Ah, the ache of trips not taken.
Abilene, Kan., birthplace and grave site of the wise Dwight D. Eisenhower; Glendale, Calif., hometown of the genuinely weird and truly magnificent American artist Don Van Vliet; and Ketchum, Idaho.
In the summer of 1979, I wanted badly to visit Ketchum, resort town where Ernest Hemingway killed himself. I didn’t know that the Hemingway home was closed to the public. It still is. But the Nobel Laureate’s grave is there.
I was 21 years old, had but one road trip under my belt — a Baltimore-to-Chicago sojourn the year before to see The Rolling Stones at Soldier Field — and for reasons not clear to me now, had a hankering to see Ketchum.
My parents talked me out of it, saying it didn’t quite make sense. They may have been right, but that didn’t make me want to go any less.
[I’ve rarely let anyone talk me out of anything since, willing to take my lumps for mistakes rather than nurse regrets.]
So instead of wading in the streams where Hemingway fished, the itch of ’79 was scratched, but not quite soothed, with a plane ticket to California, where I’d never been.
Arrangements were made with one of my mother’s cousins in Anaheim, and I flew to California thinking I’d sample what was left of the Sixties in Haight-Ashbury. The trip I took found me on the Mad Tea Party ride at Disneyland with my cousin’s 6-year-old son.
What wish-I-could-get-there towns are circled on the maps of your imagination?
Over the summer of 1994, I took my then 9-year-old daughter Sofia to every town where her grade-school friends had moved over the years.
We started in Pittsburgh, documented in 11,000 black-and-white negatives in the 1950s by W. Eugene Smith. One of the cool places in modern Pittsburgh is a museum devoted to native son Andy Warhol.
Among the sculptures of Brillo boxes, films in which nothing happens but the passage of time and double-image silk screens of the King of Rock and Roll, an old man slowly took in everything.
He looked like he’d be more at home at the American Legion hall than a museum devoted to oddities anointed as art.
I asked: “Why are you here?”
And he said: “I want to see everything I can before I die.”
When I finally make it to Ketchum, I’ll drop a line.
