How to Escape Your Hometown (or, “Lindsay Lohan and Lotto Tickets”)
If you’ve never been to the Kurt Cobain Memorial Park, you are making good life choices, and I commend you. It is located in Aberdeen, Washington. This is, famously, Kurt Cobain’s hometown. I had never been there before this past summer, when I drove through with my family in a rented camper van. Now that I have been there, I can maybe see why Mr. Cobain moved to Seattle.
Proper Pacific Northwest summer. (Garibaldi, Oregon; August 2023)
This summer we were tourists in Aberdeen. We headed straight for the memorial park, since there’s little else to see in town apart from homeless people and an excellent assortment of bong shops. The park comprises a small patch of grubby grass at the edge of a slightly distressed neighborhood and a welcome sign that looks like it was fashioned out of driftwood by a Boy Scout with ADHD, and a pirate hook instead of a left hand. And he is left-handed.
A teenaged kid was standing in the crabgrass wearing a set of oversized headphones, listening to, apparently, the devil. The kid was convulsing in a standing position, screaming to no one in particular, and shaking his clenched fists vigorously, as if he had dice in each hand and really wanted to roll a Yahtzee. I thought, this kid is running away without getting anywhere. That’s enough to make anyone desperate for a Yahtzee, a one-in-a-million, some salvation in Seattle. Or, if that’s too far to fly, then at least a bit of oblivion. That’s what you do when you don’t know how far there is to fall.
Good job, America. (Stone Hill, Montana; August 2023)
A few days later we drove our camper van through my own hometown. I hadn’t been there in years. My old neighborhood hasn’t aged well. It’s sort of like the Lindsay Lohan of neighborhoods. The kids said they felt sorry for me because I had to live there when I was younger. It’s nice that they’re old enough now to pity me. Parenting win, I guess.
Despite my kids’ misgivings, it was a pretty decent neighborhood to grow up in. Nobody ever got mugged, unless you hung out in a San Jose Sharks parka at the little mini mart at the corner strip mall after dark flashing an unscratched lotto ticket to passersby. My buddy Joel did that once. He didn’t win the lottery. He also got grounded. Probably for not winning the lottery. He had tiger parents. I call them that because they were cranky and slept a lot.
Five jewels on a beach. (Arcadia Beach, Oregon; August 2023)
When memory lane ran out of pavement, I bought my kids a round of milkshakes and we left my hometown behind. I’ve done that a lot over the years. I never thought I was running away. But maybe I was. If I was, you might look at me and I say I got somewhere. Maybe that’s true. And yet, here I am, a rider on that same road out of town I’ve driven a hundred times before. Maybe this road is a circle. It always seems to bring me back. But it doesn’t feel anymore like I’m not getting anywhere. The kids are four jewels in the rearview mirror. Shannon chatters at me from the passenger seat. It feels like I just keep rolling Yahtzees.
