Vesna’s voyages

Last night my childhood friend and I met up in a place we had lightly haunted as fourteen-year-olds or perhaps more accurately had scared us for a day. It was in Canby, Oregon where we had gone one school day when we felt like breaking the rules and visited an old classmate in a trashy trailer park on the outskirts of town. We did every bad deed we could and then I spent months afterward dreaming of emulaing his sister, a beautiful blond seventeen-year-old chainsmoker, pregnant with a second child, living in a romantic dirty campervan-sized trailer. The trailer park has been cleaned up and re-named an RV park and even the bowling alley no longer doubles as a smoky bar so we hit the next town, Oregon City.

Oregon City is the official end of the Oregon Trail and also has one of the oldest paper mills in the country; an enormous sleepless smash of smoke streamed buildings straddling a historic bend of the Willamette River.  As nighttime beckoned we followed stone-walled steps up to historic houses and a park that overlooks the city and down a walkway. From that vantage point the constantly roaring trains and churning factory were perfectly visible. We’d always marveled at this factory with its myriad stairways, strange tanks and mysterious doorways. This time we decided to walk to Emilia’s sister’s house along the tracks where she narrowly escaped a train speeding along a bend as we hopped the fence onto the shrouded tracks. Suddenly a stairway beamed next to us and we ascended it to a cobwebbed portion of the factory that was like a new-age passage to a mad scientist’s office in a tiny box suspended high in the air. Hairy spiders teetered inches from our heads as we squinted to read the dusty papers on the desk inside the dark greasy-paned windows. Then, suddenly we heard footsteps scaling the precarious twisting stairwell. We ascended higher and higher until we remained forever trapped in that moment in a spooky papermill in the same room where countless workers were slain back before the riots and the layoffs and Oregon City was never the same..

So that’s the story, of me stepping back in time with my best friend. And now my childhood is just a thing in the past,as nothing does last forever except in imaginary stories. But I work with children everyday in summer school and play their games in recess and enjoy the wonders of youth and relish in the fact that even if it seems to be gone on the outside, those years gone by can be recaptured at any moment, anytime, in the recesses of one’s mind.