Home Again

I’ve written about the idiosyncrasies and character of Grant County Airport. I haven’t talked about the experience of going – and coming – home again. Although I’ve been asked by folks here how it feels to go home again. So here were my impressions from both this recent trip and my trip back in January.

· DC is my natal city, well, just outside of DC in MD (born in Bethesda and raised in Kensington); before moving to NM, I lived in the DC metro area all but 5 years of my life. There are few more beautiful cities than Washington on the Potomac – the Washington that hugs the wide tidal river and overlooks the rocky fall that is the Potomac Gorge. Especially when flying into the city following the river down from the north. I like a window seat on the left side of the aircraft so I can track the river, watch for White’s Ferry and Sugarloaf Mountain, and on a particularly clear day, find my now-former home in Clarksburg. Then the urban centers thread by underneath: Rockville-Bethesda-Chevy Chase-Northwest DC along Wisconsin Ave-the National Cathedral-GlenEcho and MacArthur Blvd-the reservoir-Georgetown. And finally, the great monumental Washington spreads out as the plane drops past Georgetown Cathedral: the Lincoln Memorial, Key Bridge, the Washington Monument, the White House set on the South Lawn and the Capital, and finally the plane sets down right on the edge of the water across from the SW waterfront. This unfolding of DC has always thrilled me, and always will.
· On the ground in downtown DC – a different visual, auditory and olfactory experience. Assaulted by bus fumes, rumbling and exhaust-ing sidewalk grates over the underground Metro tubes, car horns, and the other forms of “street life” to be dodged or skirted, paced and tolerated.
· Seeing friends and neighbors, both personal and at work – getting hugs is so reaffirming. Having FCC folks stop by my office door to ask where I’ve been and how I’ve been reminded me that there are many forms of family. Having personal friends and former neighbors go out of their way to spend an evening or an afternoon reminded me that distance does not change the connection between us, easy enough to forget when relying on electronic bits to keep the connections fresh.
· Riding the Metro from hotel to work to dinner and back to hotel on a daily basis – at one point, I swore that every citizen from Silver City must be on the platforms at Metro Center. The trains were running more slowly because they were being manually controlled since the truly horrible train accident a few weeks ago. But that meant larger than usual crowds on the platforms. Oddly, though, the trains I rode were not, themselves, overly crowded.
· Losing my balance in the Metro – I had forgotten how jerky the trains are when they start and stop, not to mention the frequency with which they stop short of their discharge point. I was up and starting for the door when the train stopped, only to hear those dreaded words, “this train will be moving forward.” And it did, but I didn’t. I lost my balance backwards and almost fell to my butt except that the two women behind me broke my fall – not entirely voluntarily!
· Losing my balance in the Metro 2 – I got off on the yellow line and went upstairs, having to pass along the red line platform to reach my exit. The platform was the most crowded I remember in years – a train had just disgorged its passengers. They were all flooding toward me, half at a run, afraid that they’d miss the next yellow train, oblivious to the fact that another yellow train would arrive in no more than 7 minutes. In DC like many cities, time is money and is jealously and aggressively marshaled. I found myself on the train-side of the flood, and like monsoon-driven floods, could not safely cross the river of racing humans to the saner side against the wall. People were brushing me and some, bumping me, and I began to worry that when the standing train closed its doors and began to move, I could be in trouble. Sure enough, the doors closed, the train moved out, and just then, a woman moving faster than the rest of the flotsam, pushed past me, and knocked me slightly sideways. I believe that, if I had not been anticipating just such a knock, I would have fallen into the side of the speed-gathering train. My DC-attitude finally took over and I almost simultaneously bulled back, managed to move 2 feet into the onrushing flow and push forward. When I finally cleared the crowd, my heart was racing, face and scalp were wet and my mind was whimpering, “Oh to be home in Silver.”
· And that was the instant that I knew. Reinforcement came on the home-bound flight from Albuquerque through the thunderstorms to Grant Co Airport, when I found myself anxiously looking for – and low-and-behold – finding familiar landscapes to mark my progress home. I realized I could recognize, not just the most obvious, like the huge pits of the mines, but the thread that is NM 15 from Gila Cliff Dwellings, the Mimbres valley along the river and NM Rt 35, Hurley and the old graveyard across Rt 180 from the main drag into town and finally knowing when we started our approach to the airport, not by the loss of altitude but by the change in the land running beneath.

There’s no doubt that I’ll always miss much about Washington and MD and will look forward to visiting whenever I can. But now, when someone here asks how it was to “go” home, my answer is, “it’s just so great to BE home.”