Finding Home in the Ashes of the Black Forest Fire
What makes a home?
In May I moved out of New York City and have spent the last two months traveling around the country uncovering what it’s like to depend on others for a sense of home and stability. I made temporary homes in New Jersey and then Philadelphia before heading west to see friends and family in San Francisco and Colorado Springs. Punctuating my summer travels I’m ending at Boston, where I currently write, attempting to understand what it was like to gain a nephew while at the same time loosing the most permanent sense of home I had.
Throughout my travels, “home” has been a recurring theme. Without a New York lease to hold on to, I traveled to the couches and spare rooms of my friends and family. One of those temporary notions of home, perhaps the one most easily considered as “home-base” would be tragically altered during my stay and would amplify my thoughts on heart, home, and the mind.
1. Home is where the heart is.
I couldn’t find the origin, but almost every foreign language website that explains the idiom “Home is where the heart is” in reference to this quote:
“People long to be at home; your home is whatever place you long to be. I’ve had a lovely time visiting you, but home is where the heart is, and I think it’s time I went back. If home is where the heart is, then my home is my parents’ old house. I’ve never loved my own apartment the way I love their place.”
The ending words hold especially true: I’ve enjoyed many of the apartments I’ve lived in, but that’s mostly because I’ve always had New York City as my backyard. It has never actually been the domicile itself, the hardwood floors I walked on or the bed I slept in, that I loved. In fact, you rarely hear a New Yorker say “I’m heading home;” we usually say “I’m heading back to my apartment” or “I’m heading to bed.” Rarely is their apartment their home. The city is their home, as in when a NYer is abroad and catches a flight “back home.” Home isn’t where you dorm, but where you’re from.
I am from Iowa. I grew up in a small rural community far away from malls or airports or apartments. At one time the state’s motto, read when you crossed into the border, was “Iowa: A Place to Grow.” After 21 years, I grew up and if “home is whatever place you long to be” then home was no longer Iowa. I longed for New York, a place I’d never been, and moved.
I moved and I stayed for six years. I found home on 8th Avenue in Chelsea and walked the pavement, earned my masters from NYU, and wrote a book of poems about the experience. I met friends, had my heart-broke, broke-hearts, and had many incredible, eye-opening experiences. But at the end, I longed for a place that didn’t ask for so much. Rent, sure, but also dining, socializing, traveling, existing. Everything. I longed for a place that didn’t need (or want) to be the best, because being the best makes life pretty cut-throat. So, I made plans to move somewhere that is less concerned about competition and found Philadelphia. I just had to keep myself occupied from May until August.
Immediately after the early-May move out of NYC I stayed with my boyfriend at his parent’s house in New Jersey. It wasn’t his original house he grew up in but his parents are there and it is in his “home-state.” Does he long to be there? I would say so. Or at least, he longs to be close to there. Which makes me wonder: does one have to live at the exact spot for that spot to be considered home? Or does one only needs only to have access to the spot?
A New Yorker lives at their apartment but has access to the city, therefore their home is New York. My boyfriend and I are moving to Philly, but he still access to his “home” in Jersey. Can one have multiple homes, multiple longings?
2. Home is where the mind is.
In a recent e-mail from a friend and colleague, she wrote:
“Currently I’ve settled on the mind as the ultimate home, the place we cannot escape as our compass point, and the mind is integrated with the body in my take on it.”
Her thought stuck with me. My immediate question was: is the mind is the same as the heart? In its metaphorical use, “the heart” represents “love” or maybe as described earlier, “longing.” So, the logic of her thinking might be broken down to something like: home is where you long & love to be. “Home is where the mind is” means home is wherever you are — not where you long to be. This holds true only if we agree with her that the mind is integrated with the body. In other words: wherever you are is also where your mind is. For example, I could long to be in cleats on the football field but in reality my mind/body is sitting in a plastic chair at the stadium.
My mind has been a prison. My mind has been a fire…
3. Home is where the family is.
During my annual pilgrimage to San Francisco I always stay with a best friend. His house, a building that survived the SF earthquake and fire (the only one on the block), forms the center of a courtyard of apartments and is entered first through underground tunnel, second by opening a wooden paint-chipped door, and third by passing by a voluptuous garden. My friend has a quote, adopted from Tales of the City, that “There is your biological family, which you can’t change, and your logical family [which, with logic, does change].” My logical family when I was growing up was mostly illogical, how could the football captain also reasonably play MAGIC: The Gathering? High School isn’t really a place for logic or reason anyways, just hormones and rebellion. But who doesn’t have that narrative? Anyways — my point — when I made home in New York it was logical to find a flock of birds to fly with, or, a school of fish to swim with (I like that one more). It was logical and necessary for me, as a gay man from the rural Midwest to belong to a tribe denied to me earlier in life. To join the crowd and feel the power of being part of a collective as opposed to an individual. I was one among many, easily replaceable and forgettable. But that’s just New York.
Finding a boyfriend changes that logic. Swimming the ocean’s current with your school of fish just becomes more difficult when there’s a beautiful seahorse swimming opposite, eyeing you. The logic changes and the longing changed, so must too, the family change.
The timing of the Philadelphia decision was paired with that of my nephew being born. After my San Francisco trip I left for another home — this time in Black Forest, Colorado Springs — where my mom, dad, brother, sister in-law and soon to be nephew reside.
One morning, shortly after my arrival, my mom knocked on my door and said “Craig, her water broke! We’re going to the hospital!” With excitement and confusion (is it really happening?) I packed a bag (what do I bring?) and left to see my baby nephew, Emmet, who would be born on D-Day, June 6.
A few days later I was comparing two bottles of pinot noir at a liquor store when my mom got a text, and then another, and then a phone call. All stated that the winds had shifted for a local forest fire and was moving quickly within the vicinity of our home.
I looked back at the bottles of wine in my hand and realized that the logic had changed — the bottles seemed so awkward, so obtuse, so… useless. Placing them back on the rack, we left the store. As we drove closer to home, a dark plume could be seen jetting from the horizon line into the sky, fracturing the blue and green. The distance from the plume, as well as our home, became shorter and shorter. Our conversation started to dissolve into the faint sound of the radio. Full dialogue turned to quiet fragments. Fear began to replace our Midwestern optimism.
We walked through the front-door, unsure as what to do at first. Routine was to step-in, take a seat, and act in a fashion that lends itself to a happy, “Honey, I’m home!” Only the formula had changed. A fire was coming.
We started with small stuff, loading documents into the car just in case — but after a few trips, you would start to notice the smell.
Your eyes itch. You note the familial smell and feeling of being near a campfire, but with the unnerving sense of having it all around you, with every step you take, yet you can’t see the flames just yet; what you do see is a steady flow of twisting and churning black clouds move passed the roof like a column of wraiths. When the clouds become so thick they began to black out the sun. Then you start to sweat.
Then you start to pack a little more frantically. You have to make quick decisions and strange choices: dad’s favorite paper-weight or a computer disk drive? Why are you holding these two objects? What are you suppose to decide about them? What is happening?
And then you leave.
We went to my brother’s house where the newborn had just arrived from the hospital. We had little time to be exhausted.
Ten minutes grew into thirty, the smoke plume no longer looked like something from meteorology, but from mythology. It grew into a radical serpent, with ashen scales and veins of orange. The fire was close and the air was thick. The electricity went off. A plane flew over the house and it froze me in my steps. Visually, yes, it is powerful, but sonically, ten-times more powerful. The image: a propeller plane coming out of a cloud, flying just above your home, so fast, the pistons pounding so hard you can feel it in your lungs. Its wings are marked with all the official stamps and utilitarian finishes of a tool of The State. They are fighting a war against nature, and nature was coming directly for us. Law enforcement sped down the gravel, ran out to order “evacuate now!”. And so we did.
We found our next home in a hotel, all six of us. The logic had changed. Hotels are for vacation, or for temporary stays en route “back home” or for work. But here we were, three generations from the same family, doors apart from each other on the same floor, exhausted, confused, and anxious. There was no sleep.
The next day we would watch the first house, the first “home” burn down, live on Channel 5. The logic had changed. Home is where the heart is. Home is where the mind is. We took turns crying and comforting. The one who was up would help the one who was down. An hour later your role might switch. Our most solid structure was not our hearts nor our minds, but a five-day old baby named Emmet. I could touch his fingers, rock him gently, hear him squeak. And I could forget everything. My heart would know warmth. My mind would feel peace. My family, would make home.
