LINKS:

Old College

The Grotto

Sacred Heart basilica

I remember the lake was frozen over and we had come around there behind Lyons Hall and the lake was frozen solid and gray. I was 15 and was from Louisiana and I had never seen a lake frozen like that and my mother asked my sister, who was a Saint Mary’s student then, "But what about the ducks? Where do the ducks go in the wintertime? When the lake freezes over?" She said it just like that and I remember because I was reading The Catcher in the Rye at the time and that’s exactly what Holden Caulfield wanted to know. And my sister said, "They just stay here in the winter." And I decided then, right there on the edge of Saint Mary’s Lake, that I wanted to go to Notre Dame for college. I thought I knew what Holden was talking about when he cared so much what happened to the ducks in winter.

There is a well-worn path around the campus lakes. Generations of students and teachers and visitors have walked it and run it and biked it: passing along there by Old College and the log cabin, tree roots and creases in the dirt as familiar as the veins on the back of your hand; the lagoon over by Fatima and the weeping willows there and by the seminary; or over by Carroll Hall beneath the towering walnut trees; the boathouse and the beach; and that open grassy spot near the Grotto where the geese and mallards gather, staying through winter.

Even now I go there, too, circling the lakes in idle meditation, those well-worn paths taking me back to me. Sometimes I sit out there. Sometimes I look across the lake at the dome and Sacred Heart steeple towering above the leafy trees of campus. I think they’re like mountain peaks jutting up at the sky — an exuberance of spires and angles and corners pointing to heaven. Summits like up-raised fingers pointing. But I am most at peace among the trees around the lakes.

I found the sanctity of solitude there as a freshman far from home, a 19-year-old getting acclimated to Indiana cold and struggling with Ds in calculus, biology and German. I would wonder what I was doing here; I found solace in the harboring niches, in the walking, in the dark, in the seasons. And in time the books and the lectures and the late-night conversations had me wondering not what I was doing here, but what I was doing here — on this thoughtful sojourn through the cosmos. Blanket of stars overhead, sycamore trees fingering the sky. Answers falling down if you could catch them.

Then one day one spring, a few dawns before graduation — having been up all night with friends, drinking, laughing, telling tales, chomping burgers at Fat Shirley’s, walking home toward Lyons, stopping by the lake at sunrise — a band of us watched a mother mallard swimming, four little yellow tugboats close behind in single-file procession. Generations passing one to the next. The arrival, finally, of dreamy, uncertain tomorrows imagined from bold and urgent yesterdays.

My sons grew up feeding the ducks on one lake, trying to catch fish from the other. We’d race bicycles around its edges, bumping over tree roots and dodging low-flying limbs. On summer evenings, at sunset, in the final days before leaving home, they would play basketball with me out behind Lyons where once, years ago, I, too, was a teenager and a dreamer.

These days I jog around these lakes or walk them late at night, having memorized their texture and complexion, fending off the demons and deteriorations that come with age. Even at midday, too bound to this office, I may set out on those familiar paths to disentangle my head and reconnect with things forgotten. I am fortunate to have worked so long at a place so green and so lush with trees, a place that values the nurturing qualities of nature, that preserves a landscape for the soul.

We are shaped and indelibly marked and inspired by our places. They make us who we are. It is good to choose wisely those contexts we call home.

I grew up in north Louisiana, and when I was 15 I could not flee fast enough. Playing at escape, I would drive all over the countryside, piney hills and red-clay earth, the little towns and backwood hollows, Arkansas to Texas, Red River, Lake Bistineau and Dorcheat Bayou. These places I made my own, and then they could not hold me. I wanted a life that left this land behind. There was a fire inside.

But now the years have turned and I have, too, and even on I-30 sailing diagonally southwest across Arkansas the exit signs beckon me toward home: Malvern, Arkadelphia, Gum Springs, Friendship, Prescott and Hope. Near Texarkana, when I point the car due south and take the two-lane meandering through those fields and pine forests, through Evening Shade and on past that barbecue place in Lewisville, through Bradley and on to Plain Dealing, the world changes, takes on a different hue, assumes a quality of comfort.

It is as if the geography itself rises up to welcome me, embraces me, hugging me home. This terrain, too, is a well-worn path whose familiarity soothes the heart, bringing a deeper tranquillity the closer I get to my hometown.

There are still shacks spattered across the countryside, with rusted roofs of corrugated tin, set up on cinder blocks with porches full of furniture and dogs, yards with junky cars and chickens. In winter wood smoke will rise from red-brick chimneys, mist will hang over the ponds. Little country churches line the two-lane road as it glides and rolls up slope and down, through cotton field and pecan grove, where cowbirds alight and river levees run like serpentine walls holding back floods from these low-slung flats.

I feel snug among the trees here — among the spindly, swaying pines and the live oaks and the cypress in the swamps, flowering magnolia, redbud, dogwood and mimosa. There are places where the trees hang over the asphalt and the road feels like a tunnel through the land, and the drive home is like slowly, very slowly pulling on a favorite, time-worn coat — gentle fabric wrapped around you, collar warm against the chin. Driving home through this corner of creation brings a certain repose of the soul, a grounding, a down-to-earth security in a world whose moorings are flimsy, fleeting and loose.

It has been only in this past decade that I have come to appreciate coming home to this place and I am grateful that my parents have stayed and lived here long enough for me to know this anchor, these roots. I have only lately realized it isn’t just the people, the neighborhood and family house that bind me to this place, but the geography, the landscape, the mockingbirds, armadillos and snakes, the air, the cloudscapes, the smell of honeysuckle, oleander and azalea, the subtly singular spectrum of light at this latitude and longitude. And I have wondered about others, about those who have no homestead, no single family footing to serve as home base for life’s excursions. And I have wondered about my sons and whether they will come back to South Bend — if no one is here — when they are middle-aged and looking back and maybe unaware of disconnections. Or instead, perhaps they will not believe there is value in having such foundations.

Once, about 10 years ago, I made the drive to my hometown from the south. I had been in south Louisiana on a story and rented a car to come back home, arriving in the dark of night to surprise my parents, entering the city from the south. The roadsign told me I was home but I was lost. It had all changed so dramatically.

The outskirts of the city had moved outward by miles, gobbling up cotton fields and enveloping the woods around Bayou Pierre with parking lots and strip malls, sprawling, treeless subdivisions, interstate highways and off ramps and on ramps, and all those pop-up places that make everywhere look like anywhere and nowhere all at the same time. The disorientation was alarming and scary and confusing . . . and saddening, when I learned the fields of my younger days had been obliterated, the bayou paved, the watering holes used for swimming and fishing filled in and covered over — by motels and concrete and colossal discount stores.

Still, near the center of the city, where it is older and a little shabby, there is a hilly little park shaded with towering pine trees, the kind that are limbless except near the tops. This park was my place when I was little. I turned it into Normandy and Iwo Jima, Yankee Stadium and the American West, crocodile-infested jungles and mountain ranges full of bear. It is where I learned the liberating joy of exploration, the exhilarating flight of playing alone, the grace and power that comes from nature, the comforts and calm of familiar terrain. And I remember, when I was very little, wrapping my arms around the trunk of a tree and looking skyward, gazing up the length of those giant pines, watching them sway — cloud-crowned and regal — in tune to the wind. Enchanted by this view, I would often stare up these telephone-pole trees as if they were gun-sights into heaven and never ceased being amazed at how they moved so gracefully and so far in the gentle waving of the wind.

I do not go back to my hometown without returning to that place at least once each visit in order to remember what it was like back then. I believed then in a certain magic, in something spiritual playing in the air. In the years since those first awakenings, as I’ve made homes in different places, I have come to understand that the divine penetrates each landscape, that the Creator lives within creation, that our hearts are touched by the soul of the land. We grow from the very soil of our places. We carry home within us wherever we go.

copyright 1999 Notre Dame

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