Childhood Diagonally

Grass grows up through the cracks in the pavement. The road reaches towards a hilltop, a reach that it used to make but now falls short of, “dead end” signs proclaiming the new state of things. When I lived along this road it was bustling. We lost more family dogs than I care to count to that road. It never mattered how much my dad improved the fence, the allure of car tires always proved to be too much. This stretch of Hubbell Ave, also known as the diagonal for the way it slices through central Iowa, was just two lanes at the time. A nightmare for traffic. My mom was once on the evening news, showing a reporter into her closet where she kept a first aid kit for the many people who crashed outside of our home.

I have good memories of that stretch of road, too. When the flood of 1993 came and washed out a section of the road I got the joy of riding my blue Huffy bike wherever I pleased. A kid on his bike totally unaware of the hardships the flood had brought. The road was all mine, that’s what mattered. On cold school mornings the three of us kids, and usually a few cats, would wait at the end of the driveway for the school bus to pop over the hill and then rush past the fence as quickly as any of our dogs.

The road is a dead end now and we moved away 16 years ago. The state decided it was too dangerous and increased the two lanes to four. It would have wiped out my entire childhood neighborhood if they kept it on its current course. The acreage my parents owned would have been torn up. The small graveyard of family dogs would have been paved over, the road once again taking our poor dogs. It all would have been gone if not for Engeldinger Marsh on the other side of that hill. It was discovered that a number of rare butterfly species made their homes there. So the new road instead swung around my childhood and left it on a quiet dead end road. When people talk about “the butterfly effect” you never expect it to be so literal but here it is, a weird shadow of my childhood, preserved along a cracked and dormant highway thanks to those creatures.

I drive down that road on occasion, though I have no reason to. Mainly I want to reflect, to get a view of the old house, to remember those bike rides and the school bus coming over the hill. To remember those dogs, who would have loved this quiet stretch of nature now but were just born at the wrong time.