There are not many times in this life where you are able to re-live someone else’s childhood. But if one of your friends happens to be a writer, and she happens to write a memoir about her mother, and you happen to read it, and then by complete chance, you happen to end up on a tiny island where she spent her childhood. You get to walk back into someone else’s childhood.
I spent an afternoon on Vinalhaven, haunted, in mostly a good way. My friend and her mother, and to some degree her siblings, were there with me walking the downtown, on the ferry, traipsing around Lane Island, at the quarry. We were all there together, they were children of course, except my friend who intermittently jumped back and forth from a little girl with broken arms, to a wild child running naked at the quarry. Then she was 50 something and getting married (the entire reason I am on this trip, by the way).
It was weird to walk in a place with so many ghosts. Maine, being well, Maine, and islands being tiny places where everyone knows ya, of course I met someone on the ferry over who knew her mother. He didn’t say much - just that he knew her. So I wasn’t sure what version of her he actually knew. She was a great beauty, a very personable and intelligent woman who commanded the room when she walked in, but she was also haunted by ghosts and those ghosts caused her to drink something fierce. So what he knew of her remained unsaid because that is the island way...vague references to what is known and what is not, innuendo being both kind and spiteful. In his case, I was sure it was kindness, and if I am honest, it looked as though he might have had a long standing relationship with John Barleycorn also.
I was only there briefly but I took it all in: the great beauty, the sadness of an island community that felt lost in time, the comfort of familiarity and the ensuing trap of the same. I bought an oversized Vinalhaven sweatshirt that my daughter will likely steal. I am not sure why I bought it, I mean I have no attachment to the place, except my friend and now a few scattered memories of my own.
But I left that island haunted by something other than the ghosts of dead mothers, childhoods long past and the promise that lives in the heartbeat of every tiny town...the looming future that stretches out before us all. The certainty that we will wake tomorrow just like all the other days, the cocksureness that my time will be long and lovely. I am not sure why but Vinalhaven left me feeling closer to death. A looming omnipresence that I cannot quite shake. I do not know if this is a foreboding of things to come in the more immediate future or just existential fear that is normal for a woman almost 55. But I remain haunted all the same.
Vacations often do not turn out as one plans...most especially if you are like me and travel with absolutely no plans. And neither do lifetimes or childhoods. I suppose all childhoods, if you are lucky, or if you are unlucky, are filled with both good tidings and sad reflections. There is no other way to review your past. No one escapes childhood unscathed. No one. And so, to some degree, we are all haunted by the dreams crushed, the parents who, while doing the best they can, failed. The hurts, the losses, the gifts and the experiences all culminate to grow us up and into these adult sized children with a host of issues, problems, traumas and hurts. And all of that riles just beneath the thin veneer of who we attempt to pass for in every day life: people put together, people functioning, people without addiction, loss and sadness.
I did walk back into her childhood and I haven’t quite been able to shake it honestly. Vinalhaven is a place like no other I have been, so intense in its beauty, heartbeat and breath. It is the kind of places that changes you, forever.
I got lost out on Lane Island. Attempting to hike in shoes that were not meant for hiking. Lost in thoughts about my life and my own childhood that left me broken and wounded. Wondering if any of us ever gets out without forever being haunted by all things we wish happened and all the things we wished did not.
I am glad I went, nevertheless. I heard her words, her beautiful poetic prose in every footfall. Her descriptions of the landscape, the people, the experiences and the pure joy that was found on Vinalhaven. If you want to be forever changed, you should read her book...and I can get you a copy just as soon as she finishes it. And I know a little something about the unfinished work of childhoods lives and lost...makes me wonder if I will ever finish my own memoir about how I lived, and loved and became this fucked up, but still trying version of a grown up child who is severely lacking in so very many areas of this whole adulating game. Maybe we don’t ever grow up, maybe we only grow older and perhaps the secret to a happy adulthood is to understand that no matter who you are or what you are, you will never live long enough to outgrow your childhood, or in my case, my own and now several other people’s childhoods.
I didn’t know you could walk back into someone else’s childhood...but I am here to tell you, you can and if you are brave enough to do that for someone else, you have the courage required to do it with your own.
I promise.
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