I grew up in Van Buren, Maine, a town that borders St. Leonard, New Brunswick via the St. John River. It's a town with a population of under 3,000, though many more than that grew up there.
Realizing a lack of economic opportunity, the majority of graduates from Van Buren District Secondary School move away and never come back to the town in which their French Canadian parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents grew up?a town so rich in their own heritage that they can't help but take it for granted. I often wonder if these young graduates ever feel its absence as they try to set up a new life elsewhere.
Coming home to Van Buren on college breaks always feels a bit like that scene in Garden State where Zach Braff goes to a house party and sees friends who never made it out of the town, friends he hasn't seen in years and with whom he never kept in touch. But instead of drug-haze, spin-the-bottle, and promiscuous hook-ups, partying when I return to Van Buren means hanging out with my little sister's friends.
In truth, most of my friends don't come back to Van Buren much anymore, though we never really managed to keep in touch anyway. So if I want to see anything other than the inside of my own house, it's watching PG-rated movies and playing junior-high party games for me.
I'm referring specifically to this year's Thanksgiving night, during which one of my sister's friends was having a birthday party and invited me to come along (clearly I looked that starved for entertainment).
So after watching Elf, playing a name-game they called "George", and eating some homemade strawberry shortcake with kids ages 13-19, we did the only thing kids in Van Buren do when they've run out of ideas: we got in a truck and "did laps" in town.
I'm not sure how widespread this phenomenon is, but it's a rite of passage in Van Buren. Once kids get their licenses?and luckily there was just such a boy at the party?they instantly pile as many friends as they can fit into their cars and drive from the Tulsa gas station on one end of town to the Tastee Freeze on the other end.
Over and over again, back and forth?I can't tell you how many nights of my adolescence were spent cruising the streets of Van Buren like this on weekend nights, cramming six friends into my parents' maroon Mercury Villager and listening to the new mixtape I had just made specifically for the occasion.
Sometimes we would bring a camcorder along and pretend to be cops out patrolling the streets for "common street trash" and "known drug dealers;" another time, we decided to bring some water balloons along and wound up almost getting arrested. The policeman said he could charge us with assault?assault by water balloon.
My theory is that the VBPD are just as starved for excitement as we are. In fact, to push this point and the Garden State comparison even further, as I was parked along the side of the road taking photographs for this article, a cruiser pulled up behind me to ask what I was doing.
The policeman was none other than a former high school friend of mine who was with us that fateful night with the water balloons.
But though you may pity our lack of entertainment options, it gets worse for the older generation. While the kids are driving along doing laps, without true destination or concern for such concepts, a crowd of 60-somethings park their cars in lots along Main Street and watch the cars go by.
The summer months bring the added excitement of being able to park close enough to roll down the windows and carry on conversations between vehicles. I once sat in with my grandparents as they took part in this bizarre ritual that is in no way bizarre to residents of Van Buren.
And what do kids do when they've tired of laps? They go "fielding," of course. This is essentially just driving through the plethora of country back-roads and potato farm trails, preferably after a good rainstorm.
In other parts of the state this activity is known as "muddin'." The mark of a proud "mudder" is to leave the caked-on mud on your rusted Ford F-150 for as long as possible.
Unfortunately, our young driver was not feeling up to the task, and since he was driving his parents' truck, he did not feel like it was right to treat it to a temporary paint job. So we kept doing variations of the lap, listening to a mix CD ("Back in my day we had tape decks!") with kids who have the attention span of a mosquito with ADD, switching to the next song after just an intro.
Friday night I met up with two of my best friends from high school, the only two with whom I occasionally make an effort to keep in touch.
My friend Randy and I decided to watch a "so-bad-it's-funny" horror movie, and trust me, I never appreciate Bart & Greg's more than when I come home and have to drive a half hour to rent a movie from Movie Gallery (don't be na?ve enough to think that corporate chains would leave poor Northern Maine mom-and-pop stores alone).
With typical Movie Gallery frustration, after realizing there was nothing there we really wanted to see, we settled on Frankenfish.
We drove the movie another half-hour over to my friend Adam's apartment in Easton (my parents are still uncomfortable about R-rated movies coming into my house?an effect of the puritanical moral hold on many Van Buren households).
The movie, of course, didn't disappoint in being gory, ridiculous, hilarious, and terrible, and as we stepped outside for the long drive home, I witnessed my first snowfall of the season.
Such a site, of course, is much more beautiful when you don't have to drive through it at 11:30 pm on poorly paved, winding, unlit roads with your mother's foreboding warning to "watch out for moose" ringing in your ears.