The Land of my Youth

The Daily Post prompt today:

Describe the town where you grew up. Do you still live there? If not, do you ever visit?

The geography of my childhood was less a place than it was a state of mind. I grew up a Navy brat. We moved about every three years, so I didn’t grow up in a single town. Instead, I grew up in a series of military neighborhoods, and specifically among the families of fighter pilots.

I was born on Pensacola Naval Air Station (NAS) in Florida. We lived there only a few months before we moved to NAS Miramar in California. Then we spent a few years at the Naval Postgraduate School in Navy housing in Monterey, California, before moving back to Miramar. Until I was ten years old, my family lived on base surrounded by other Navy and Marines families.

Living on a naval air station provided me with some different visceral experiences of “home” than I think civilian kids grow up with. I could identify a the basic class of airplane based on its sound and I could narrow it down to the specific type of plane by sight. The base fairgrounds were behind our houses and across a field. We could watch the air shows from our back yard. We walked to the Bob Hope USO Show. Some of the flying they did for the movie Top Gun was over our houses.

The houses on base were all similar. At Miramar, they were old officers’ quarters built circa WWII. Our street was made up of seven units, squat, stuccoed buildings each set on 1/4 acre of land. There were empty fields surrounding the houses. When construction started on the new commissary and exchange, it drove the rattlesnakes into our yards. Before letting us play outside, my mother would go outside and hose down all of the bushes to dislodge any snakes that might be lurking there. When my father would come home from work in the evening, I would hug him, burying my face in his shirt and breathing in the mix of cigarette smoke, Brut aftershave, and jet fuel that permeated the khaki cloth. Or we would spend months without him while he was on an aircraft carrier floating about the seas, protecting American air space, sightseeing in exotic locales, and having bizarre parties on board the aircraft carrier. When I was older, I would spend summer days riding bikes with my friend, Lisa, up and down the dead-end streets, singing “The Greatest American Hero” theme song at the top of our lungs.

In Monterey, the houses were triplexes, two units on the bottom with a breezeway in between, and one above that extended over the units below. During the day, the children ran through the streets unsupervised by adults. From age 4, I would play by myself at the park behind the houses across the street. The school was in the neighborhood, so when I started kindergarten I walked there with my friends every day. I remember Monterey as shaded and scented by evergreen trees. My favorite things to do were to go to the pond and feed the geese stale bread and go to Fisherman’s Wharf and give the organ grinder’s monkey coins and maybe get to shake his skinny little hand. If I was really lucky, I would get a huge soft pretzel or an all-day sucker. I loved watching the otters floating on their backs and beating shellfish with stones to break them open. From our house, we could hear the sea lions barking and the fog horns bellowing.

The big thing I remember is the feeling of community among the military families. With the husbands gone so much of the time (at that time, it was all husbands; I knew only a handful of active duty military women), the squadron Wives Clubs provided a great deal of support. We would meet for dinners and picnics and play dates (although they weren’t called play dates in the late 70’s and early 80’s). The women would organize care packages to send to the guys on cruise, and get us kids to write letters to the guys without families. When my father’s plane went down, and he was missing for almost 24 hours, the wives converged on our home. They brought food and children and wine and sat with my mom and us kids all through that long, long day. They cried with us with relief when the chaplain knocked on the door after dark to tell us my dad and the pilot had been found, safe.

Even though we were far from our biological families, we had a bond with these other families wrought of common experience and the fear of that black car pulling up to deliver tragedy.

I no longer live in the town where I grew up, physically or emotionally. Geographically, these places don’t even exist the way I knew them. All of my childhood homes have been torn down. My father’s opinion is that this happened way too late, as they were pretty much in disrepair (and filled with asbestos) when we lived there. He’s probably right, but there’s something unmooring about never being able to prove with my eyes that the places in my memory actually existed.

Experience-wise, I’ve never found the kind of community we had on base. The only place I’ve ever experienced anything like that kind of take-it-for-granted closeness was at college, where we would drop by and just let ourselves into our friends’ homes, crash on their floors, share food off of their plates. Like college, once we left the geographical and circumstantial closeness of living on base, the emotional closeness waned, too. It’s like the connections stretch only so far before they break. But it’s not a dramatic break. I picture silly putty, stretched and stretched until the little bit in the middle is too thin to support its own weight and it just oozes apart.

So, that’s where I grew up. While I think the stress that brought us so close to the families then would consume me now, I still feel drawn to that closeness nevertheless. I had hoped to manufacture it in my adult life, but perhaps without the daily threat of death (or worse), people just can’t or don’t pull together that close.

While I can’t visit the land of my childhood, I get a taste of it when a fighter jet flies overhead.