Fresh?

This past week is, by a long shot, the longest break I've taken from blogging in the nearly three years I've been doing "Shot In The Dark".

Wow. I can see why Sullivan takes those biennial months off.

I'm writing from a place that was, from ages 5-18, my second home; the Alfred Dickey Library in Jamestown, ND. They finally added an internet terminal (read: one), which is where I'm at today.

Otherwise the library, which was built in the late 1800s, has changed hardly an iota since I was maxing out my library card in elementary school. Even most of the staff seems familiar; fiftyish women with permanent perms.

The only real change? There seem to be fewer books - whole shelves are gone, making the building a lot more roomy but a lot lower-content, it seems. Worse, the back room - once full of musty older books, including some historical treasure troves from the twenties through the forties - is mostly given over to modern fiction - read "best-sellers" - which is a turn for the worse.

Jamestown has changed a lot in the almost-twenty years since I left here; the town I grew up in seemed frozen in the forties and fifties, its glory days. Today, many - maybe most - of those old landmarks are going away. The junior high school - built in the twenties - is gone. The sixties-vintage senior high is now the "Middle School", and the city has a new High School, built up on "the hill..."

...which is how you can tell I'm a Jamestown native. Jamestown is mostly built in the valley of the James River, known as the world's longest unnavigable river; the older part of town is all in the valley - but the bluffs surrounding the town, which lead up to the level of the actual prairie, are inevitably called "hills"; Mill Hill on the south, Hospital Hill on the north, and so on. Growing up in and rarely leaving the valley, I was somewhere in my teens before I realized that neither of them were hills at all.

Anyway, most of the town's development since the seventies has been up on "the hill", and it's probably a telling event that the new high school - a relatively huge concrete neo-stalinist concrete building that at first sight looks like a NORAD control bunker - is built on "the hill" by the airport. In the eighties, the commercial center of town moved to "the south hill", with the Buffalo Mall (the town's first successful mall), then K-Mart and finally WalMart. Now, the town's emotional center moves to "the north hill", with the high school joining Jamestown College (my alma mater, natch) in looking over the town below.

So things are a little slower downtown than even the bucolic pace I grew up with, although Main Street hasn't completely dried up and blown away; three years ago, at my 20th reunion, many of us who'd left after high school were amazed at how much life there actually was here compared to the near-desert we remembered from the dismal eighties.

It's been strange coming back here, for the first time in a couple of years. This fall it'll be 20 years since I left. I'm past the throat-clutching terror I used to feel at the thought of spending the rest of my life here; I'm not past not only remembering the reasons I fled here after college, but seeing those reasons right in front of me as I drive or walk around the town.

There's another post or two coming on this subject, natch. But I'm off to take the kids sledding. Gotta try to wear them down a bit, before we head off on the six-hour drive back to the Cities.

More later. Expect a return to regular blogging tomorrow.

And a zillion thanks to Steve Gigl for filling in - it's been fun reading!