Going Home

Going Home

   One sometimes hears that phrase, more often than not in the movies, the main character facing the end of life and looking blurry-eyed at something distant and saying peacefully and almost expectantly, "I'm going home." But what exactly is home?  Is it a country, a celestial afterlife, a return to birth, a house or structure?  The common thread in those cases would seem to be a beginning, a place where much of your life was formed or had made a deep and lasting impression on you.  But then what of your home once you had grown and had married or moved on, leaving your "childhood" home?  Does country or culture (or even a new home) then override that factor?  For several of my friends, this is the case, their Irish heritage pulling them back again and again (they've since bought a second home in Ireland), their accents and habits still strongly attached to their birthland.  For another friend, his draw is to a generalize part of the country, the draw of the west not nearly enough to keep him here should things change in his life; at that point, he would eagerly be headed "back east."  My own draw should be back to my own heritage, that of my childhood home in Hawaii; yet when it comes to my own answer I am a bit lost, loving many of the "homes" I've experienced.

    Oddly enough, the London Review of Books carried a short piece by author Sir Jon Day on (of all things) eels.  I can remember being fascinated as a child by the electric eel imprisoned on display at the Honolulu Aquarium, the voltage meter outside registering the eel's dissatisfaction with all the human onlookers.  But that was my extent of wonderment and knowledge about eels (as it turns out, the electric eel is not considered an eel at all, says National Geographic, which shows just how little I did and still do know about eels).  In England eels are prized for their delicate taste, often boiled in stock and jellied (once considered a food for the poor, eels from the Thames are now said to be in short supply but jellied eels are still a prized dish in England, France and other countries); in Spain the eels are chopped into pieces while still alive and added to dishes such as paella or simply fried in a pan, while in Japan, eels are an essential ingredient in many sushi and noodle dishes.  But going back to basics, author Day notes: Back on the riverbank, Joe (an ichthyologist from London Zoo) told us that all European eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, a placid oceanic gyre in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Mexico.  There they hatch amid the trailing fronds of Sargassum weed before developing into leptocephali: transparent leaf-shaped fry that were once thought to be a distinct species of fish.  As leptocephali the baby eels drift and feed in the current for a few months before heading east, riding the Gulf Stream to Europe...On the journey their bodies change dramatically.  When they get to the coastal areas of Europe they become glass eels – still transparent, but skinnier now.  Glass eels are a delicacy in Spain and Japan, something that is largely responsible for their decline.  As they move on through estuaries and begin to run up freshwater rivers in the spring they darken and become elvers.  Over time their bellies turn yellow, then dark green.  They live in freshwater for up to a decade before at some point returning – no one really knows why – to the Sargasso Sea to breed.  If, in the intervening years, they get stuck in a canal or a lake, Joe told us, they can climb out of the water and slither overland until they find a river again.  They’re sometimes found on dewy nights writhing in the middle of fields, trying to find a way to get home...When they return to salt water, their bodies change again: they take on a silvery sheen, their eyes grow, and they lose their stomach and intestines and never eat another meal.  Then they start swimming.  The journey is long: around four thousand miles, and they complete it in six months.  Arriving back at the Sargasso Sea they breed and finally die.  Unlike salmon and migratory sea trout, who spend their middle years at sea before returning to the rivers they were born in to breed, eels have no memory of the rivers they return to year after year.  Quite how they do it is still unclear.  Is it a kind of embodied recall?  A smell?  Joe said he didn’t know, but suspected it was a simple process, a combination of tidal forces and the eels’ aversion to areas of high population density.

    What is that drive, that instinctual lust to return to one's beginnings, to mate and then perish at the place one was born?  Salmon and eels and others have that urge, but do other animals and mammals?  Do we?  For myself, having spent so much time in (early years) southern California and (later years) northern California, my memories were strong there.  A high school reunion made me realize how much time had passed and how much things had changed in the lower part of the state, the high "dangerous" hill my brother and I would ride down (on our backs) on skateboards (the early home-made versions with metal rollerskate wheels that would lock on the smallest pebble and send you hurtling off on your back for a rough remaining skid on the scraping sidewalk path) was now quite average and non-threatening (it had been reshaped and indeed lowered in the intervening years).  But many of my formative years were etched in the northern part of the state, my late-20s and 30s; through mudslides and pre-dawn hikes, raucous parties and dazzling women, stunning scenery and blinding fog, steep hillsides and even steeper hills in San Francisco...it was all a wonderful time, and now my wife and I were planning a return journey, a long drive to serve as a break, to "leave it all behind" if only for a week and for me, to see just if and how and could I recapture some memories.  Would things have radically changed (along the upper coast, development restrictions are many so change happens at a much slower pace)?  And would I feel as if I was somehow returning "home?"

    Then came a call from a friend, someone once very close and now someone relegated to a phone call once or twice a year.  Just thinking about you, he told me, had a few dreams about you lately.  Really, I asked, like what?  One was the usual all-over-the-map dream, one which made little sense.  But the other, he added, wasn't good.  Like what did he mean, I asked?  Well not to freak you out or anything but it wasn't good...let's just say you didn't die; it woke me up.  We chatted for a bit more, laughed a bit, then I ended the call telling him about my planned drive to California (we had spent many years there together as well).  Drive carefully, he said solemnly, and hung up.  Hmmm, just a fluke I thought, but as with not being able to unring a bell (a term used by lawyers when evidence is presented to a jury and overruled by a judge), his words stuck.  Then came this from Paul Kingsnorth's new novel, Beast about being called home: When we stand on a mountain overcome by the sunset and all that it brings, or fall to our knees in front of an altar in the presence of something greater than ourselves, then we are sensing the animal shift and turn beneath our feet. Then it is calling us home.  Or perhaps it is hungry.  My journey begins...