ROAD TRIP!! sort of.

So, my dad is coming to visit for a little while. And by a little while I mean several weeks. In order to start said visit however, he has to get here. In order to get here I have to bring him. So I will fly out to the homestead in southern AZ and we will drive back together to KY this weekend . This will be the first time I have been with my parents without my family in tow in a long while. Daughter, Wife etc... I'm a bit nervous.

The physical space of the part of AZ I call home has changed drastically since I was there last (it always does between visits). More identical houses have cropped up and the area of the desert where I spent my youth hiking, biking and hunting is being cleared for more houses. The town of roughly 2,500 people that I grew up in is slated to become a town of 15,ooo over the next few years. But these changes while drastic are not the MOST drastic.

The town is/was a mining town built by Del Web in the mid 1950s. It was a company town until the mid 1990s when the company sold the houses and infrastructure to private interests and individuals. The mine closed not to long after the sell-out and this spring saw the destruction of the two several hundred foot tall icons that marked the town since it's creation. The copper smelter smokestacks. You see or rather saw the stacks as you crested the hill to come into town. You could see them from the air if you flew over in a plane. Their silhouette graced the header of the newspaper and appears on t-shirts for every town event. Those stacks held a perverse identity. Perverse because they also spewed sulfur tinged poison smoke onto and into the residents of the entire valley. It came down so thick you literally could not see across the street. On really bad days the weighty, yellow-gray smoke settled into every crack, crevasse, nostril and lung of the tiny town and became such a part of my person that as I write I can taste that acrid shit on the roof of my mouth and in the depths of my sinuses 10 years and 2,500 miles away. Their long term effects still wait to play out on those of us who spent our younger tears there.

Though they were disgusting I'm sure that as I lay my eyes on the now empty horizon of what I claim as my home town I'll feel nostalgia not disgust. Those stacks with all of their good and bad represented my town probably in a more complete way than any symbol of any town in America.

With that I go home, however briefly and try to remember something about who I was, when...