For one year back in 1972 my family moved to Grand Forks, North Dakota. We had been living as bohemian ex-patriots in The Hague, with both my father and mother teaching at the American school there, but after three years of that, my father decided that he’d had enough of teaching for one life and after some searching decided upon coming home and getting his doctorate. He had heard great things about the U of ND through a friend of the family. Apparently they offered the exact program he was looking for and so after school was over for the year, we packed our things and headed straight into the middle of the Great Plains. Straight into the never ending prairies and the cold teeth of winter.
My mother and sister and I arrived at night after taking the train from Chicago. I don’t remember how we found a house but we did. My brother, father and our dog Toby drove the U-haul and came a day or two later. That year we lived in a duplex where I don’t remember the neighbors, but remember the Kings who lived across the alley.
They canceled that doctorate program the year we arrived. Half way around the world for nothing I guess. My mother took a job with the Girl Scouts where her territory covered the eastern half of both North and South Dakota. My father took a few classes here and there but mostly we hunkered down and waited for the spring thaw and the new jobs that might come with it.
Down around the corner, past the cornfield, was the cemetery; one of the few places in town with trees and gentle hills and smooth winding roads to ride your bike. My brother and I had saved twenty bucks buy a used red Schwinn if we pooled our money. I don’t remember him ever riding it though. Soon after we bought it, the seat fell off and I spent the spring and early summer of the next year riding on the rear fender, bare-footed, longhaired in a pair of cut off jeans. Tasting the first real joys of freedom as I traveled by myself or with my friends to the Piggly Wiggly, the Salvation Army thrift store, my friend Charlie Schmitt’s house, or the winding paths that snaked their way through the tombstones.
Early that summer, before we left and made our way to Frankfurt, my mother signed up the Girl Scouts and by default her children, to clean an area of the Grand Forks river bank that was often used for dumping. There amidst the overgrowth and gnarled trees was a makeshift city dump, filled with discarded appliances, household waste building material and rotting bits of clothing.
I found a small jar that was full of safety matches. I was eight and didn’t think my parents would have let me keep them, so I snuck them into the front pocket of my jeans and spent the rest of the afternoon wondering if anyone would notice. No one did.
Later that afternoon, or the next day or week, I showed my friend Laurence my treasure and we set about starting small fires in a vacant lot down behind the warehouses. We would stomp them out before they got to big until one finally did and then we ran and hid. After the fire trucks put out the fire, Laurence went home and I rode through the cemetery. I stopped by an old oak and there in it’s roots, next to an almost consumed small grave marker, I buried that jar of matches.
When I am older than I am now. When my children have grown but are not yet old themselves, I’ll go back to Grand Forks. I will have grown my hair long again, and the skin of the bottom of my feet will be rough and scraped. I will rent a bicycle who’s seat I will remove so I can ride on the fender and find that tree, that marker, that gnarled old root and dig for an old glass jar.
And when I find them, I’m going to sit in the green shade and try every one, until they spark and sputter in the summer heat.
