Return to
Oakpine
by Ron Carlson
Our hometown is either a place we never want to leave, can’t
determine HOW to leave or a place we NEVER plan to return. For the current and
former residents of fictional Oakpine, Wyoming, all of the above apply.
Some thirty odd years after their high school graduation and
the life changing events of that day, former 1960s garage-band members and high
school classmates converge on Oakpine. The homecoming and reunion plot proves
to be a great mechanism for building a story that readers who are post
high-school will identify - and Carlson has created some very likeable
characters to tell this story.
There is Frank who runs a popular bar in Oakpine and Craig
who operates a hardware store and construction company in the town that has changed
little since their high school days. There is Mason who has spent his adult
life practicing law in Denver; his only outdoor experience in all those years being
his daily walk between the parking-garage and his office. And then there is Jimmy who left Oakpine on a
bus the day he graduated high school, went to NYC, and now as a well-known
novelist, comes home with AIDS, his body only a whisper of what it was thirty
years before.
Their garage band, ‘Life on Earth’, repertoire consisted of only
nine songs, but during a few short months of their senior year, they became
local rock legends. And when assembled back in Oakpine so many years later,
they reunite and the music and the accompanied memories act as a salve that heals
some of the long ago wounds and unfinished explanations.
Carlson creates a clever parallel to his reunion theme with
the character Larry, Craig’s son who is currently in his senior year of
high school and feeling the pull of the world outside of Oakpine. Through Larry, Carlson paints a perfect
picture of the awkwardness, the uncertainty and the change that defines high
school life.
In the end Carlson serves up a delicate reminder that sentiment
and appreciation of our hometown often improves with time.
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