“I Just Know I’ll Be Happy Anywhere But Here”

A brief, random memoir from last year’s notes. I thought I had more of these than I did.

Growing up in a suboptimal family situation in northeast Columbia, South Carolina, I longed to get away. On sleepy, nothin’-doin’ Sundays afternoons I would walk three-quarters of a mile from what passed for home to climb the berm between Edgewater Drive and Interstate 20.

To go one way would take you to Augusta and then, after a long stretch of pine-woods nothing, Atlanta. Also, all the way out to just east of El Paso, Texas, but Atlanta was the western frontier of my knowledge, and I didn’t care for the west then. I wanted to go in the other direction, to Interstate 95, the junction of which is the sole reason Florence, South Carolina, exists. I wanted to turn north, and go to Washington, Baltimore, and New York City. Maybe I’d feel more at home in Boston. At least some place where it snowed in the winter.

Anywhere but here...it’s one of humanity’s oldest stories, and thank God mine had a happy ending. Uncle Jim was right. The West is the best.

Westbound US 160 through the San Luis Valley, on my way to the county seat to drop off my local elections ballot. One thousand, eight hundred miles and even further away in time from where I was and, again, thank God.