Harmon Park and Other Ghosts
As Harmon Park, where I learned to hit and field, where I played and ran, and in whose folds I sought refuge from the anxieties of a troubled home, is a ghost. I stand about where home plate used to be. The ball field has long been a memory, paved over decades ago and now home to an expanded Sutter Tracy Community Hospital.
We didn't require much by way of a ball field back then, just an adequate expanse of grass and a frail chicken wire barrier in left field where green ivy padded our collisions, situated close enough to make a home run a distinct possibility.
Tracy was a boy's paradise when I lived there and my vision, actual and metaphorical, was drawn according to a boy's geography, bordered to the north by the mysteries of the San Joaquin River, to the west by the rolling hills of Altamont Pass and to the south by the railroad yards where Southern Pacific locomotives announced their arrival with deafening blasts from their horns.
In the summer, winds carried the scent of fresh-cut alfalfa and other earthy fragrances across the valley, enveloping the little grassy diamond framed by cherry trees and the chicken wire home run fence.
I look out across the asphalt to where I chased the moment and beyond, to a youth who lived beneath summer moons traversing the night sky above the expanse of farms and fields. I recall the waft of alfalfa, corn, and hay; bicycling out to where the San Joaquin washed the mud and silt along the Delta; the locomotive yards with their smells of oil and tar and strange men riding the rails.
Walking back to my car, I realize that, although I left the town when I was fourteen, the town never left me. The river, the fields, the railroad, the ghost field and a long-lost host of friends whose lives intermingled with mine for a time all remain, influencing me in ways too subtle to fathom yet too intrinsic to ignore. More than mere memories, they became true in the way home is fundamentally different from a motel.
From boyhood I have been marked by a need for movement, as though the river and the fields, the railroad yards, the kinetic energy of the ball field worked their ways into my being, leaving me with a gravitational pull toward flowing waters, golden summer fields stretching out towards horizons with no discernible end, train tracks and railroad cars with their promise of endless movement intermingled with enticing elements of danger.
As I pull my car around and take a last look at the ghost of summer’s past, I'm tempted to wonder, with a degree of whimsy, if the old park didn't bring as much wholeness and healing as the modern hospital for which it was bulldozed.
I take a Google tour around the new Harmon Park that has taken shape on a small patch in the midst of a residential neighborhood a half-mile west of the old field. There is no fence, though. It is too small to play real baseball on. Perhaps wiffle ball. I'm sure the intentions were good. I close the tab.
Some things are irreplaceable.