Between Two Kingdoms

I grew up in a small community that was famous for two things: The Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center and Onion Town. Our house was situated between them equally if you measured by a crow’s flight. Knots on either side of Route 22 where the sun goes cold before dark.

Onion Town was written up in the New York Times. Described as a mysterious enclave cut off from American culture, it was a place even local law enforcement avoided. I think you would use the term off the grid to explain it now, but I wasn’t familiar with that phrase back in the early eighties.

It was a curious society all its own. Kids from there dropped out of school the minute they could. We lifted our feet from the bus when we drove past it. I guess we did it to keep ourselves safe. Or to mock it. Which may be one and the same.

The Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center kind of speaks for itself. It was a huge campus of brick buildings amongst rolling green hills. It was almost pretty, if you didn’t know what went on inside the walls.

In first grade we sang Christmas Carols there. I watched a large orderly race across the room and restrain a young man who’d been talking to himself. I screamed, the sound rushing through my own ears. Our music teacher shouted at me to wait outside in the hallway until my mother came. I didn’t have to be told twice.

Isolation versus institution were the two kingdoms between which we dwelled. I’d like to say it shaped us somewhat as a town, but I can’t say it did, other than the employment opportunities offered by one and the folklore by the other. Everyone I knew had a mother or a father who worked at Harlem Valley and we all understood where the borders of Onion town stopped and started. 

This was twenty-some years before neurodiversity became a part of my own life, in the shape of the autism bell curve. My son Jack. A boy who talks to himself incessantly.

I revisit these people in the margins of my mind and wonder what happened to the girls who never came back to class after their sixteenth birthday, or the young adults knocking around inside the brick walls of psychiatry. In my darkest moments I can really get myself going.

I look at my son – a young man himself – and wonder where he would have fit in this narrative, had he landed on a different timeline.

I wonder where he fits now. 

These days, Harlem Valley is deserted. Vines grow up along the windowsills and apparently asbestos in the drywall prevents any kind of tear-down or sale. It’s my impression that institutional living is on its way out, as our culture moves from campuses to community homes on the road between kingdoms.

As for Onion Town, I hear it’s still there. The people remain steadfast in their commitment to avoid the mainstream, but the opposition has settled somewhat.

Still, the future haunts me. What will happen once I am gone? So much so, that when I lie awake at night, I force myself to change my heart’s direction, and consider what is possible as opposed to what once felt hopeless. 

After all, what are knots but an opportunity to untangle all we once thought to be true?

In the midst of darkness, I close my eyes. I picture a house in the distance. It glints and sparkles in the sunlight.

If you look closer, you see a sentence etched into the front door. This one sentence—this collection of words—well, they are very, very big.

They are a shored wall against a flood of uncertainty.

They are a million bright stars in an otherwise long, dark night.

They are peace and forgiveness, power and pride. They are everlasting absolution.

“It is time to write a new story.”