Home, Like Me

The author in Arches National Park and in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, both national parks in Utah. 

A writer, traveler, explorer comes home to raise her family in the area where she grew up

By Laura Forrest Hopfauf

I grew up in Washington County. More specifically I graduated from Boonsboro High School. More specifically than that, I was raised in Sharpsburg. From there we can drill down to Dargan. And if you want to get to the real nitty gritty that even native Washington County residents might have never heard of, I’m from Frog Hollar—home of legendary moonshine. 

When I was 18 and about to leave for college halfway across the country if you would have told me that I would end up coming back to raise my family in the same area where I was born, I would have told you that you were crazy, and that there was a great big wide world and I needed to see it all. I couldn’t just stay here. 

But here I am, and I haven’t seen the whole world. Though truth be told, I made a valiant effort. 

In my life I’ve managed to get to 30 countries and all but one state. I’ve snorkeled above octopus, backpacked across a Caribbean Island, canoed through the Everglades, hiked alongside Grizzlies, and done a bunch of other things that stressed out my mother. 

When I travel, I really like to feel that I’ve come to know a place. Just seeing it has never been enough for me. I’m somebody who has to turn things over, hold them in my hands, and break them open. I have to understand things to a point that feels uncomfortable for them, and maybe even for me.  

I can’t just see the Grand Canyon. I’ve got to go inside. I’ve got to sweat while the sun beats down like it’s somehow come closer. I’ve got to dip water out of little crevices a park ranger told me about before I left for my hike and drink it. I have to leave my tent behind and sleep wide open on red dirt under the stars because to do anything less makes me feel like I missed it. Like I was there, but I wasn’t.  

Even as child, I was like this. My parents could not keep me in their yard, try as they might. I grew up in the countryside along the C&O Canal, and I was constantly traipsing through the woods that surrounded our house, through my neighbor’s woods, and their neighbor’s woods, looking for God only knows what, but for something. I found long forgotten Plymouths wedged between trees on an angle that made me stumble, forts with holes I could stick my whole arm through that I assume were pockets for rifles from the Civil War, and so many old glass bottles in a full rainbow of colors that they stopped being exciting. But I came to feel like I understood those woods, that I knew them. 

And once I knew them, I felt like I should move on. That there was someplace else I needed to know. Somewhere else I had to understand.   

But as I traveled and as I grew, I realized that I can’t come to know a place without time. In the time I’ve been away from the Grand Canyon, it has dug itself deeper. Since I canoed the Everglades, the mangroves have grown and changed the channels I passed through. The island I hiked in the Caribbean suffered through a hurricane that erased paths I climbed. Nothing stays put. Everything is always changing. 

Knowing a place, knowing anything, requires building a relationship. And relationships require time. Once I stop spending time in a place, our relationship is paused at that moment, and pretty soon I start to wonder if I still understand it, if I still know that place. Or if it’s changed so much in my absence that we’ve become strangers yet again. 

In some ways, I think that’s why I came back to Washington County, why I’m raising my family here. Because it’s a place that’s changing more than we realize. Because it’s a place that isn’t as easy to know as it may seem. But it’s worth knowing. It’s worth taking the time to build our relationship into the next generation. Because I may know Washington County like the back of my hand, but there is still so much that I don’t know. 

Frog Hollar isn’t like Sharpsburg, isn’t like Boonsboro, isn’t like Smithsburg, isn’t like Hagerstown, isn’t like Clear Spring. There are treasures and gems and heroes and wild spaces hidden in each one. Sometimes, it can take a lifetime to find those, to know them, and in that lifetime, you’re no longer a traveler. You’re home, like me. 

The author hiking in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas.