.: A long walk along another frozen stream, through frozen cattails, a Hawthorn grove, and bundles of sumac and burdock and other strange thistley-flowered things… makes me realize how inept I am with this little digital camera– so much looks good on that LCD screen, but when I import them onto the laptop… well, it shows how hit-or-miss the operation, at least in my hands, is.

But I traveled the lands of my youth, again: Ilion, New York, a small Mohawk Valley township; my house only several hundred yards from the Erie Canal, or what is left of it.

Here is the house in which I grew up, though then it was brown– a color that I, and my brothers, painted it to be long ago. I remember hand scraping the paint off the old boards, sweating and resentful all summer long. I also remember that first winter we were there, when it snowed so much that we– the CLark children– constructed a massive ice-slide down the hill that still lies to the north of the house. For days we sprayed it with water, lovingly fashioning a jump at the end and shoring it up, rebuilding it, strengthening it to withstand the speeds we were starting to attain on our sleds and inner tubes. Strange how large it seemed then– and perhaps that is a typical thing to say in regards to one’s youthful conceptions, but believe me, the ride down was like sailing down the frozen slopes from the halls of Asgard to the more mundane world below.

My parents drove me through most the old streets, the ones I ran or biked through, past the houses that once held friends, enemies, or those girls on whom I had the most unbearably exquisite crushes. I rode past the corner where I was pushed onto the ground for being “smart”; past the house where I was punched in the face for the first time; past the library where I spent most my waking, non-school hours; past soccer fields where I scored 4 goals in the 1st quarter and was benched by my compassionate coach for the other 3; past the forests where my friends and I would run and fight with sticks, like quarterstaffs, on our lunch recess; we even walked into the little mini-mall, that I once thought was so important to the town, where I bought christmas presents for my family for years and years, where I first played video games, where I first heard and saw that Space Shuttle explosion on the TV in Radio Shack. That mini-mall was all but vacant, a hollow and depressing reminder of the state of things in little Ilion, an impoverished and difficult area. Last time I had talked to my old friends, they sang to me a litany of our acquaintances’ fates: this one died in a car accident, drunk; this one got that one pregnant; this one died in a car accident, hit by our other friend, who was drunk; this one was pregnant, no one knew the father and she wasn’t telling; this one moved away for a bit, but came back and got into an accident up in the Gorge, drunk. Didn’t die but had trouble walking.

Ten miles outside that town and the entire landscape is farmland. Beautiful fields and thick forest, hawthorn and hemlock and pine and maple. Streams cut through the old hills, and the Adirondacks slumber, their soft, worn, and rounded mountain-tops choked with the twisted stubble and broken stones of an old old face.

I have alot to say on that, I think– something about these people’s existential friction, how it is impossible to be old-world, like their German, Polish, Dutch forebears, but they are unable to be new-world, either. But it is too early for me to say, I have seen so little and what I’ve seen has been choked with memory, and memory knows no objectivity. So I will leave it for now, a suggestion and a sympathy. And I will go to help my mother cook her spaghetti sauce, for though she is mostly German, she lived among Italians most of her life; let us see just how it comes out.