6.30.26 - Untitled: Chapter 1
1. River View
River View was one of the prettiest places I had ever been in my life. I was born right outside of here, at the County hospital, I've been to a ton of places around the world, and River View is still the prettiest.
I always had a hard time describing River View to my friends at school. First, it's not a town. It's just a chunk of a larger suburb, which for historical reasons, is a Census Designated Place called River View. But my River View is just a chunk of River View proper, surrounded by other chunks of suburb with other names of a pastoral flavor. Cherry Hill. Lakeside. Great Oaks. Not uncommon, the kind of names you probably see all around the country--weakly evocative of some geographic feature that I guess we're supposed to believe existed before they put a bunch of houses there.
The suburb itself was easy to describe, what was a little difficult was why River View was special amongst these parishes, and why there was a kind of River View nationalism. You see, each suburban chunk had its own elementary school. Cherry Hill Elementary, Lakeside Elementary, Great Oaks Elementary, and River View Elementary. But then, all of these elementary schools fed into just two middle schools: River Crest Middle School and Oak Ridge Middle School. Finally, those two middle schools fed into one high school--River View High.
River View wasn't the nicest, or the richest of the four parishes. Great Oaks had way bigger houses, with more expensive cars parked in front of them. Lakeside was a newer development with more sprawl, and the elementary school there was probably the nicest. Cherry Hill, notwithstanding what I said earlier, was arguably much more charming with more access to trails and nature.
River View didn't have these things going for it. It was the oldest of the bunch, with more modest 1990s developments. Less Teslas, more Hondas. River View Elementary and River Crest Middle School were older school buildings, and didn't have the high ceilings or natural light that their counterparts in the other parishes did.
And it was a little more busy than the other neighborhoods, a little more road. Not quite as serene. It was built around what used to be a "downtown" shopping center in the sixties. River View Plaza. The Plaza had a library, a McDonald's, a bakery, a tailor shop, a pizza parlor, a gas station, a frozen yogurt place, and a rotating cast of fast casual restaurants. At some point we had a Blockbuster video and a laser tag joint, but those venues have just been pop-up shops for years. Up until this year, we had a movie theater too. Basically, we had it all. And it wasn't far from the River View developments. What made River View special is that if you grew up here, you could just walk around and do things in this whimsical, red brick Plaza. Then play in the woods. And then walk home. The other neighborhoods weren't really like that. You had to cross the big highway and walk alongside it to get anywhere worth being--and all they really have are little strip malls with expensive food and a grocery store. We had a little main street, and we would be hanging around it since we were little kids, while the Great Oak kids had to get driven around or hang out in someone's basement.
But the best thing about River View is that it's where everyone eventually ended up, since the High School is here. And by that time, everyone wants to hang out, loiter and do stuff outside the house. And where would that be? The Plaza. And who already knew about the Plaza? The River View kids. We were the only batch that spent the entirety of our childhood years in an easy walking distance from our school. River View Elementary, River Crest Middle School, and River View High could all be reached by sidewalk. The poor Great Oaks kids, their commute just got farther and farther with each level. Not that it mattered by High School, and not that they minded driving their nice cars into River View. But we had the unique privilege of showing everyone around, and taking them to our old haunts. And we had houses close to where everyone wanted to hang out. Naturally, being a River View kid gave you some structural social advantages.
Not that we were all that different from the other neighborhoods otherwise. River View proper was just another rich suburb among rich suburbs. It was for the most part, an increasingly isolating, socially alienated place where people spent too much time in their cars and their houses. Throughout most of River View, streets are quiet all day, you don't see much, and it wouldn't be strange to go on a walk without seeing a single child for hours on end. They were probably in their house, in their school, or in a car. Until they got their own car, that was their lot in life.
But if you were in my little River View, you at least could get a small taste of the kind of childhood they show in Eighties movies. You could feasibly be a little rascal or like a Goonies in little River View. You could leave the house and go on little adventures. And a small faction of us did. All the time. We had watergun fights. We shoplifted from the gas station. We biked miles away to Cherry Hill and got lost. We snuck into the movie theater and hopped between showings. Every square meter of River View is a good memory.
When the Emergency started I was a little excited to come back. I hated leaving state college, I hated leaving my friends. And I was scared. But the idea of spending some time back in River View wasn't so bad. My friends were coming back too--and I hadn't seen them for months at a time. We'd all be together again, back in little River View. Maybe we would take some nice walks. Go on a late night fast-food run. Things were getting so goddamned strange--going back to a place I had more or less mastered felt like it could stop the ground from shifting under my feet. The idea of coming back home, finding everything as I had left it, was a small, fleeting comfort.
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