Fayette County...Columbia township...to be specific, Garrison Creek...
Maybe you can find it in the image below.
http://pics.city-data.com/topoz/ztm8493.png
Yep, that's it...east of Orange, south of Columbia, west of Alpine.
Tucked away where most just kind of forget it.
That's the way we who lived "on the crick" liked it when I was a kid.
Just leave us alone out here.
That's why Mom and Dad moved us out here.
To raise five energetic half way intelligent kids to be strong, decent, motivated adults on down the line.
Give them fresh air, good basic food, work, play, and not too much stuff or mindless activities and chances are they will turn out pretty good.
That was the plan.
And those two worked the plan.
And we were the wild animals that were the children.
Of course I was perfect, it was the OTHERS that were problem children, not ME.
Not really, of course, but we all like to play that game don't we?
We were also given the gift of being made to move on when it was right.
I didn't think it was right at the time, but after a while I saw that it was right after all.
I wanted to be able to go to Ball State, obtain my teaching degree, come back, teach at Orange, work our farm and live happily ever after...
But Mom and Dad knew that Fayette County was changing, had already changed.
By the time I left for Denver in 1988 most of the factories that had supplied the overwhelming cash flow for the previous one hundred years had packed up and fled town, or had just simply dissolved into the crumbling rubble they left behind along with a century of coal dust and factory grime to color the town a dingy grayish yuck.
Connersville felt - to many of us young adults - like the discarded mistress of a wealthy tyrant, who in his haste to ditch it for a newer, younger version of a mistress, had taken all the pretty trimmings along with the baubles and cash.
I felt I would quickly become a burden, not a help, to my parents in their aging years in that mess.
I had to go learn a different way to live.
I was so disgusted with this provincial life I just wanted to experience new things - different things.
Find out what was OUT THERE.
I knew it was cliche, but it was MY finding out, so it was unique to me.
That started my habit of working too much.
With in a few months of arriving in Denver I not only had a job, I had THREE jobs!
By my twenty-first birthday I was married, had an infant son, and was in management at a national company.
When I had a random day off I would put my son in a baby back pack and take RTD's 15 LTD bus (now it is also the 16 LTD) and Boulder Express all the way to Boulder.
http://www.boulderdowntown.com/_files/images/boulderhome1.jpg
As much as I learned to be an urbanite in such a short time-
https://www.denver.org/images/memberimages/Cropped_553x300/12438_553x300.jpg
I STARVED for the lush country side of Fayette county that I had grown up with.
I always thought that John Denver's songs were so cornball after I reached the age of teen age cool-dom, but when I was face to face with those towering walls of massive rock I suddenly realized every word he said was true, no matter how cornball.
Every time I stepped on a trail in the Rocky Mountains I could not help but wonder what ole John would have sung about the Whitewater Valley.
But I also knew it just didn't matter what he would have thought.
I knew what I thought.
This was the most important country road to me:
I played in, drew the sweetest breaths in, and ate things that grew out of the very DIRT of the Whitewater Valley.
...of a small farm that laid behind the crumbing banks of Garrison Creek.
But John DID write a song just for ME and about the joy of washing my long hair at the waterfall in Garrison Creek in front of our farm and laying on the grassy banks to soak up the sun and drink every drop of life in while I could.
For nineteen years I had consumed that valley, that farm, that life.
It was the heart of me and I wondered if I would ever be able to survive a transplant.
And so, I would leave John's lyrics in the corners of my mind and drift back to Neil's:
"Now you say you're leavin' home
'Cause you want to be alone.
Ain't it funny how you feel
When you're findin' out it's real?
Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain
With the barkers and the colored balloons,
You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you're thinking that
you're leaving there too soon,
You're leaving there too soon"
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/neilyoung/sugarmountain.html
To be continued in: My Sugar Mountain Part III
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