Dear World: I Am Searching for My Youth in This Bar

And also some frigging club soda, thanks

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

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Nobody in America drinks club soda. I went to every nearby gas station and couldn’t find one bottle. Not even Perrier, which is for prissies anyway.

I am deeply saddened by this.

When I lived in Chile, all we drank was club soda. They even have three different levels: light gas, normal gas, and extra gas, which you drink the next morning after decimating your body with sweet white wine mixed with pineapple ice cream. THAT IS A THING. IT IS CALLED A “TERREMOTO.” DO NOT ORDER.

Just kidding, have a ball, your liver will be fine, long live club soda!

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Okay, wait, but did we know that Paris actually has sparking water fountains? As in, water fountains full of carbonated water? What????????? Why does this make me feel extremely insecure?

It’s bad enough the French are leggy, striped-shirt-wearing sexual behemoths.

The Germans, on the other hand, are just behemoths. But at least they, too, know the beacon of hope that is club soda.

(I am told that ordering still water in Germany is akin to ordering horse meat in Portland, Oregon. Can someone please confirm?!)

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Discovered something horrifying: there are corn cobs UNDERNEATH THE FLOORS OF THE FARMHOUSE.

“Corn cobs?????????????” you think, making the same exact face I did.

Alas, when we took the floorboards up to run new electrical underneath them, there they were: MANY MUMMIFIED CORN COBS. Two or three per joist. Just sitting there, like an ancient museum of maize.

“Squirrels!” the electrician announced, unruffled.

“SQUIRRELS???????????????” I screamed, before hurling myself over the railing.

They look like they’re a hundred years old. Apparently corn cobs are the cockroaches of the vegetable world: they never disappear. Though the internet had two other intriguing hypotheses:

1. 1800s-style insulation

2. 1800s-style toilet paper

The farmhouse was built in 1872. And guess what? I’d rather believe that someone was wiping their bits with these than even THINK about the much more likely scenario of rats coming to eat my brains.

I was too weirded out to touch them.

I left the fuckers there.

That was probably the wrong decision.

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Speaking of corn: drove by a girl who was stuck in the farmer’s field up the road. It was snowing. She must’ve slid. The tire tracks were deep. But, she was also in a giant Ford pickup truck, so I didn’t feel too bad for her. Four wheel drive, as I have discovered, could get you out of hell, if it had to.

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I called the neighbors, who have all sorts of big truck-like equipment-y things that could actually help get her out, versus me just awkwardly waving my hands. They said the police should handle it, because it’s possible she was on drugs. Meth is still a big problem in rural America, though I never see anyone who seems to be on meth.

I am naive.

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Got blood work done the other day. Routine. Tunin’ up the ol’ thyroid, making sure I’m not going to die of too much buffalo sauce consumption.

Then I got the bill.

$1,150 USD.

For the sake of comparison, a full panel of blood work, done in Costa Rica, is only $120 USD.

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There’s a bar in the basement of an old fly & tackle shop.

The basement is old stone.

There are drips from the ceiling.

It is dark and cave-like.

The same cast of characters seems to be there every time. There is the man who only wears pajama pants. There is the girl whose partner overdosed. There is the guy who is way too sweet to be in there. There is the boy who used to be shy so he became an alcoholic. There is the woman who no one sits next to because she’ll never stop talking. The short bald guy who always stands just slightly behind the bar, acting like a mini celebrity. The man with the handlebar mustache who always calls me “honey.” And a seventy-year-old woman who owns 2,100 acres of tree farm, and gets drunk on Keystone Light before driving back to her farm in a side-by-side.

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I stopped in recently to get wings, and a football game was on.

The national anthem began.

The bartender smacked one of the patrons: “Take off your hat!”

And then I looked around to see that all of the men in the bar had removed theirs.

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I have heard some troublesome things in this bar.

One man has had four DUIs. He went to jail every time. He doesn’t have a license anymore. But, he still drinks (and drives).

Another person saw me order a Bud Light and commented “tranny juice!”

And perhaps one of the most common assaults is the usage of a word I (erroneously) thought had died a long time ago:

Retard.

It’s part of the common vernacular in these parts, even among people with good reputations.

“The township is retarded.”

“Sorry, I’m being a retard today.”

“My PDF software went retarded.”

All I can think about is how there really are two different Americas.

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Some days I struggle with the decision to buy this farmhouse.

Why am I here? What am I doing? This is not a place where I can grow.

But, I didn’t come here to grow these past 6 months: I came here to get rooted.

I wanted to experience the world I used to know.

I wanted to remember the girl I once was.

I wanted to visit my past and my innocence and my youth—like a long-lost memory, frozen in time.

And, frozen in time it is: there’s the same coffee shop, and the same gas station, and the same guys I knew from high school, all working down at the hardware store.

There are also a lot of the same ideas.

Outdated, primitive, regressive.

Just the other day, I was told about a gay man who was ousted from the Baptist church. At the same church, a young couple who had gotten pregnant before marriage were made to stand in front of the congregation and apologize to its members.

But of course, when the national anthem comes on, everyone take off your hat.

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I remember being in high school, dating one of the star basketball players who also want to the Baptist church. He took me to their “church prom.” We went miniature golfing afterward, next to the Baptist Bible College.

A few weeks later, he tried to save me.

I wonder if he knows I write The Middle Finger Project now.

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There are things I like about being here.

I like the silence. No tourists keeping me up at night. No twenty-something party-ers.

I like the waving. There is lots of waving. Everyone waves when they drive by one another on a dirt road, even if they don’t know one another.

I like the woodlands. And the fresh air. And the ponds. And the fields.

I like not worrying about jungle roaches crawling over my shoulder. Or poisonous frogs. Or venomous snakes.

I like that a glass of wine costs $4.

And this big house on 5 acres with a guest cottage cost the same as my teeny tiny condo in the city.

I like the snow. And the driving—oh, do I love driving. I had missed that, dearly! Driving feels as much a part of me as my eye color. There is something therapeutic about taking to an old dirt road. I take afternoon drives almost every day.

And, I like the feeling of being known. I know the high school principal. And the elementary school principal. And all the teachers. And the local contractors. And the guy who lays tile. And the girl who mows lawn. And the guy who sells cars. And the girl who opened a brewery. And all the neighbors around me.

There is something about this that feels comforting and snug and nostalgic—for someone like me, who is not gay, and not Black, and not a pregnant teen.

And, that’s the thing about America, isn’t it?

There are two very different countries inside of one.

And, while observing this version of America has been an interesting culture study, I can’t help but wonder if I could ever really stay.

Or, if maybe the farmhouse was just a childhood souvenir, letting me remember what it feels like to come home.