Flat-terranean Homesick Blues.

I was just searching for the video of Forrest Gump running to add to my last blog entry, which I thought would be kind of fun and whimsical, but instead I found myself getting a little bit melancholy.
I was living in BC when I first saw Forrest Gump. I saw it in the theater, and let me tell you people, Vancouver in Autumn is very far from Saskatoon.
I was feeling lonesome and homesick the way that prairie people often do when they're surrounded and shut in by trees and mountains and clouds. The Pacific Coast can wrap you in, and if you're averse to being wrapped it's not necessarily a good thing.

I'll admit that I'm pretty susceptible to outside influences, particularly when it comes to emotions and such. There's a running scene in Forrest Gump in which he runs across America a few times. One of the shots in this scene is a long sweeping panorama of prairie skyline, as Forrest runs along a flatland highway through shimmering wheat fields.

I was sitting in this dark theater, and that big beautiful blue sky in the scene was even more real to me at that time than any sky I could recall. I felt such an incredible wave of homesickness at that point, of complete and utter displacement that it hit me in the stomach like a lost love.

Here's a confession of some teenage silliness for you, that is somewhat related while we're at it.
When I was a teenager I thought I'd seen Saskatchewan for the last time. It turned out that I hadn't, and the day that I came back from living in Britain was one of the best days of my life. The day that I came back I went to the outskirts of the city where the fields start and they don't stop, and I actually ran out into a wheatfield with my walkman blaring John Cougar and I rocked out until I was exhausted (I'd held on to this image of the video for Pink Houses while I'd been in Britain) and after I rocked out and relived the video I just laid there in the freezing November cold, ecstatic and delirious. Here's another little confession, I was actually trying to grow my hair out to look like the album cover of American Fool back then. I so identified with this video that it determined my entire personality. You'll see at the end...Aviators, long hair, white T-shirt, boots. When I was overseas this video defined home for me, and I think that somehow, by emulating him I was holding on to home.

John Mellencamp - Pink Houses
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