Some years ago, I rode the train from Chicago to Charleston, West Virginia. It was a long trip, calling for some over-night scrunching up among those of us who hadn’t bought sleeper car accommodations. Two grandmotherly women from the South Side of Chicago travelled the distance in my same car. Shortly after crossing the border from Ohio into West Virginia, we stopped in Huntington. Even though we were still over fifty miles from Charleston, it felt as if we were virtually at our destination at last. I heard those two fellow travelers exclaim in relief, “When we’s in Huntington, we’s home!”
It struck me that the point at which we feel we’re virtually home is relative to the total distance we’ve travelled.
I didn’t learn how to drive until I was well into my thirties. (I was the only teen-ager who DIDN’T want to drive.) So I would go shopping for my family on foot, pulling a 2-wheel shopping cart. I’d usually have quite a precariously balanced load to haul. The grocery store was four blocks away. But after I’d covered three blocks, I always breathed a sigh of relief. Only one more block to go! I knew at that point that whatever happened - if my shopping cart lost a wheel, if I sprained an ankle – somehow I could make it that extra block. I’d mentally celebrate, “I’m home.”
Then after I learned how to drive, I’d visit my brother in the suburbs. I was always nervous behind the wheel. It was such a relief when, on the return trip, I’d pass into Chicago’s City limits at Cumberland Avenue. Chicago busses start running at Cumberland, and I knew if I crashed or broke down, I could still make it the rest of the way by catching a bus. So as soon as I hit Cumberland, about 6 miles from my house, I’d feel, “I’m home.”
As I’ve forced myself to become a somewhat more adventurous driver, I’ve started visiting friends on the shores of Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada. That drive takes me along a nerve-racking route that includes expressways and the Ambassador Bridge. But on the return trip, as I pass through Benton Harbor, Michigan, and then certainly as I pass through Gary, Indiana, I feel a huge relief. That other side of Lake Michigan is only 30 or 40 miles from home – a mere hop, skip, and a jump. If anything bad happens to my car, I know that from those points I can take the Chicago Metro train into Chicago. When I’m in Gary, I’m as good as home.
When I’ve flown to various European cities, the pilot usually announces when we are over Newfoundland. Coming back, I can relax once I glimpse those icy edges of Newfoundland below. That means we have successfully navigated over the vast, treacherous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. We’ll be flying over solid ground from there on in. It’s my continent, my accustomed territory. When I’m over Newfoundland, I’m home.
Now there’s increasing talk of sending manned spaceships to Mars and possibly to other points in the Solar System. I can imagine the astronauts’ relief when, on their return trip, they fly past the orbit of the Moon – the Moon, that safe and familiar luminescence that has presided over our Earth’s night skies for all the eons we’ve been around. Surely, the astronauts will feel the safety of that trail of light that the Moon casts over Earth’s waters as they propel through the circumference of our friendly satellite. They’ll glow with reassurances to each other, “When we’re past the Moon, we’re home.”
Scientists currently say it would be impossible for astronauts to go farther than our Solar System in a lifetime. But who knows? Some way might be found to beat the System, to navigate some loophole (or some wormhole) through Einstein’s rule against the possibility of traveling faster and farther than the speed of light can take us. Then our astronauts will feel the safety and assurance of being in familiar space when they shoot through the Oort Cloud of icy rocks and asteroids that‘s beyond Pluto. “Only 10 billion miles to go! We’re in our solar system. We’re almost there!”
And if somehow, we find a way to go even farther, to “break the surly bonds” of our galaxy and follow Carl Sagan’s unimaginable trail of zeroes out to other galaxies – the point at which we feel the relief of home-coming will be pushed outward farther yet. As the great, great grandchildren of our original astronauts make their way back from Andromeda, they will perhaps be like the monarch butterflies that migrate back to the place their forbears left, a place they’ve never personally been, but know just by instinct. Our astronauts will not only see by their dials, but will perhaps feel by some unique intersecting influence of light and gravity, that they are coming back into the vast womb where their kind was born, once they’ve burst over that rough edge of our Galaxy. It will only be another 20 thousand light years then. They will look at each other in triumph and beam, “When we’s in the Milky Way, we’s home!”
Wheeeeee!
