by Chris Settle
- The Road to St. Louis
They always say the journey is more important than the destination, so take a second to appreciate the drive to St. Louis. Four hundred and fifty miles between your quaint little college town and the bustle of the city on the Mississippi. That distance is important, it means you don’t have to bother coming up with an excuse as to why you aren’t going back every weekend. However, you do have to remember that it also means when your friends have a New Year’s party back at school, you probably won’t be able to make it, so you’ll need to plan your trips carefully; get there and back as quickly as possible. You don’t want to waste too much of your break spending time with your family, right?
Most of the journey will take place on Interstate 44. That means you get to spend seven hours looking at the wonderful sights of cows, corn fields, and trees. You have to be careful, though. Along the way you may be tempted by the billboards beckoning you to take the next exit, whether it’s for the World’s Largest Gift Shop (a self-proclaimed title with no evidence online to prove or disprove it), the hometown of famous scientist Edwin Hubble (he lived there for a couple years when he was a kid), or the famous Uranus fudge factory (they spent more time on the gimmick of the name than they did perfecting the fudge). Each billboard will call to you like a siren, but you have to be vigilant. More than one wary tourist has been caught by the trap.
- Lafayette High School
When you do finally make it to St. Louis and pull off the interstate, you’ll find yourself on Highway 109. This long road will take you all the way to your parent’s house (because you don’t like to call it your home anymore). However, your first stop here is none other than Lafayette High School, home of the Lancers. You have so many little memories from this place: talks with your friends in the cafeteria, the clubs you were a part of, and the teachers whose classes you genuinely enjoyed. Of course, it’s very important that you don’t think about the end of senior year and all of the events you planned: graduation, prom, and time spent with your friends. You shouldn’t think about leaving for spring break and then never stepping foot inside that building again.
Think about the time you spent in the library, playing cards with your friends. The snap-snap of the cards as each of you tried to be the fastest. There’s Jaycox’s classroom, too. The number one stop in the whole school. The posters around the room that showed the different plots of Shakespeare plays and his wall of favorite movies along the back. The Dungeons & Dragons books he’d let you flip through when you were done with your work. That class is what made you like writing in the first place. It was the first class that taught you to be proud of your writing beyond just submitting it as an assignment.
- High School Football Field
We can’t spend all day walking those halls, though. Let’s get outside into the wonderful St. Louis weather: thirty degrees and so icy it will make you terrified of driving. At the end of the high school campus is the football field, only one of the half dozen different fields that catered to the comprehensive sports program available at Lafayette, although that side of school never interested you much. The best part of the football field was the eclipse, of course. In August it wasn’t nearly as cold as it is now. The entire school had come out here with their eclipse goggles, blatantly ignoring the advice of all the teachers to not look directly at the sun. It got so dark, like midnight in the middle of the day. By the end of it, your neck was stiff from craning back to look at the sky. You still wanted to be an astronomer then, huh? It requires quite a bit of math, and there’s a lot more to it than just looking at stars through a telescope.
- The Valley
Let’s leave school behind for now. We can continue down 109 a bit further. That road would take you home, but it’s not time for that. Let’s keep things cheerful for now as we head towards the Valley. Your dad had explained to you how the levies work to keep the area from flooding, and that the rising hills on either side is what gives this place its name, but despite the threat of being washed away, the Valley has grown into quite the commercial hotspot. There’s a giant strip mall with all seven kinds of fast food restaurants you’ll eat at. They’ve got all of the best local shopping to be done here: Target, Walmart, even a Best Buy. It sure beats any farmers market you can find.
It’s a great place to learn to drive, with plenty of parking lots to practice in. Your mom kept a tight grip on the safety bar, of course, but who could blame her? You’d be grateful to learn here, because it was really the only place you would drive to on your own, outside of work. It was a good place to drive to. A lot of the shops here would go bankrupt over time and be replaced with new exciting stores before the next wave of financial troubles came through.
- Zen Thai and Japanese Restaurant
There’s just one more place to see in the Valley, though. Your favorite restaurant, the place with the best beef noodle stew and BBQ pork pad Thai in Missouri. Or, at least, you can see where it was. It closed down a few years ago, which makes sense. Most of the time you were there with your family, but there wouldn’t be other customers. However, when it was there, it really was perfect. You were always raising the spice levels to new extremes, seeing how far you could take your taste buds before you had to bow out and steal some of your sister’s rice.
- Anniversary Park
That’s it for the Valley. If we head back towards 109, we’ll find the perfect destination for anyone looking to wear out their tiny tots on a weekend. Anniversary Park is conveniently placed next to an ice cream shop, which means you’ll either have to get ice cream while you’re there, or listen to your kids whine about not having ice cream the entire time you’re there. It’s your choice which you would rather deal with.
Funnily enough, the roundabout in the park would always remind you of an ice cream sandwich. The dark brown color with the regularly spaced circular holes would make you hungry while you spun round and round until you were so dizzy you might puke or whoever was spinning you was too tired to go on. That wasn’t the only part of the park though. There was a nice jungle gym with a couple slides and a few monkey bars that you’d fall from, only to cut your arms on the mulch below. Luckily, one of your parents was usually there to help you dry your tears and get you back to where you fell so that you could always finish the trip across.
The park closes early now, so you had better keep moving. We still have so many places to see.
- The Penguin Exhibit
This is the furthest you’ll have to go out of your way: the St. Louis Zoo. Summer after summer spent here, looking at the different animals, begging for some Dippin’ Dots or a criminally overpriced hamburger. However, the best place here will always be the penguin house. Your mom loved it because it was cold, and after being dragged around the entire park during the summer, she needed somewhere with some A/C. As the sliding glass doors open, the first thing that would hit you is a blast of cool air. The second is the smell. Wafting out like a cloud of mustard gas is the aroma of fish and penguin poop. It’s a scent that’s etched into the cells of your brain, the kind of awful smell that you couldn’t help but enjoy. Even several years later, the smell of fish will bring up memories of the penguins calling to each other, splashing into the pool of water, and doing small tricks to get a snack from the zookeepers. You’d spend ages there, face pressed to the glass of the water tank, looking for signs of penguins moving in its murky green depths. Your mom took the time to settle into one of the ice-shelf-shaped benches along the wall and rest her legs while you listened to the penguin feeder explain the mating rituals of the birds. She’d even get you one of the plush penguins from the gift shop on the way out of the zoo, and you’d hug it tight all the way home until it was lost in the menagerie of stuffed animals that you kept on the corner of your bed.
- Chesterfield Mall
You can head back down the interstate here, cruising I-64. Look at you, merging into traffic like a true native: no blinker, almost hitting a minivan, and, of course, calling everyone else a bad driver. Take the exit up ahead and you’ll be there. It might look like a block of apartment buildings like all of the others that popped up over the past couple of years, but believe it or not, this was once the shopping mall of the Chesterfield area. By the time you had your license, most of it was closed, but there was still the V-Stock, the AMC, and even the Cheesecake Factory. What a wonderful place. Maybe if you had been born a bit earlier, you could have hung out with your friends here, like your older sister. It seemed like such a fun place to be. It seems the residents don’t want us hanging around here. They paid good money to live in a nostalgic graveyard turned corporate plaster and minimalist furniture. We shouldn’t bother them.
- Dierbergs Family Market
Up next is the grocery store. Exciting! Of course, this is the store you dragged your feet around in as a kid, waiting for your mom to finish errands so you could watch TV at home, but more importantly, it’s also where you got your first job. All those fond memories of cashiering during the Christmas rush, when people were throwing frozen butterball turkeys at you and blaming you for being out of sparkling apple cider. Or in the summer on the Fourth of July when no one believed you that you couldn’t sell alcohol before eight in the morning. Then you spilled that case of beer on yourself. You reeked of the stuff for your entire eight hour shift. Nineteen years old and every customer that smelled it on you gave you the same angry look. It’s a good thing you don’t work there now though, they’ve been cutting back on employees. It’s hard to go against the juggernauts like Walmart for prices, after all. It was only ever a local chain, and those are doomed to wither and die, even if they started seventy-five years ago.
- Homecoming
The time’s come at last. There’s only one more spot to visit on our tour of ol’ San Luis. The place you’ve been dreading, but at the same time, it’ll be nice to go home and rest. There’s nothing quite like laying down in your own bed, the one you grew up in and know so well. It’s getting dark, but you know the roads here like the back of your hand. They twist and turn through the woods along steep drops and hairpin turns. There it is at the end of the street. You’ve made it. Oh, but don’t pull in just yet. There’s one more surprise for you. Do you see that sign? “SOLD.” It looks like your parents finally managed to sell it. It was too big for them with all their kids gone. It’s changed, too. The roof shingles are blue now. It seems jarring—almost garish compared to the gray they had once been. Through the glass doors you can see the cabinets have been painted over, too. Gone are the dark browns. Instead, it’s more of a neutral beige color, like dog vomit. How modern.
You can’t see the backyard, but hopefully it remains unchanged. The fire pit where you had all your friends over to make s’mores before school let out for your junior year. The smoke stinging your eyes, making them tear up. You couldn’t wipe them, though, unless you wanted marshmallows all over your face. Your friend didn’t mind. He was on his sixth s’more by then, experimenting with new ideas like using chocolate as a graham cracker. You would find chocolate fingerprints around your basement for a while after that.
It’s a shame you can’t see the basement one more time. The place where you watched movies and played Dungeons & Dragons with your friends. The summer you taught your sister to play Breath of the Wild, even though she had a few too many rum and cokes to understand the game.
That’s just the way of things, though. Nothing stays the same. Your childhood home is really just that: a place from your childhood—your past. You can’t ever really go back there. Too many miles and too many hours between then and now. Things change: new restaurants open where old ones closed, new people work the same job you once did. You still come back here, just hoping for a glimpse of the kind of experience you can’t find anywhere else in America. Certainly not like the tourist traps on your way here. It’s a genuine experience, one you’ll just have to live with. At least you’ll always have the memories.
Chris is from St. Louis, Missouri. He’s pursuing a degree in English and Computer Science. He loves writing and analyzing literature, especially science fiction.