You Can’t Get There From Here Anymore
Patti Whitman

The town waits right on Old 99
(if you remember that long ago),
so everyone bound for Medford or Eugene
or even Tacoma had to go straight through.
Then the freeway double bypassed
the main artery of the town.
Now you really have to want to go there
or else you may end up in Montague
or maybe even Gazelle,
much smaller towns
where hardly anything happens,
except, perhaps, the Firemen’s Ball.
I always just drove until the place showed up.
That’s what I did when I returned
for Yreka High’s reunion.
Things looked pretty much the same.
Without success, I sought the Fourth Street house
kitty-corner from my kindergarten class,
but I did catch a whiff of the
heavy-headed lilacs, lavender and pearl,
nodding off in the summer’s haze,
and a glimpse of the baby-hued abalone
that had washed up from the ocean of
Grandma’s garden.
Even though I looked carefully
as I drove down Main Street,
somehow I missed Con Brown’s,
where murmured conversations
 were punctuated by the slap
of cards in the back room
on bright spring mornings
when my sister and I ventured timidly
into the cramped emporium
to purchase Dad’s Sunday paper, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Wasn’t the Yreka Drug down on the corner of Broadway Street?
Where we spun on the stools after school
watching the counter girl make YD toast,
a dime’s worth of delicious
which the cool kids ate with a cherry coke.
Slapping melted butter on a Wonder bread slice,
wielding a soft bristled brush
then thwack, she diagonalized it with a butcher knife.
I looked up and down the street but couldn’t spot
the steep-staired office of old Dr. Kleaver
where Novacaine was king and he the court jester.
My teeth still ache in remembrance
each time a blank key is drilled.
I can’t be sure
but I think I caught a glance,
just out of the corner of my eye,
of our hometown bake shop
of Ripley’s Believe It or Not fame.
Not for the maple bars, cinnamon buns or bear claws,
nor my favorite, chocolate glazed,
just the palindrome reflected off the window
across the street from the
Yreka Bakery.
Somehow when I journeyed back home
I never dreamt it would be this hard
to find  the places I recall.
The next time
I come up this way
I think I’ll just use MapQuest.com.