LIVE FROM THE HILLS: You Are Where You Come From

I don’t know who said it. Maybe it was Socrates, maybe it was Hunter S. Thompson. For all I know, it could’ve been Larry King or Charlie Rose. But it’s true.

You are where you came from.

Welcome to Warwick, population 600. It’s in Massachusetts, but it isn’t in the same state as Boston. In fact, here’s a message hand-delivered from home: you bastards drowned four towns and called it the Quabbin Reservoir just so you could have tap water.

Maybe I’m jumping the gun, though. We didn’t mean any hostility there. Welcome to Warwick.

Looking for Main Street? We don’t have one, but you’re welcome to use Route 78, a 20-mile garden snake of pavement that runs the length of Warwick and nowhere else. Looking for some shops? We don’t have any of those, either.

But Warwick doesn’t need any stores, nor high-rise complexes or gallery plazas of condominiums, because Warwick has state forestland and long dirt roads and rock wall-enclosed meadows. It has buckshot-ridden stop signs, wood stoves and ice fishing huts out on the lake. It has my old three-room elementary school where three teachers taught six grades.

And then there was high school and the 70 kids from five towns in my graduating class.

There are high schoolers at home. They drink on abandoned bridges overlooking the Connecticut River or try to catch freight trains moving south, east or in any direction at all. They file restraining orders against each other, ransack decrepit prisons and rob gas stations, but they don’t bring their guns to school.

They may huff gasoline and lob homemade petrol bombs onto a neighbor’s lawn, but they really are good kids.

There are conflicts. In western Massachusetts, new-age liberalism confronts backwater ignorance, which offers little tolerance. It’s where toothless lumberjacks eat ecstasy and show up to raves with their boot eyes tied tight.

Home is funny. You watch future Marines gobble up bathtub acid, and you can feel ex-Marines track your movement through rifle scope as you walk up their driveways.

One summer, I worked for a veteran who put so many slugs in the trees around his house that a strong wind would occasionally knock one over.

The trees don’t have it any easier in the winter. They explode from the cold.

Farmers brew moonshine by the side of the road, drive Clydesdales into town and steal cattle from New Hampshire. When I was much younger, I’d hear them coming up my road in the very early morning, the low bellows of cows carrying to my window. My road certainly wasn’t the quickest route, but it was definitely the most covert. For old-timers, there is usually some peace.

For everybody else, there is classic rock on the FM at night.

For the kids, there is and always will be bonfires. And liquor. And a spooky type of desperation. We climbed mountains and drove four hours for $50 of fireworks. We stole beer and ran from the police. Some jumped off bridges. Others climbed saplings. We rode around in the back of pickup trucks and swam naked on summer nights.

And the girls, always the girls. They’d be the death of you. Tattooed small town girls with a rainy-day penchant for dark, erotic endeavors. And enough flare to force you along for the ride. They always had angry fathers.

Everybody has a home. My home is driving by the lumberyard smokestacks at dawn, going to work. My home is blowtorches, shaved heads and blue-collar beers.

Home is for fourth amendment nuts like myself, or flat-landers like my folks, who saw the light of day pointing to the countryside.

Home is miles of barbed wire, and like everybody’s home, mine has an underbelly that will get you down after a while. Home is too many moments of silence for dead friends over the high school intercoms, too much money spent on funeral clothes.

At home, you don’t hit the bottle; the bottle hits you. And sometimes you’re an old man before you put it down again. Home is dead-end jobs and teenage mothers and cross-eyed little girls. And everybody has an addiction. Sometimes when you’re home you realize you should get out. And so I did.

But in a lot of ways, I never left Warwick, even though I’ve lived in Boston for three years now. A place like Warwick doesn’t let you leave.

I still get phone calls late at night with familiar voices on the other end, saying things like, “You won’t believe what Shawn just did,” or, “Will Jack Daniels burn in a fire?”

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I’ll try to be as Boston-oriented as I can with this column. You’ll have to forgive me if I now and then lapse into an old story or some redneck philosophy, or devote an occasional 800 words to the beauty of fireworks or how to drive in a blizzard.

And no, Jack Daniels won’t burn well. But Wild Turkey will.