it felt like we'd been here

Being the only licensed driver in house, I'm the one who provides transportation to and from Boston Derby Dames bouts on those occasions when Maura decides to go stag. The matches are held at the Shriners' Auditorum in Wilmington (a.k.a. "The Land of Nod"), not far at all from my old North Woburn stomping grounds.

In the summer, making the long ride down Fordham Road to the venue with Super Lumina's windows rolled down, it hard not to notice a certain aroma -- a melange of evergreen, scrub foliage, and diesel scents -- wafting in the late afternoon breeze. It's the smell of my childhood.

I lived in North Woburn until the fall of 1984, when my family left our first floor apartment on the corner of Merrimac and Dartmouth Street and moved into the other side of my maternal grandparents' duplex in Woburn Center. I think about the old neighborhood surprisingly often, though my visits (or rather "pass-throughs," as there's no reason to stop and get out of the car these days) have gotten more and more infrequent. The landscape has changed too much since the early 1980's, and the dissonance between "what was" and "what is" is the stuff of fever dreams -- ghosts of eradicated landmarks superimpose themselves over the upstart subdivisions and McMansions that now occupy their previous spaces.

But then Woburn, especially the part of the city north of I-95 and west of I-93, has been a developmental palimpsest as far back as I can remember. That was what made it such a fascinating place in which to spend one's childhood. Despite the push towards modern office parks as upscale replacements for the tanneries and chemical plants, the the scars and mouldering remains of the old industries remained -- crumbling foundations and discarded machinery half concealed under nature's attempts to reclaim the open spaces.

"Down Back," the tract of land stretching from NELCO (New England Leadburning Company, founded by my great-great-grandfather) to the edge of the city dump was a playground beyond compare, criss-crossed with the BMX-friendly remains of pulled up train tracks and chock-full of piles of illegally discarded junk. A ten-year old with more curiosity than sense (and, hopefully, an up-to-date tetanus vaccination) could unearth all kinds of treasures from the refuse, from animal skulls to a collection of turn-of-the-century postcards to creased and weatherbeaten porn mags to all sorts of things construct a hastily made go-kart with before sending it careening down Chester Avenue. One of the more disturbing finds my crew made was several sacks of arsenic, dumped by the side of the path so as to return that ultra-toxic goodness back to the soil, I suppose. Or because some lazy cheap fuck couldn't be bothered to dispose of it properly.

Coexisting with this graveyard of industry past were many rustic elements. A couple of the residents (including my paternal grandparents, and later, my aunt) at the far end of the neighborhood had horse stables, chicken coops, and even the occasional goat on their land. Though only a short ten miles from downtown Boston, North Woburn was on the far edge of the suburban fringe (which has since spilled northward over the I-95 boundary, brushing up against and even crossing the New Hampshire border. Check the tags on southbound vehicles on any given morning commute, and you'll see what I mean). While not as honky-tonk as, say, Billerica or Tewksbury was at the time, there was a certain blue-collar ethnic hillbilly character to the neighborhood, though fading fast even back then under the influence of newer arrivals but still manifested though the occasional buckshot-perforated stop sign or raccoon pelt nailed to a tree for drying.

As a kid, I wasn't really aware of the neighborhood's unique atmosphere. In fact, I was thrilled when my family moved as it put me within closer range of the places that sold comics, music, and other items of adolescent importance. Now that I'm older, and last traces of its identity have given way to a sedate aura of suburbanity, I find myself reflecting about how lucky I was to have had such a place to spend my formative years in, full of wide open spaces with maximum potential for childhood hijinx and where nine-year old kids could frolic free of adult supervision through industrial ruins.

Yeah, I know. Everyone feels nostalgic about their childhood haunts and thinks that they were something special and rare.

Mine really was, though.

Skeletal Family - Promised Land (from a 1985 single; collected on The Best of the Skeletal Family, 2001) - Not really a chant, and I'm clear on their ever-circling credentials, but it's a lovely bit of gothic rock from a time before the the genre devolved into mall-rats with black hoodies and Trent Reznor fixations.