The Up and Down Place

m W The Up and Down Place by Syd Weedon I've come home to a place I've never lived before, back to a bunch of strangers who know my name. It's been a long time, twenty years. My footsteps on the old sidewalks make echoes of other times. Some are only half-remembered and some, I guess, never happened. No one can tell you where you belong. You have to feel it. You have to sense that "this is the place." Old mountains, towers of rock and green which defy us, hold us like a cradle. To walk up or down them is also to tread the stairway of the soul, to move upon the landscape of the heart. I was here a long time ago. Back now with 45 different eyes, the mountains are the same, but only the mountains. Whitesburg is a town with a lot of character, the kind ofplace which makes me want to go poking around to see what's there. We live in the old part of town. I like places which let me feel other times and generations. The North Fork of the Kentucky River runs through town, not the prettiest or cleanest river in the world, but rivers and creeks are power symbols for me. Most of my favorite places have been near creeks and rivers. Like most of the other mountain towns (Hazard, Pikeville, and Jackson are three that come to mind), the shape of Whitesburg is determined by the water which runs through it. Whitesburg is wide enough to have three streets which run parallel for a couple of blocks before the creek turns and the hills make vertical barriers. Because of this, it's several miles long and winds through the narrow valleys out into the hills. This kind of landscape will either give you a hemmed-in feeling or a sense of snug shelter. Twenty years ago I lived in Hazard, which is thirty miles down the road. I was a teenager, the time when everything is possible, before life got terribly real. I had a pretty girl friend with blonde hair and delicate features named Debbie. I had two close friends, Buddy and Jimmy. We did everything together, and to pick a fight with one of us was to take on all three. There were scores of other good friends, loose aggregates of rock bands, crazy camping trips, ridiculous stunts-all of the things wnich bond you to a place and time. Leaving Hazard was one of the hardest moves I've ever made, maybe the hardest. At times I feel like a ghost, like a spirit permitted to return to an old haunt, to watch unobserved what others have done to carry on since I departed. And I have ghosts here. There is a ghost of me who is sixteen and cruising the old roads on Friday night, drunk on Little Kings while Vic drives and makes up stories about sexual encounters with women. There is a nervous ghost of me who takes Debbie to a sock hop in the green '69 Chevy Nova. Another shoots at anything moving or still with a pistol by the creek in Vicco. I see Jimmy, Buddy, Debbie, Vic, and the others the way they were twenty years ago, and a part of me hopes that I don't run into them in their grown-up form. They've built a new road between Hazard and Whitesburg, Highway 15, and it's a safer road than the old one. You'd have to call it progress, but to build it, they had to cut out the old one, cut down whole mountains and hollows, knock down buildings, and reshape everything. That old road's in my soul, and I keep looking for it, its curves and funky little stores that stood by the roadside. There was a hollow, we called it "Happy Hollow," where we went to do all the things we weren't supposed to-romance, smoke cigarettes, drink, and hide out from the cops after our pranks. It's gone now. Just gone. They put the road through it. To love this place, you have...