“Is that it?” my husband asked. Brian had been endlessly indulgent of me that entire morning, trundling a rental car down the cobbled roads of an obscure little town in eastern Germany. It was spring of 2018, and we’d been given the rare treat of travel by my in-laws. We’d just finished touring Nurenburg that morning, and were due in Prague by nightfall. But first, we had a mission to complete, or rather I did: to track down the place where my family had lived as part of my father’s overseas assignment as an officer in the U.S. Army in the mid-1980s. All we had to go by were GPS apps on our phones and my frayed, thirty-year-old memories. But remarkably, these had served us well, and soon we found the German village that rested next door to the military post. (For the uninitiated: the Air Force and Navy have bases, but the Army has posts.) Like beacons on the horizon, landmarks from my elementary years jumped from the surrounding landscape—there was the bus stop! The church with the spire shaped like a witch’s hat! The park where my brother was attacked by a goose!
I was confident that these same memories would lead us to the main gates of the post, but as we sped past the village town hall, I grew uneasy. Where was the arch designating the entrance? The gatehouse and flags? Had they been moved? Then, over the rooftops, a magnificent tower rose into view: half-timbered in the traditional Dark Forest style, with peaked gables. I knew it for what it was: a water tower, disguised to match the surrounding German architecture. The thing was mundane as toast, but as a child it was as magical to me as any Disney castle. It sat in the middle of the post, a block away from my elementary school, and was a beloved landmark by the military families stationed there. You could buy postcards of it at the Post Exchange. I still had one; it decorated my dorm room walls in college.
“Pull over!” I cried, all excited. Brian stopped by the curb and I hopped out, cell phone at the ready to take a picture. But just before I did so, I noticed it, tucked between two buildings on the street: a nondescript mechanized arm gate, painted red and white, similar to those you’d find in a parking garage. Next to it was an American soldier in fatigues, heavily armed. It suddenly occurred to me that to the soldier, I was a strange woman who had hopped out of her car to take photographs of a U.S. military installation. Was this suspicious behavior? My heart began to race, and my fingers fumbled.
“Is everything okay?” Brian leaned across the car to check on me, and I swallowed.
In front of the gate, the soldier raised his head and looked me in the eye.
***
This wasn’t the first time I’d dragged Brian along on a quest to find my past homes. In 2001, we hauled a stuffed-to-the-gills moving van towing a past-its-prime Ford Escort down the streets of Toledo, Ohio, where my family had lived in the height of the rust-belt auto industry bust. Brian and I were newlyweds en route to graduate school in Pittsburgh, and I had cooked up the idea for a detour.
I was disheartened to see that decades of economic depression had kept the neighborhood identical to the one I’d known at age six. It was easy to find our little three-bedroom, using the address my mother taught me to memorize in kindergarten and driving instructions printed from MapQuest. Brian snapped a few pictures of me standing in the driveway until the current homeowner came out of the front door to ask who we were. I nervously exchanged a few pleasantries and made a hasty exit.
“Did you see the tree in the backyard?” my parents asked on the phone that evening. “How big was it?” They were avid gardeners, and they’d planted an elm the year before we moved away. They talked about it on occasion for years, wondering how the tree had grown. “It must be taller than the roof by now!” I sadly told them that the backyard looked empty. Apparently I grew up in the shadow of an imaginary tree.
Brian appreciated my need to see my past homes, even if he didn’t quite understand my yearning for it. It’s a hankering many people feel—to go on pilgrimages, to not only read about history, but to be there, whether it is the Pyramids of Giza or Independence Hall. To put your feet on the same places where the ancient or the famous stood, to run your fingers along the same stones or polished wood, breathe the same dust that filters through the sunlight. This really happened. This is real. I imagine the bones of saints are kept in cathedral reliquaries for the same reason. In Florence, the Galileo Science Museum keeps the finger of the famed astronomer in a golden casket on prominent display, perhaps proving a need for some that science is real.
What does it mean if you need that verification of your own life? Of your own history? My mother famously likes to say that “we moved twenty times in eighteen years.” I can’t remember half-a-dozen of them; each dwelling is a shadow that rapidly fades with time. Who is guarding the homes of my childhood? Who is caring for them? Do they exist?
Brian and I had better success finding my home from the high school years, in a suburb of Washington, D.C. The rental house was nondescript, a two-story four-bedroom, but the real treasure of the place was the dense forest behind it, running unfenced directly to the edge of the backyard. It was marvelously unchanged, tall domes of deciduous canopy unfolding into the sky. My brothers were the ones who needed the details this time. “The creek at the bottom of the forest,” they asked, referencing the site of innumerable forts and fantasy play. “Is it still there?” I was more than happy to let them know their childhood Valhalla was untouched by time. As the years have passed, my sister’s social media contacts revealed that one of her good friends from middle school now occupies the house, happily raising a young family there. I don’t know why, but the news unraveled a tiny knot of tension in my heart.
Forever locked away, of course, are the various officers’ quarters my family occupied on U.S. Army posts. Occasionally, I have run into other military families who coincidentally lived in the same places, and no small amount of restraint is required not to jog them for details. Did they ever visit the swimming pool? The Post Exchange? Does the commissary look the same? Did they ever happen to drive down a certain road, where a certain house or apartment building sits . . . ?
Perhaps this yearning is part and parcel of my Mormon upbringing, the need to visit the homeplaces, to bring along witnesses to see the bits of soil or forest that make up the foundational memories of a culture, a religion, a self. It’s one that sends thousands of faithful tourists to tiny, otherwise backwater corners of New England or the Midwest: Look! This is the home where Joseph Smith lived. This is where the faithful made their cabins. This is where ordinary people tried to build Zion. This is where people saw God. This really happened. I wish my own faith were so easily mapped.
***
Back at the gates of the Army post in Germany, I pause before the gaze of the soldier, my cell phone trembling in my hands. I chide myself for cowardice. Just how suspicious is my behavior, anyway? Surely there are other military children like me, trying to grasp a piece of childhood? Something forever locked away by the dictates of war and security?
“Are you okay?” Brain asks again from inside the rental car. I snap a quick photo of the water tower and hop back into the vehicle. “Maybe there’s a different entrance than this one,” I say, opening Google Maps and pushing the image around. “I remember there being two.” But, like all things too secret to be spoken of, my home only appears on the app as a nondescript block of grey, void of roads or names. Only Time itself could dream of such an erasure, so perfect, so complete.
Brooke Shirts is a children’s librarian and music educator living in the Pacific Northwest.
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