The Road to Nowhere

by Eric Francis Coppolino and illustrations by Emil Alzamora, October 25, 2007

On September 30, I drove down to New York City and then to Long Island on a mission to visit my parents and collect the bits of my property that were scattered around the New York area. After nearly a decade of living in many cities and countries, I have decided to make New York my home. When people say I’ve come back to New York, I politely correct them and say I’ve come forward.

It was the first time I had seen both of my parents on the same day since (as best I can reckon) the late 1970s.

As for New York, I was waiting for that moment when it would indeed be about a step ahead and not a step toward the past. That being said, I think my favorite thing about Kingston is that it’s soaked in Revolutionary War–era history. Second favorite is that I’m living in Kingston down the street from Chronogram. I don’t have to call or e-mail—I can take a break, go outside, and visit.

But the past seems to be coming back to me even if I am not going back to it. My mother had a box of dishes and cups for me; they were not from the old days, but she has recently returned after a long and painful absence.

My friend Priya (who blogs daily for PlanetWaves.net) was keeping a huge plastic tub of my diaries, poems, and notebooks from between 1980 and 1997 (these had previously been stored in Woodstock, where they survived a flood).

My father had two boxes of my published materials, some of them going back to junior high school (a campaign poster from my run for ninth-grade class president), and also various things I had mailed to him over the years when my suitcases overflowed. Speaking of overflowing, these items, as well, survived a serious flood in his basement with minimal damage. Some were the only remaining copies of articles lost when Hurricane Floyd visited New Jersey in 1999.

Among these retrieved collections were many treasures. It was like finding everything that I had ever lost all at once. I still have only been through a portion of it. Memories of entire phases of my life, like distinct incarnations, return to my perception. I open a folder and am handling articles with my name on them that I don’t even vaguely remember writing. Others are artifacts of truly stellar moments in my complicated trip as a writer, such as the series of articles that made the PCB and dioxin contamination at SUNY New Paltz a national story in the mid-1990s.

One item was a diary with notes from a dream I had in June 1986; the dream notes are recorded the first page of the journal, a thick black sketchbook titled in bold stencil lettering, “Wide Awake.”

That was the spring I graduated from SUNY Buffalo. I later learned that in that very month was my Chiron-square-Chiron transit. This is a key life transit that’s usually a time of huge transition (depending on when you were born, it occurs sometime between the ages of 7 and 23; kids today are getting it on the far younger end of the scale). It was a tumultuous moment of upheaval and nearly total uncertainty. At the time, Chernobyl was spewing radiation around the world. From that event, I knew that I would be an environmental journalist, but had no clue how I would ever get there, much less any concrete plan or conscious desire to do so.