HOLLIFIELD: Going up the mountain, back in time

My truck may be a time machine. Whatever you do, don’t tell any shadowy government agencies. I don’t want square-jawed men in suits and sunglasses with tiny wires coming out of their ears whisking us away to an undisclosed location to kick the tires, check under the hood and interrogate me using “persuasive methods” previously awarded the Dick Cheney Seal of Approval.

“Where did you get the time machine, son?”

“Uh ... a used car lot.”

“Seriously, where did you get the time machine?”

“Salesman’s name was Honest Bob. For some reason, I felt I could trust him.”

“Agent Stanley, we’re going to need some water and a board.”

For a while, I thought my past was being systematically destroyed. It began when the first house I ever owned — the place where my wife and I spent 14 years raising one child, two dogs and enough money to eventually move to another house that wasn’t 18 miles from the nearest grocery store — caught fire, leaving what the new owners said was an uninhabitable shell.

Coincidentally, that’s what it was when we first moved in.

We were a couple of years gone by the time of the fire, but it hurt knowing the place in which I had invested blood, sweat and tears (much of the blood and tears came from misuse of power tools) to turn it into a semi-inhabitable shell would be razed.
Then, the woods surrounding the house where I grew up, my father’s house, were leveled for the timber.

I hold no ill will toward the landowners or the loggers. These are hard times, and the man who drives the skidder has to put food on his table same as I do. But as a boy grows up, he claims the woods around him as his own, even if they belong to someone else. For the first time in my life, I could stand in the yard of my childhood home, look southwest and see cars on the highway.

Last weekend, errands — and maybe a little of the nostalgia that autumn brings — took me 25 miles or so up the mountain road to the small town where my grandma had lived. I had been there only a couple of times since her death in 2000, and I had not seen her house — now a stranger’s house — for nine years.

My business in town was soon done. I was only a short drive from the place where, as a child, I spent every Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.

What would I find if I drove up that hill past the Presbyterian Church and took a look? More of my past laid to waste? A vacant lot? A fast-food joint where the garden grew?

I considered avoiding the house, keeping what memories I had of the place intact.

But I went anyway.

And it was exactly the same as I remembered.

Almost eerily so.

There stood the small, white wood-frame house with the painted gray porch, surrounded by a neat yard dotted with trimmed trees. I pulled off the side of the highway, now a quiet strip of road, thanks to the bypass, and stared. From the outside, from my vantage point, it had not changed at all. I almost expected my grandmother to open the door and walk out on the porch, which probably would have caused me to soil the seat of my time machine.

I took it all in for a few minutes, filed the mental picture away, cranked the truck and headed down the mountain.

There are two explanations. Either my grandma’s house hasn’t changed one bit in nine years or my truck is a time machine.
I’m cool with either one. If it’s the latter, though, let’s keep it to ourselves.

Scott Hollifield is editor/general manager of Media General’s The McDowell News in Marion, N.C.