Walk like a Man by Robert J. Wiersema

My Hometown
    Album: Born in the U.S.A.
    Released: June 4, 1984
    Recorded: January 1982–March 1984
    C OMING OFF the bombast and exuberance of a live version of “Rosalita,” the transition into “ My Hometown ” (the studio version, no less) is the musical equivalent of slamming headfirst into a brick wall. That’s by design, and it’s precisely the feeling I get every time I hear the song.
    I don’t actively dislike “My Hometown”; that would be giving it too much credit. It’s just not a song I ever seek out. It’s not in my top ten (or twenty, or fifty) favorite Springsteen songs. Those who were with me in Vancouver in 2003 will probably remember my self-righteous indignation (and the vitriolic flow of obscenities) upon hearing a rumor that the evening’s performance of “My Hometown” had been an audible 1 and had replaced, of all things, “ Incident on 57th Street ” on the setlist. 2
    The music is clunky and monotonous in “My Hometown,” and the live versions, they do tend to go on. And on. You can’t argue with the sentiment, however, simultaneously plainspoken and borderline overblown though it may be. And therein lies the rub: “My Hometown” speaks to me.
    There’s a perfect, and beautiful, movement to the song. It begins with the personal—a young boy, the narrator, running out to buy a newspaper for his father—then radiates outward, first to the level of family (with the boy being driven around on his father’s lap), then to their community, and then to larger social concerns (the racial tensions of the 1960s, the economic decline of the 1980s) before contracting back to the familial and the personal to finish. This not only allows a panoramic perspective but builds a narrative that spans decades, showing how these social changes have affected individuals: in contrast to the freedom of a boy in a small town running off to the corner store, the “contemporary” characters feel boxed in and are looking for escape. Which leads to the question: is the song’s final assertion, “son take a good look around, This is your hometown,” with the next-generation repeat of a son driving around on his father’s lap, a farewell or a gesture of resignation?
    â€œMy Hometown” is a perfect example of what I find most significant about Springsteen’s work: his ability to use the specific and the personal (whether true or fictionalized) to create a sense of the universal. In its specific details—newspapers that only cost a dime, a confrontation at a traffic light, the closing of a textile mill—the song resonates for anyone who has grown up in a small town and felt it dying around them.
    It certainly resonates for me.
    A FEW MILES from where the only stoplight in town marks the center of Agassiz proper, out past where the streetlights give way to the darkness, there’s a stretch of highway. It’s almost the last gasp of the Lougheed, which starts in Vancouver as a major urban thoroughfare, before running into the depths of British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, skirting the north side of the river through Port Moody, Coquitlam, and Mission before just bypassing Agassiz and ending up in Hope.
    The stretch of highway I’m talking about is little more than a country road: two lanes, pretty quiet most of the time, though on holiday weekends the campers and motorcycles on their way to Harrison Lake can ride bumper to bumper. It’s dead straight, that stretch of road, less than a mile long, lined with farms and houses and the skeleton of the old Kent Hotel. It’s anchored at one end by the house my mother grew up in, where my grandmother still lives, and on the other by the house my brothers and I were raised in, the house that my father built, now the house my mother lives in with my stepfather, Tom.
    When I think of my world as a child, I think of my bedroom, where I