I didn't really want to move, that hot July back in 1987. For most of my life I had been whining about how boring things were in my little Indiana town. Hobart, Indiana never seemed to have much going on as I was growing up, and even once I was married and out on my own, it still was not what I considered a happening place. Of course, now, on the other side of 50 and heading downhill faster every day, I look back at Hobart and think,"Why didn't I appreciate that fabulous little place when I was living there?" The answer, being, of course, that I was living there. It's hard to really see a place clearly when you are living there. You've seen the same things over and over again, dealt with the same people for so long, that you get a little numbed to how special it really is.
So I sort of clutched when my husband and I decided that it was time to move. We were working for a church at the time, one that was heading in a direction we really didn't agree with. When the pastor that had married us offered both of us jobs in the grade school at the church he was currently pastoring, we felt like it was something we were supposed to do and we took the jobs. Then reality set in. I was 25 years old and except for one ill-fated year at a college in Wisconsin, had never lived more than a mile from my family. My in-laws were a short distance away as well. Except for my friend Linda who had had the nerve to follow her husband down south for his job, leaving me when I needed her, all my friends were in Indiana. And we had just taken jobs 1800 miles away. In Cody, Wyoming, to be exact. We packed up and moved on July 6th, in what I swear was the hottest July on record, with everything we owned jammed into a junky little pickup truck. Did I mention it had no air conditioning? And I was 8 weeks pregnant?
We moved to Cody, where we were welcomed and cared for as only a church can do for its newest and obviously pitiful members. I cried for weeks. I sent my parents a postcard with Garfield on the front and a message that said, "Greetings from the Edge of Nowhere." The nearest mall was two hours away in Billings Montana, painful for a 1980's mall rat such as myself. There was no place to shop but a Pamida, a K-mart, and what seemed to me to be very tiny grocery stores. But over a few months I awoke to the awesome beauty of the place, the stubborn self-reliance of its people that was merely a thin veneer over some of the most kind and charitable hearts I had ever met. I stopped needing to shop to keep myself busy. I walked miles, breathing through a nose that was completely medication-free non-congested for the first time in years. I fell in love with that little town, which at that time had a population lower than its elevation. I felt as if I were home.
In those two years so many things happened. Our first son was stillborn seven months after we arrived. We were wrapped in arms of such love and caring that our pain was shared and eased by those who genuinely hurt for us. Our second son was born, alive and healthy 11 months after that, and our friends rejoiced with us. We were taken into more than one family circle and found friends that I miss to this day.
The population was down because of the oil situation, always an up and down proposition for the men and women who worked in it. The school became more than the church could sustain and two years after we arrived, plans were made to close it. We really had no skills that we could use at that time in Cody. Reluctantly, we packed up our belongings and our four-month old son and headed back to Indiana. I cried for weeks. I looked around and longed for the mountains every day. But my husband got a new job and I started nursing school. Our son grew and thrived surrounded by his family. When he was four, I graduated, my husband went back to school and eventually got other jobs, and although we had started off saying we would return to Cody when we could get jobs, we never did. We've lived in another state, also surrounded by mountains of a different sort, and Cody became a beautiful memory. "We lived near Yellowstone once for a couple of years," is how that incredible, emotion-filled two years gets described now. But on my recent trip my kids and I spent three days in Cody, seeing some old friends and visiting that town that, thank God, is now growing and prospering, with a population higher than its elevation. So many things have changed, but Heart Mountain, the mountain I looked at every day when I came out of the little trailer we lived in, still looks the same. Our old home is gone, the church we worked at is now a food pantry, the restaurant I loved to eat at is a different one, the library I spend hours at is in a different location, and the pharmacy where I filled my prescriptions is now a clothing store. But it still feels the same, it is still beautiful, and even years later, I still miss it. Maybe it's because so many things happened to us in those two short years. Maybe it's because now that I am older, I have started to appreciate the wonderful things that can be found in each place that I live. We only lived there two years, and it's been 24 years since we left. But I am still homesick.
