A Sense of Place

 Here is a piece I wrote for class that still needs some tweaking. Our assignment was to write an essay about a place, and though I like parts of this I think I felt pressured to find a theme that still doesn't quite fit.

     I never really knew how my parents had found the tiny town of Union Pier, Michigan, but we stayed there for a week while taking a Mid-Western road trip when I was twelve. We came for the beach and stayed in a rental home a short drive away, a high-ceilinged cabin with a lofted room that my mother was too nervous to let me sleep in. My memories of the place are scattered and vague- I remember the shallow wood and steep hill which miraculously ended in the beach; I remember driving through the neighborhoods with their simple and idyllic yards, but I don’t remember the people. For all my twelve-year-old self recollects, we were staying in a ghost town.
       This all came about because of my father, a sometimes unsettlingly passionate man, whose obsession with Edward Hopper fueled our rambling journey through the Midwest to those cities where his paintings were scattered: Cleveland, Ohio, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. I believe our time in Union Pier was a concession to my mother, whose love for Edward Hopper was a bit more sedated and who most likely had been looking forward to our semi-annual Cape Cod getaway.
       My sister was, at the time, a difficult fifteen, though most ages of hers I can recollect would be described as difficult since we didn’t get along for most of our young lives. As for me, I was already a sullen and skeptical twelve, bitter for being chubby and for not having had a boyfriend (even though I had only just finished the 6th grade) and already dreading the prospect of going back to school. Yet somewhere in me I held a romantic notion of how simple and quaint a small town might be, with fresh foods and friendly neighbors, all of the pristine joys of country living.
      I grew up in a suburb just outside of Washington, D.C. called Reston, Virginia, famous for being one of the first planned communities in the 1960s, a place where one could work, relax, and raise a family without ever leaving. I held an elitist air throughout my childhood simply because we would leave, my parents taking me and my sister into the depths of D.C. where they both went to college, had their first apartments, and not-so-secretly wanted to live. No matter how much I loved it, though, I always held on to dreams of endless fields and farms, having read romantic books as a child like Where the Red Fern Grows and My Side of the Mountain in which the plots were centered around a kind of scenic beauty I had never really experienced.
      I lived in the same house from the age of 1 to 17, a smallish town house with a tiny square front yard and a rocky, fenced in backyard that lead to the alleyway where we once saw a possum (my sister mistook it for a monster).  The backyard was mostly taken up by a large air conditioning unit, and when I was much younger than twelve we tried to grow carrots in the dried soil that surrounded it. To my naïve astonishment, nothing grew. The woods in my town were our source of nature but after a ten-minute walk in any direction you would arrive at some other shopping center or elementary school. All of the lakes where I grew up were man-made.
         Our family vacations typically centered around city adventuring; my parents were far from the naturalistic type, and Union Pier certainly wasn’t covered in the farms or fields I so arbitrarily craved. Instead, it was a beach town, and our days were spent on the shores of Lake Michigan. I came to realize later that small towns were too intimate to hold me, too slow to sustain me, but when we first arrived in that self-contained Michigan town I found myself convinced of its magic.
     It was the beach itself which seemed to me like a mystical place, a lake which looked as endless as any sea, an oceanic imposter. On the first day, there were flies, so tiny we could barely even see their swarms. They made us aware of their presence by biting furiously at our exposed flesh until we conceded and left the beach. When we came the next day they were gone, replaced by ladybugs by the thousands who festered amongst the wettest of the wet sand by the waters edge almost a foot wide. I had never seen so many in one place and the next day, they were all dead. Up and down the beaches with no end in sight, their tiny carcasses lent an apocalyptic air, for it was the shortest life cycle my twelve-year-old eyes had ever seen.
      Our week-long stay had a curious effect on my family. It was as though each one of us was testing out our roles in small town life, a big “what if?” hanging over our every action, falling into a great game of pretend with our daily routine. My Dad and I would always rise early no matter where we were, and I never did learn how to sleep in, unless it was to sleep off a hangover. When I was in pre-school I used to fall asleep before my dad came home from work and wake up after he had left, so I learned early on to rise while the sky was still deep blue in order to drink apple juice and watch him shave.
       My Dad and I still used the mornings to spend time together, and every morning in Union Pier we would walk to a nearby bakery to get pastries and donuts for my still-sleeping sister and mother. I didn’t really like to eat whatever fresh baked treat we found but loved the very process of choosing and the joys of inhaling the thick, cloying scent of sugar.  After the bakery we would go to the train tracks nearby and leave a quarter or two to be flattened by the rumbling steel we could hear each night from the house as we drifted off to sleep. We went back to the tracks each morning but could never seem to find the spare change we had left the day before.
      As a family we were full of energy and exclusivity, having spent most of our time as a foursome instead of celebrating holidays and birthdays with sprawling factions of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. In Union Pier I can remember feeling as though our laughter interrupted something in the static world we had burst into. Every summer prior we had gone as a family to Chatham, Cape Cod, my parents being great fans of WASPy culture despite my fathers (not often discussed) Jewish descent. We rented the same house and joined the thicket of tourists who filled the beaches and restaurants. The townspeople catered to us with pleasure, with lobster specials and a Sunday night band that played popular songs from the American lexicon to bundled families on blankets and lawn chairs. Unlike our time spent in Cape Cod, where the townies and tourists were easily differentiated, we stood out in Union Pier as the only strangers in a strange land, too starkly contrasted for a place where everyone knew each other.
       Each night after dinner in Michigan my family and I would go to the same small ice cream shop and drive down to the beach, milkshakes in tow, to try and catch a glimpse of the sunset in an attempt to perpetuate a Cape Cod ritual. At this time of day the beaches were completely empty, not very different from the earlier hours we had spent there. We could feel free to run and yell, but even my sister and I would often just set up camp under blankets and wait. And wait. And wait. And even though each day the sun would slowly descend and set, it never gave the triumphant finish our vacation days required. We left each night disappointed, returning to the cabin in the dark immersed in the night symphony of summer cicadas and distant toads. 
         On our last morning in Michigan my Dad and I went to the bakery, buying them out of their stale leftovers from the day before to satiate us for the long ride home. We had just returned and placed the brown bag down on the cabin’s kitchen counter when we heard it- the trains whistle. We had learned from sleep to block it out but there it was, the wheels certainly at that very moment churning over those last few quarters we had half-heartedly tossed onto the tracks. We ran for it, not speaking but laughing through our panting breaths as we dashed through the neighborhood, out past the bakery, reaching the tracks just as the last car rumbled by. The quarters were there and sure enough, the train had laid them flat, smooth and ultimately worthless.
        I have no idea whether or not we keep those relics of our morning walks, or if we did where they might be now. But I think the purpose was less to have them than to have seen them, to have conquered that most solid of materials. At the very least, it seemed like a small town thing to do. When we finally rolled out of that quiet town I remember feeling relieved even though I was now leaving the wide expanse of sky for a seemingly endless enclosed car ride. My place in the world was cemented, confirmed; the way I had been raised would be better suited to the anonymity of large cities and crowded towns, where I could, without apology, be loud and free.