h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My thoughts on home

Posted Jul 16, 2002

When I was young, I remember Georgetown being a magical place where you could always find something to do. There were parks that had flowers and sticks; the rain would cause the dirt streets to get muddy and form little rivers running down the streets; there were places to explore that even if I'd explored them before, they seemed different, new and exciting; in winter there were the hills to sled down and plenty of snow to throw at my sister (or to be whitewashed in by my uncle!).

And then I got old. I think it was in seventh grade when I really became cynical about things. Everything was boring and there was nothing to do. The first week of seventh grade was horrible. The year before there had been a camp for all of the sixth graders from the three elementary schools to get together and meet each other before school started. I was sick. By not going, some sort of reputation was formed, which once I became friends with people, they conveniently forgot what it was all about. That summer I went to music camp in Fort Collins. I learned about The X-Files and became an instant fan. This must be a side effect of watching Unsolved Mysteries as a child. Every week I would watch and then I wouldn't be able to sleep. Either aliens were going to abduct me or I was going to be kidnapped and murdered. I have vivid memories of lying awake in bed, peering out of my window, watching for something to happen. The stupid part was no matter how scared I was that week; I couldn't wait for the next episode. So when the first episode of The X-Files made me jump, it was like meeting someone that reminded me of my good childhood friend. Not that this has to do with anything, but it probably explains something.

So I made it through high school as a loner, with dreams of being a biochemical researcher by day and a free-lance musician by night. (Of course, once I went to school that dream only lasted three months). I couldn't wait to get out of Georgetown and Clear Creek County. It was small and no one had ever heard of it. Even people from Colorado. A person can only handle explaining where they are from so many times.

Then I went to college (one more year to go). Coming from Colorado, you'd think that I'd go somewhere extremely beautiful or to the big city. I went to Iowa. Despite the fact that people made fun of me then (not that they've stopped), I would like to point out that Cedar Rapids has multiple stoplights. Clear Creek County has two that I'm aware of. The population of Georgetown is the same as the number of students attending my college.

The more people I met, the more I had to explain where Georgetown was. At one point I was tempted to just write a card out to explain it. I was still very realistic about the town. It is a small town that survives on tourism and has a bunch of people running around to try to make it a truly 'historic' town. They want everyone to pain their house white (that's the color that they appear in the black and white photos) and to rip up all of the paved streets because those are historically accurate. My family is what seems to be the minority of people who think the other people are stupid and should bugger off, though they don't seem to be able to tell them that to their faces. Small town politics are always a lot of fun. In fact, my college reminds me a lot of a small town. Pardon me as I digress for a moment. It is very easy to walk from one side of campus to the other in about five minutes. Unless you run into someone you know. There are always things to plan or maybe you need to set up a study session. This is fine and dandy, though it tends to take a lot of time. There have been many a time that a friend has called me to bring something to them in one building, which should only take me five minutes to bring, and it takes me more like twenty minutes. The combination of a talkative family and growing up in a small town has had some interesting affects on me.

Back to the point. I started working summer theatre, so I was meeting more people. I was in West Virginia when I was telling someone where I was from, starting my little description of where Georgetown is located when he said 'Right down the road from Silver Plume. I know Georgetown.' I nearly had to excuse my self for a change of trousers. I couldn't believe it! Someone, in West Virginia of all places, knew where Georgetown was, had been there and even knew of Silver Plume, the next town west, which is even smaller.

From that point on, I kept meeting people who knew about Georgetown. There was the student whose uncle owned the candy store in town, the freshman that lived in Parker. It made Georgetown a little magical again. I showed some old postcards to friends of mine.

One particular postcard shows the entire town taken from Guanella Pass. There's enough detail that someone who's lived there for a while (like myself) can date the postcard because of the visible changes that have happened in the town. This postcard was taken before I was seven. I know because all three of my grandparent's trees are still standing (one of them blew over on a Friday in April when I was seven during a really bad windstorm and landed on the house. My mother, sister and grandmother were on the bottom floor; my mother yelled at my sister asking what she'd done. One of the few times when I wasn't the first one blamed).

This past spring, a group of my friends were going to take a trip out to Colorado to do some climbing. They had plans to stop in Georgetown, which amused me because I'd be spending the entire break in Iowa.

When they came back, they told me how lovely Georgetown was and wanted to know why I had left. The answer was easy; the town is dying. Businesses have a hard time staying open, there's a water shortage (the town uses water that doesn't belong to them); tourism is down and no one knows why. There are more people on the roads than there use to be, but none of them seem to be going anywhere. Most of the young people have left town. My younger sister is going mad. She has one more year of high school and then she intends to leave.

It is a nice town. The Christmas Gift with John Denver was filmed there when I was six. I don't remember much of it, other than my mother would come to the elementary school everyday to pick me up. I had a habit of wandering home everyday. During the first two weekends of December, there is a massive Christmas Market, which is very quaint. The children from the elementary school carol with their Santa Lucia procession. (The Market has Swedish roots) Not only did I do this for years (I was even the queen when I was in sixth grade), but also I helped my mother sell things at her booth (she makes hats and scarves and such; her company is even named after me) and roasted chestnuts. That was one time that has always been magical, even when I was cynical, and I do miss that. My mother and her two brothers (who also happen to be my uncles) grew up there and my grandfather still leaves there; in the same house even. The architecture is all Victorian style (which is interesting since we've never had a Queen Victoria; or any Victoria that I'm aware of) and there are plenty of cute museums. The Hamill House has a distant connection to Mark Hamill (if you don't know who he is, you must have a life); the Hotel de Paris was formed by a Frenchman who deserted the US army after the Civil War; the Loop Railroad is a fun little trip up to Silver Plume and back with information of the history of the area. Georgetown use to have a population of over 2,000 people. Then the Great Depression hit. It’s never really recovered (there are now about 1,300 people). There's the man made lake on the east end of town, where a few years back a developer tried to make an outlet factory. However, that fell through.

Georgetown is a nice place to have been from. I think that there are towns whose purpose in existence is to be a nice place to be from. For a little kid it's great. There's Henry's, a small grocery store that has candy; the Fort Mackinaw Candy Factory, where you can see them making the saltwater taffy; the ball park and city park, which are great places to play; plenty of sledding hills in the winter; small stores where the people all know each other (or maybe they all just know me) from Polly Candler's Bookstore to the Georgetown Mercantile Company, there are plenty of treasures for kids there. It's when you get older and you need that hard to find book today, so you go to Barnes and Noble or some other big chain store; you want to watch a movie on the big screen (or any screen other than your television); shopping in a mall. The demands that we feel we need to fulfill in our lives causes people to become bored with Georgetown. It might also be because nothing seems to be progressing forward as time tends to do, but rather there are people who are fighting to make things as they were in the past. They don't understand that cars on dirt roads stir up a lot of dust that wasn't there a hundred years ago; horses had a handy way to keep that down. They took a house, which looks pretty much like most of the other houses in town, except that it had started to burn down in the sixties by some hippies (the fire was put out) and then had been lived in by cats for a couple of decades, and turned it into a historic place and fixed the house. However, as I understand it, nothing is original on the house because it was so destroyed.

It's all of the stupid things that have caused me to leave Georgetown. Even though it's quaint and tourists seem to like it (though they tend to be of the slow and stupid kind), it's not a place for someone who wants to explore to live after they've already explored it since childhood.

Discuss this Journal entry [4]

Latest reply: Jul 16, 2002