If you ever happen to be in St. Louis, and you take Highway 40 to the western edge of the city, you will spy, looming above the Clayton Road exit, the world’s largest Amoco sign. Forty feet tall, sixty feet wide, the sign is so big and so bright that, according to local legend, pilots once used it to guide their flights in and out of Lambert Field.

No matter that British Petroleum bought Amoco more than a quarter of a century ago. The people of St. Louis treasure that sign as a symbol of a bygone era. Some iteration of it has marked that spot since the early part of the twentieth century when it was lit by 4,500 lightbulbs and powered by its own generator. It’s older than the highway, older than any highway in the region. Removing it would be tantamount to tearing down the Arch.

The Amoco sign marks a convergence of borders in a city carved and divided like a badly made pizza—heavy with toppings here, charred and spare two slices away. North of the sign is the wide expanse of Forest Park, vestige of the 1904 World’s Fair. South is Dogtown, a hilly bungalowed burgh. East is the city, grand but crumbling, opulent mansions with circular drives alongside boarded up ruins. And west is Clayton, the suburb I fled throughout high school in the eighties, dreaming of the day when I would leave it for good.

Until recently, whenever I returned to St. Louis, I would marvel at how little had changed since the early nineties, when my parents moved. This may be, in large part, because I tended to migrate to the same places. I’d walk the same paths in U City and Forest Park, browse the same stacks at my favorite bookstore in the Central West End. I’d sit in the same booth at the same restaurant, always ordering the same thing: a burger topped with a scoop of cheese spread and a chilled glass of IBC root beer.

All that said, there’s no stopping time. Trees grow, trees fall. Someone widens the road and whole neighborhoods give way to expanded parking for a Home Goods or a Trader Joe’s. New people move into old houses, renovating them beyond recognition or allowing them to fall into disrepair, porches rotting on weedy lots.

Understand, then, that when I call St. Louis my hometown, I do not mean the St. Louis of today. My St. Louis is the St. Louis of 1991, the summer after my first year of college, one year before my family left. My St. Louis is the St. Louis of three o’clock in the morning, just after the night shift at the IHOP, under the biggest Amoco sign on the Planet Earth.

***

That summer, I felt sexy.

Even though I was sweltering from the round collar of my IHOP uniform to the toes of my control top pantyhose. Even though I stank of grease, sweat, cigarettes, and artificial maple syrup. Even though my skin had grown mottled and flushed in the muggy weather, my hair poufy and frizzed. Even though I was furred inside and out with the accumulating residue of nicotine, spewing pollution like an antique steam engine as I puffed my Camel Light.

Even though—or maybe because—St. Louis in the summer was as swampy as the Everglades. So hot that two minutes in a parked car would melt a Hershey bar. So humid that it was visible, mist rising from the turf at dusk. The body can’t help but yield to this kind of heat. Flesh softens under stiff polyester. Limbs loosen in the sultry air.

 And, of course, 1991 was the summer of the boys, boys, boys. Dishwashers. Cashiers. Exchange students. Old flames. I was attached to none and open to all. For dates, for fantasy, for flirtation. Sometimes for light petting, though I rarely went past first or second base. I wasn’t interested in a relationship. I was in it for the preening. I’d strut between the booths at the IHOP in my white Keds, serving late night breakfast to my regulars, tilting my chin for some coquettish banter with the cute ones, secure in the knowledge that I’d be gone come September when college resumed. I was leaving, and as far as I was concerned, leaving gave me license to drift. What did it matter who paid for dinner, who took me to the movies, whose motorcycle I straddled?

It was glorious, this mindless hedonism.

It almost made me want to stay.

***

Until I turned west to face Clayton, the place I could never call home.

Many people considered Clayton a desirable place to live with its low crime and top-notch schools. It was also undeniably beautiful, a romantic kind of beauty that signals status and wealth. Its winding roads were curbed with granite, its tile-roofed homes tricked out with stained glass and wrought iron, its rambling parks amply shaded by tall trees and tidy pavilions for picnics and birthday parties.

It nauseated me.

Not only because I knew that less than ten miles away from my house, people were living in extreme poverty.

Not only because I didn’t believe the prevailing dogma that Claytonians deserved all their privilege due to their superior work ethic.

Not only (though mostly) because of the blind eye parents, teachers, and peers took to injustice, denying racism, though everyone could see that Black kids were marginalized, sometimes harassed by cops if they lingered too long after dark. Everyone saw, and most turned away, just as they turned away when my gay friend was forced to drop out of school because people threw rocks at him, just as they turned away when weirdos like me were bullied to the point of a broken arm in seventh grade.

An infrequency of crime does not make a place safe.

Fuck this place, I’d rage, red-faced, sputtering, shrill. Fuck its BMWs and its Guess Jeans and its Giorgio perfume and its top-notch schools. Fuck its smugness, its snootiness, its entitlement, its oblivion.

These adolescent tantrums did nothing to improve my social life, but the way I saw it, my only alternative to spitting bile was swallowing it, and my gag reflex was far too developed for that. Yes, I was inappropriate, extreme, awkward, grotesque. And yes, I was a hypocrite, a privileged person ranting about privilege.

Still, I wasn’t wrong.

“That’s just the way it is,” Claytonians would say, waving me away like a gnat, and even then, I knew they had a point. Racism, homophobia, and materialism were hardly unique to Clayton in the 1980s. All were prevalent if not ubiquitous in Ronald Reagan’s America, where consumerism was a Cold War weapon, AIDS a punishment for the sexually deviant, and racism a truth acknowledged only as a distasteful relic from a distant and less enlightened past.

Yes, that was the way it was, and based on the denial and apathy around me, it wasn’t likely to change.

I began to fantasize about life in distant countries. I’d flip through the glossy pages in my old picture atlas from elementary school, imagining myself alone on one of those beautiful green hills in New Zealand or on a boat headed to the Island of St. Helena. Or I’d read about St. Theresa the Little Flower in France, and consider joining a convent where I could live as a cloistered nun. Sometimes I’d gaze at a seascape my mother had painted entitled “The Coast of County Clare” and picture myself standing on a cliff, waves crashing below me.

“Love it or leave it,” Claytonians would shoot back at me when I launched into one of my diatribes.

            Leave it, I’d think. And don’t look back.

***

And yet, I can’t deny that there were times when that place held me.

Times when I stopped.

Stopped to pick a fallen cup-shaped blossom from the sidewalk near my house and lick its nectar from the place where the petals met the stamen.

Stopped on my retrieval of a stray ball to inhale the sweet scent of wet turf and savor the cool sensation of drizzle on my cheeks.

Stopped on my walk home from school to turn and take in the scene behind me: at the horizon, the hill I’d just descended. In the foreground, the hill on which I stood. Between the two, a hollow carpeted with leaves—sycamore leaves the color of amber, maple leaves the color of blood. The wee stemmed leaflets of locust trees and the papery lobes of oak. Leaves falling and piling like snow, honeyed on their descent by the setting sun.

Those were the times when all my hurt and spite would fall off like old bark. I’d stop, momentarily frozen, and it was as if my feet sprouted roots that shot down, dandelion-like, piercing through the pebbles and rhizomes and worms deep into the clay-rich soil. I’d stop, and my heart would leap up, soaring above the treetops to a secret, invisible place. I’d stop and hover, peering down through the woods to the spot where my feet were planted, then plunge back down.

These times would never last longer than a minute or two. Still, I’d come away changed, fortified by a strange new certainty that I belonged completely. That I belonged to that place, that it was part of me, and I was part of it, whether or not I chose to call it home.

***

Meanwhile, the world was rapidly changing.

Two years after my epiphany among the trees, the Berlin Wall fell. Less than two years after that, the Soviet Union collapsed altogether.

It happened that summer, the summer of the boys, boys, boys.

I was home from college, waitressing at the Clayton IHOP for extra cash. I worked the night shift, starting at five and ending at two, then drove around weary but too restless for sleep. It wasn’t long before my wanderings led me to the Amoco station, the one place that was still open at that hour. At first, I went there simply to replenish my smokes but quickly took to hanging around for some light flirtation with the cute boy who worked there. (Flirtation only, as he had no interest in me. And anyway, he had a kid.)

I want to say I had just arisen from bed that August afternoon when my mother ran up the stairs with the news that tanks were rolling down the streets of Moscow. There had been a coup d’état. Communist party leaders had detained the president in his dacha, declaring Martial Law and issuing arrest warrants for all his allies.

The Russians, in response, filled the streets in protest, barricading the Parliament and facing down the tanks, a spectacle eerily reminiscent of the Tiananmen Square massacre a few years earlier.

Except that the soldiers tasked with the occupation decided not to shoot. Instead, they joined the protestors, decking the tanks with garlands of flowers, smiling for the cameras with roses in the barrels of their guns.

The Soviet Union had finally fallen, and its fall was virtually bloodless.

How I wish I could remember that moment with my whole body, the moment I realized that the Cold War was over. How I wish I could remember it the way I remember the leaves on that autumn afternoon or the taste of nectar from a fallen tulip tree blossom. How I wish it especially now, as I write this, in these desperately uncertain times. I need reassurance that it wasn’t a dream or a movie or a rumor or a happy thought. I need reassurance that it really happened. Because if it really did happen, then anything can happen, and nobody is doomed.

I do remember some of it, of course—my mother running up the stairs, the pictures of the crowds and the tanks and the flowers, that Scorpions song on the radio.

But no memories of that entire summer are anywhere as vivid as that one moment under the Amoco sign. Nothing comes close to the delicious poison of nicotine swilling in my lungs, the slack languor of the hour just before dawn. The omnipresent moisture, fresh in the early morning air and close under my thick polyester uniform. The buggy haze of the sky, glowing from the light of the sign. And, of course, the sign, itself, hovering benevolently over the highway that would one day carry me off from the place I could never call home.

***

It’s easy, these days, to succumb to nostalgia. Easy to forget that 1991 also marked the first Iraq War, the police brutality against Rodney King, the riots that followed, and the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Still, I can’t help but look back to that year and the decade that followed as an era of relative optimism, the triumph of democracy in Eastern Europe, the demise of apartheid in South Africa, peace in Northern Ireland.

I had no idea how precious these events would become to me, admonitions of hope in seemingly hopeless times. Just as I had no idea how much I would grow to love St. Louis as the decades passed—how joyous it would be to amble in Forest Park among the daffodils in early April, how incredibly satisfying to bite down into the crusty deliciousness of an Amighetti’s Special sandwich or sip an ice-cold Peach Vess soda from a plastic cup on a hundred-degree day.

Most surprising of all is how I’ve softened on Clayton, which did, after all, educate me in its top-notch schools, regardless of my belligerence. At first, I avoided it, but when I did finally venture back, I found myself charmed by its winding roads and tile-roofed houses. It may not be home, but a part of me will always belong to that place among the trees, the place that held me when I was hurting.

Hence my heartbreak when I learned of the EF-3 tornado that struck St. Louis two weeks ago. It touched down in Clayton, sweeping across the landscape at 150 miles per hour east and north into Forest Park and the Central West End. It ripped shingles from rooftops, air conditioners from windows, trees from their roots, tossing them about like juggling pins and hurling them back down to the ground. Then the tornado moved further east, into poorer neighborhoods, where, finding fewer trees, it grew deadly, tearing into hundred-year-old brick buildings the way a famished feral child might tear into a layer cake. By the time it dissipated, it had killed five people, injured 38, damaged or destroyed 5,000 churches, businesses, and homes, and uprooted thousands more trees, many of which were over a century old.

Reading about it all in the news and on social media, I couldn’t stay away. I gassed up and headed south. Five hours later, I was driving east along the northern border of Forest Park past piles and piles of timber. Wild, amputated limbs, trunks the size of vault doors, piles taller than the car. Behind them, a wasteland.

I kept on driving until the end of the park, then turned at its western border. Here the tree-corpses were fewer but somehow more tragic, limbs still attached and reaching, roots exposed like some terrible pornography. How many times had I walked there, buoyed by a gentle breeze and shaded by their canopy? Whoever would have imagined the ravenous turn that breeze would take? And what else had it chewed up and spat out? How many of my former haunts would have been swept up in its rampage? How much of my St. Louis had vanished forever?

And then, the Amoco sign came into view.

Yes, it’s still standing. I can see it this very minute through the window of my hotel room. I’m staying in the Cheshire Inn, a St. Louis approximation of an old English hunting lodge with paneled walls, lattice windows, leather chairs, all guarded by an ancient taxidermied bear and situated across the street from the world’s largest Amoco sign. “The storm just missed us,” my bartender said when I checked in. “But when I drove just a few blocks north, it looked like there had been a war, and the war was fought with trees.”

From here, the sign looks so much smaller than I remembered—small enough to fit in just one diamond pane, though it’s only a few hundred feet away. It seems dimmer, too—the hotel’s security light is much brighter.

And yet, faded as it is, the sign draws me in, reassures me, holds me.

I think about the pilots who once used that sign to guide their aircraft in and out of St. Louis. I think about the drivers speeding past it today, how if they keep on driving, past Kansas City, through the Plains and the Rocky Mountains, they can reach the Pacific Ocean. I think about my own drive back in a few days to the Chicago suburbs, the place I now call home. I’ll gas up at the Amoco station and drive east without looking back.

For now, though, there is nothing to do but lie back and wait for the horn-free hum of traffic to lull me to sleep.

How refreshing it is, this mindless complacency.

It almost makes me want to stay.