"The Long Way Home"
or
"The Fiction Writer Cometh"
by
Scott F. Falkner
(Said with the slight embarrassment and trepidation of someone introducing them self at an AA meeting.) I’m Scott, and I am a fiction writer.
That means I lie for a living.
Well, that isn’t entirely true.
I don’t lie in the negative sense. However, FICTION denotes untruth, which means in telling you that I write fiction, I’m telling you up front that I’m a liar. It’s just like that old story about the snake and the old woman crossing the river… you can’t blame a snake for being a snake. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I tell untruths for a living. None of what I write is true… so it’s a lie… sort of.
Like if I said that I met a middle-aged man in a diner on the corner of Center and Skull Streets, in 1995 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a man who’s name I can’t really remember, but who told me over several cups of coffee how he lived a life in the shadows and chased down supernatural beings… all in the course of making the world a better place. I could say that I based much of Helman Graff on that man’s life and what he told me… I could say that, and yet you’d have to assume that I was making it up… because I’m a fiction writer.
Anyway, I say this all up front, because I want you to know just what you’re getting into… that is, I want you to understand what I may or may not be telling you… if you catch my meaning?
I left Rice Lake, Wisconsin, in 1991. That’s going on eighteen years ago.
Eighteen years.
So we’ll say I left nineteen years ago. I can do that. Because I’m a fiction writer.
I enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood in a small town with a great family and great friends. However, when I was seventeen, I was chomping at the bit to leave. I’m sure it’s a feeling that the majority of high school seniors feel: that sense of urgency to get on with life, to get out there and see and experience all the world has to offer.
And so I left.
I don’t want to dwell too much on what happened to me while I was away. I don’t want to focus on such things as how I—in my own mind and the mind of a maniacal director—stole the show playing the part of a teenage stoner in a college production of Talk Radio.
I don’t want to dwell on how I fell two stories onto a sidewalk trying to steal a store sign in Paris, Texas, and cracked my head open.
I don’t want to dwell on sitting with my mentor, a Pulitzer Prize winning German writer, in a Milwaukee hospital as he died from self-inflicted cuts to his wrists.
There are enough stories there to fill a book in itself, stories of jumping six stories into the Chippewa River at three a.m. in February, stories about kicking a raging heroin addiction with the help of an Indian Mystic who taught me the majestic art of Tai-Chi, stories about cursing out a Theology Professor in front of a class of two-hundred students for his lack of Native American insight, stories about working at a television affiliate during nine-eleven, stories about getting married, buying houses and cars, and watching my children being born.
Lot’s of stories.
What I’d rather focus on is what I’ve noticed about Rice Lake since coming back after nineteen years of being away.
To be certain, I’ve been back in the meantime, to visit family and friends, but to tell you the truth, I never really NOTICED my hometown while I was here for those visits. Sure, I noticed small things, like the lack of a Starbucks, but for the most part the city itself was really just backdrop.
Window dressing.
Staging.
But now I’m back, and as such I’m starting to notice things.
Small things.
Big things.
Take the changing face of the businesses for instance. When I was a kid, Russ’s Pancake House was the place to go for a great breakfast. Then the lead waitress left and started up Maxine’s. Maxine’s took the place of an Asian Restaurant. Now there’s an Asian Restaurant where Russ’s Pancake House was in the first place.
Talk about full circle.
That block where Russ’s was has changed a lot. Where Dominoes was is now a Mexican Restaurant, and there’s a nifty little coffee shop on the corner that’s completely new to me. A little farther north, the big grocery store in town moved across the street, and a collection of smaller businesses moved in where it used to be… it seems like a waste of space.
The other big grocery store in town, the one of the south end, the one where I used to drag my fingers along the floor while riding in the bottom of my mom’s shopping cart, has closed down.
The mall has changed a lot too. It seemed larger when I was a kid, but just about everything seemed larger back then I suppose. The Big Steer is gone. Eat at Joe’s, the eatery which had the miniature theater where you could watch a cartoon for a quarter, is now a coffee shop. Woolworth's is now JC Penny and JC Penny is now a sporting goods store. The fountain is still there in the middle, the one I almost fell into when I was in choir and fainted on the risers set up over the top of it.
I fainted in church too, when I was playing Joseph in the Christmas pageant. I fell over onto Mary and punted the doll representing the Christ child into the third row… unintentionally of course. That was at First United Methodist up on the hill. I’ve only been there a few times since, and it seems like one of the few places that hasn’t changed all that much.
Up the street from the church, the pool no longer has the high diving board… insurance reasons I’ve been told.
My old elementary school now has a second floor.
My old high school has changed a lot. I brought my daughter there for a dance recital and was wowed by the new addition off the gym. Of course, now they’re tearing up the football field and the track, and cutting down a lot of brilliant old trees, for a multi-million dollar sports complex.
Back in my day, myself and some friends petitioned the city council for a place to skateboard. They gave us a slab of asphalt near the hockey arena.
These days, there’s a new skatepark out where the old airport used to be. It’s right next to the soccer park… which takes me to my old stomping grounds.
I used to live on the corner of Orchard Beach, across from where the old boat landing was. My backyard used to be a field with a rustic old barn, and beyond that was Nutter’s Ranch—also known as Misty Moors. Behind the ranch, the cranberry bogs where I once played, where myself and a friend saw a pack of beavers gnawing into the fresh carcass of a black bear before turning their sights on us, are now gone, replaced by a swamp.
That field behind my old house? That’s now filled with condominiums. Down the road, however, lay the Round Houses, and other than their color, they’ve not changed much. They remain a fantastically unique, and interesting comment on promotional architecture.
Speaking of promotional architecture…
Today, atop a building on Main Street, standing like a supernatural sentry, is a twelve foot gorilla.
That’s all I have to say about that.
Just like when I was little, when the wind is just right, the pervasive and comfortingly familiar stench of the onion factory still rolls through the city, as does the dull roar of the race track on Saturday nights.
And of course, the eastern horizon is still filled with the ever present shadow of the Blue Hills.
I spent a lot of time in those hills as a kid. I was taught to ski by my sister when I was five at Hardscrabble, and I continued to ski regularly until I was introduced to the wondrous invention of the snowboard in 1989.
I haven’t skied since.
Some friends and I used to hike in Gundy’s Canyon. I’m not sure if we were trespassing or not… and I’m still not sure what we saw hovering over the center of the canyon like a mechanical octopus on that summer day in 1990—I do know that four of us went out to the canyon that day… and only three of us came back.
I remember getting lost in the Blue Hills on Sunday afternoons with a friend who will remain nameless. I remember wandering for hours on dusty back roads barely wider than the car and past tin shacks that didn’t look inhabitable… but which had smoke winding up and out of their exhaust pipe chimneys.
On a recent drive out to the hills I found that much of it hasn’t changed. It’s still our very own strange and mysterious place, filled with just as much wonder as danger. I’m glad that my kids will one day have the opportunity to experience it.
So, Rice Lake is much the same as when I left, despite numerous cosmetic differences.
More importantly, I suppose, is that I’ve changed significantly in the last nineteen years.
When I left, I was an angry young man, imbued with a sense of destiny and determined to inflict my own ideas on the world as loudly as possible.
These days, as a husband and father, I’m a bit softer around the edges—emotionally and physically—though my mind and sense of awareness are much sharper. I’m still determined to force my ideas on the world, yet now I understand that for those ideas to be effective, they must often be conveyed subtly, and with a certain degree of modesty.
The Rice Lake area—much to my initial surprise—is a good place to do that.
Here, from my quiet little corner of the world, I can spew forth my lies, my untruths, and affect your minds… at least for a little while.
After all, that’s what I do. I’m Scott, and I’m a Fiction Writer.
~
