"Movement is one of the great consolers of human woe; movement, a sense of continual migration, is the history of America."
--V.S. Pritchett
We were always moving—from
my birthplace in Toledo, Ohio, to Kentucky: Westwood, Rush, and Cannonsburg, back to Ohio: South Point, Proctorville,
Burlington, Scottown, Chesapeake, Burlington again,
Chesapeake again. We lived in a house that leaned so hard it looked about to
collapse, several trailers past their prime, two-bedroom townhouse apartments,
a few drafty houses (one supposedly haunted), and a nice big place with a bomb
shelter on the Ohio River, then back to another broke-down trailer. I attended
eight different schools before sixth grade, and would have added more to that
count had my mom not completely ignored school district boundaries and kept
taking us to the same school every day, something they didn’t catch her at
until I was ready to graduate high school. It never bothered me much; I liked
the adventure of it, and would re-create myself, re-tell my story as I made new
friends. No one knew anything about who my people were, and I wasn’t related to
anyone they knew. I didn’t always like the new school or the new home, and so
knowing a change was always around the corner was a comfort. New homes smelled
of bleach, paint, and pizza for dinner. New homes meant a race to claim the
best bedroom or best corner of a shared bedroom, a race to meet the new friends
and find the best hiding places.
I continued moving in my adult
life, as have my brother and sister. In three years of college, I had eight
homes; in the last of these I took in my brother Daniel, who’d left school to
go from couch to couch, hitchhiking and bumming change. He was there long
enough to graduate before moving in with other kids, with nothing more to his
name than a Hefty bag full of thrift store clothes and a used mattress on the
floor. Soon after, I was determined to leave Ohio forever; my partner and I
sold everything we owned in a yard sale—including my car—for a
grand total of $650. We packed what remained of our belongings and drove,
singing all the way, to Washington, D.C. We came back to Ohio, singing the
blues of being “homeless and unemployed,” moving from Fremont to Columbus to
Indianapolis to Lexington in the next few years. My sister, Laura, once moved
six times within one year, or maybe it was two years, but there was a lot of
packing stuff up and down stairs, for sure. She moved to Columbus to go to
school, dropped out and moved to Cincinnati with a boyfriend, then moved back
to Columbus when they broke up, then back to Chesapeake when our mom died, then
to Somerset, Kentucky, with a friend from high school, then to Clarksville,
Tennessee, to marry a military man, the promise of future travels ahead of her.
When we were kids, Mom always
talked about when she spent summers riding with “Aunt Betty’s Show,” the
traveling carnival owned by her aunt Betty and uncle Homer. My brother, sister,
and I listened to the same stories a hundred times. My favorite was the one
about the Cherokee boy that operated the Scrambler; Mom was so enamored of his
smile and long, shiny black hair that she rode it 27 times in a row and
couldn’t walk anymore. The three of us wanted to be carnies, to follow the
bright lights, cotton candy, and rigged games at every little town from
Sandusky to Valdosta. We practiced our tricks as we got older. I ate and blew
fire, Daniel dislocated his shoulders to fit through a tennis racquet, and
Laura contorted her body. Once, Daniel decided to really do it, and I drove him
from my apartment in Columbus to meet a man in Pickerington, who told him to be
back at 7 a.m. tomorrow to leave town. Daniel chewed his nails and furrowed his
brow for a long while before deciding to take the Kirby job instead, and he was
whisked away in a van to Chicago, left in a Polish ghetto with a 100+ pound
blue vacuum cleaner. Instead of dragging it to doors that wouldn’t open for
him, he sat on it and smoked until they picked him back up, then he hitchhiked
back to Ohio the next day. From there, he floated from job to job to job, until
the birth of his daughter anchored him more to home. His last roving job was
during the 2000 Presidential campaign, when he rode around the Midwest in a van
with our mom and grandparents, following the candidates on their speaking tour
and selling buttons to anyone who’d buy.
My grandmother, Betty, spent the
first 7 years of her life shuffled between the homes of her mother’s family
members in the hollers near Denton and Hitchens,
Kentucky, while her Daddy, Frank, was “out hoboin’
around.” Frank would take off on a whim, riding trains anywhere they went,
washing up in the creek, and doing odd jobs for hot meals, leaving his family
behind. When the family moved to Hamilton, Ohio, for some unremembered factory
job, there wasn’t often the means to make the monthly trips back to Kentucky.
If the car broke down or ran out of gas, they just walked the rest of the way
or caught a ride. If they didn’t have enough food or money, Betty was sent to
ask for some bread, bologna, milk, or gas because girls could bum better than
boys. One time, Betty went with her daddy from Ashland to Hamilton,
hitchhiking. They had to sleep in a cornfield along the way, and it was so
cold, she thought she’d freeze to death before morning. I picture her, about 9
or 10, her auburn curls dirty, her pretty brown eyes frowning, her lips pursed,
standing alongside the road holding her daddy’s hand, wearing a dress made from
an older brother’s old shirt or an old flour sack, kicking the toes of her
Oxfords at the gravel and wishing hard for penny loafers with two shiny new
pennies to put in them, having no choice but to deliver a timid knock on a
stranger’s door to ask for some cornbread, some milk, some extra something to
fill their bellies. Betty’s family moved back to Ashland when she was 14, and
she met my grandfather, Billy, and married him to escape the life her daddy had
made for them.
My great-great grandfather,
Silas, otherwise known as “Boone,” moved the family across the country to pick
apples in Washington, dig potatoes in Maine, set tobacco in Kentucky, or any
other work available to feed them all along the roads in between. When his
wife, Mary, died, Boone signed the papers to marry off his three girls as soon
as he thought they were old enough: Berty in Carter
County, Kentucky, Besty in St. Louis, and Marie in
Columbus, Ohio. Boone traveled with Frank for years, hopping freight trains to
get from one place to another, and walking where the train didn’t go. On one
late fall trip back toward Michigan or Illinois from Washington where his
people were, Boone was trying to rest, watch the land go by, and relax. Another
hobo on the freight car got to drinking and talking some big talk, then started
in on Boone. Boone was quiet; he just stared, didn’t say a word one to that
man, who kept going on and on. Miles and miles and miles went by, and that man
kept talking. Somewhere in Montana, Boone stood up, picked up that man by the
collar, and threw him right off the train as they were crossing a trestle. Then
he sat back down, put his hat over his face, and took a nap.
A few years ago, my partner,
daughter, and I took ten days to drive out to Yellowstone from our home in
Lexington. Though our original plan was to drive straight out, stay there
several days, and then drive straight back to Kentucky, we ended up driving
almost the entire time, detouring to crawl BIA highways and state and national
park roads, on the lookout for Mustang ponies, sudden snow-capped peaks, elk,
bison, and grizzly. On about day six of driving, we ended up getting lost in
the dark in the Sawtooth Mountains. Though it was
barely 10 p.m., the small towns through which we passed were dark. We stopped
at hotel after hotel, but the only one that did answer the bell did not take
credit cards, we were short on cash, and there wasn’t an ATM that didn’t stand
behind padlocked doors in the whole town. Eventually, we just decided to drive
to the last town before the Bighorn Mountains, and then nap a few hours in a
parking lot. The sudden amber blade of the sunrise woke me. I looked in the
rearview mirror to see my daughter, Aedin, sleeping
in the back seat, the sunlight glinting through her tousled hair. She hugged
her stuffed monkey close under her chin, its tail tucked in her fist, her thumb
poised on the tip. I roused her with a tap to the knee. “Time for breakfast,” I
said, and got out of the truck to stretch my legs.
