Ohio line, I’m starting to see road signs and place names that I know.

As one of the professionally transient (we who take jobs and move across the country every few years) I haven’t seen or heard much on the phenomenon of passing through old, familiar stomping grounds. There is a rush of memories. I expected that, just not this much.

NCPR’s web guy Dale Hobson would tell me, “You never step in the same river twice.” But, if you’re lucky, you can return to a well-known, comfy spot on the bank and reminisce.

And then, once again, move on.