Harry Sternberg:
Father Leaving Home with Suitcase
[Series/Book Title: Life in Woodcuts] (20th century)

"I no longer need to take leave."

The drive up and out of The Walla Walla Valley that first morning of Exile felt promising, for our possessions were already on their way, and we'd been left behind. It seemed as though we were only trying to catch up to our life as we headed East across the Blue Mountains and on through Southern Idaho into Utah. We made Evanston that first evening, just as far as my to-be first wife and I had made it the first morning of our initial Exile thirty-five years earlier. We were catching up to our lives then, too. She was chasing her first job after graduating from university, and I was tagging along, heading into what was then still a seemingly great unknown. I was twenty-two and had never experienced humidity, which made me a virgin of sorts. I'd never imagined what most of the rest of the country routinely experienced, clear evidence that I'd left Eden for some alternate universe inhabited by heathens. Why would any sentient being tolerate high humidity? It did not make sense!

With that first Exile experience and a lifetime's accumulation of others, I'd grown familiar with Leaving. I had become essentially a professional. I was perhaps too casual about it, rarely even thinking about packing until the morning I left; I could usually be ready in well under an hour. I never fully unpacked, preferring to keep my toiletries, for instance, in my dopp kit rather than my medicine cabinet. That was one less transfer I'd need to accomplish when returning or Leaving again. I was forever Leaving again. During our later Exile, The Muse traveled back to the home office at least once a month. It became a part of the routine for her to disappear every third or fourth week, abandoning me to the place, Leaving me behind. I'd tend the cats until she got back. I only rarely went anywhere myself.

We frequently went on toodles, though. These were mainly orienteering excursions intended to fill those blank spaces just over the horizon and extend our space. I could easily imagine beyond the horizon in every direction at home, for I'd often been there and returned. The DC area featured foreshortened horizons with low hills and grey for about a third of the year. It usually felt as though we were captive there with no mountain peaks or broad vistas to liberate our perspective, so we'd foray beyond the narrowing distances, leaving our exile on odd weekends and escaping. We'd drive to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on a late summer weekend in search of decent canning tomatoes and find them. Or, we'd toodle down the Blue Ridge Parkway to see what the world looked like from that direction. Leaving that Exile always proved problematic because of the distance to the edge of what passed for civilization there. An hour or more of suburbs and industrial areas separated the inner city from the surrounding countryside with traffic jams. The transition from one to another was never once a comfortable ride. It was usually like pulling Gs to Leave, but so starved for the horizon, we'd leave anyway and only hesitantly return. Returning never felt like heading home but more like slamming a jail door shut on ourselves again.

Once back home, Exile ended, I noticed a genuine reluctance whenever considering Leaving. All that Leaving seems to have left me a confirmed homebody. I no longer ache for adventure. Perhaps those Exiles leached all that disquiet out of my system. I catch myself clinging to home, insistent that I'm most urgently needed there, and so cannot go anywhere else. I know these later years were supposed to be spent in perpetual vacation and that some folks move far away from friends and family when they retire, but I hold no such urges. I know where I belong and rarely consider it necessary to go anywhere other than where I've learned I belong. I finally live somewhere where I can see some distant mountains and humidity observes the rules of basic human decency. Tell me, where else should I consider being? To where might I be Leaving?

Being Exiled induces a forced choice, and forced choices might be the best way to dissuade anyone from ever choosing again. Preference metastasizes then, leaving a dominant imperative. To freely choose to avoid choosing might prove to be the highest instantiation of choice, finally co-opting those damned-whatever-you choose dilemmas. Nobody freely chooses to be Exiled. Circumstances co-opt choice except for one sole obvious one, which no one would ever freely choose. Once subjected to such absence replacing presence, the present tends to dominate. Absence's novelty evaporates, leaving it unable to meaningfully compete with simply staying put. I cling to home now, seriously uninterested in roaming very far afield. I need vacations only from the need to take vacations. I've left often enough that I no longer need to take leave.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz