Blog4: On _Off the Map_

The dissonance between living in an idyllic and harmonious place yet being completely unhappy and ungrateful was nice. It was also nice to see the story of someone not waxing poetic ad naseum about the dirt and the rain and bullfrogs and caterpillars and what not. Charley’s depression juxtaposed against his seemingly calm and fulfilling country life allowed me an opportunity to revisit my unhappiness living in a very similar locale and I suppose this is why I enjoyed Off The Map. That some people do not find sustenance and contentment living “the simple life”is something I can understand.

A short, personal story on this: My father came back from Desert Storm when I was ten years old. At that time we lived in a small town in Central Texas called Copperas Cove. We had a house about a mile out of town in the boonies where our closest neighbor was about a mile away. We had lived like this, on the outskirts of a city, since before I can remember. Even when we were stationed in Germany I can distinctly remember, and I must have been about four years old, walking into town to go to the candy store.

So, at age ten when my dad came back from Iraq things in my house were a bit tense. My dad had been through hell and my mother had as well and they were stressed out over money and the military and other such things I had and still have no concept of. Already semi-isolated in the hill country, my father withdrew even further into himself and started a pattern of insomnia and chain smoking that worried us all. Not one for therapy, my father took his frustration and anger and sadness out with axe and wood on the chopping block in our backyard and when that no longer sufficed he bought himself a chainsaw that he used to decimate everything from our doghouse to the deck out back.

I would like to say that, like Charley, there was one particular turning point for my dad and that I, like Bo, was able to maneuver a grand scheme to snap him back into appreciation of his life. But nothing like that happened. He slowly found ways, on his own terms, to deal with his depression, and by the time he was sent overseas again, this time to Korea, things in the house were better.

But, this period of sadness for my father was also devastating for me. Watching my father work through his illness made me feel alone, isolated, and hopeless. There was no one, no friend, nearby that could comfort me. All of my school friends lived in town and phone conversations as a ten year old girl are really not conducive to talking about loneliness. I would sit outside in the evenings on our porch swing and imagine that I lived in Turkey Creek or Hilltop Estates or any of the other neighborhoods in town that my friends lived in. They were probably riding their bikes or playing hopscotch or at the neighborhood park and there I was, throwing stones at grasshoppers hoping I would at least maim one or two of them. I realized then that, even though country life was the only life I knew, I would one day grow up and be a city girl. No backwoods depression for me. No sir. If I was going to be lonely, I would do it surrounded by people.

So, I suppose the moral of my story is that living off the land in a simple, no nonsense way is not always the cure for people’s woes. I appreciated the gentle treatment of this in the movie. The “country life” ideal that has been so prevelant in the texts we have read so far this semester has now been complicated by Charley’s depression and Bo’s desire for movement out of the wild. I think these are both good stories to tell. Life is not always a Pilgrim Creek or a Sand County.