Growing Up Suburban

EIGHT YEARS LATER, NEWLY MARRIED, WITH THE beginnings of a career, I came home again. We moved into a town house in Montgomery Village, Kettler Brothers' largest development in the county, a disorienting sea of boxed housing where, more than two decades after it began, the master plan is still in force. On the day we moved into our five-digit address on Brassie Place, mainline of the Windermere subdevelopment, bulldozers churned the trees and grassy fields into mud around us, pushing inexorably toward the horizon. Near the Village Mall across the way, the smell of hot tar wafted from the site of another road-widening.

It would be easy to say that we chose Montgomery Village because the rent was cheap, which it was, and because I lacked a steady job, which I did. The more uncomfortable truth is that I thought I needed to come back, to find some solid ground after years in California.

It was a mistake. For days I drove aimlessly up and down the Pike, stopping at the malls, examining store signs, searching for even the slightest epiphany, the vaguest sense that I was home. But I felt only dread. In eight years the entire Pike seemed to have been obliterated and rebuilt. Not only had virtually all of the stores and restaurants changed, but the basic architecture of the road had been altered, and it appeared to be undergoing yet another round of noisy, smoky surgery. The sides of the strip were indented by new, neon-lit mini-malls. Two enormous enclosed malls that hadn't been there earlier now anchored the road. To the south was White Flint, a multi-story behemoth with an uncounted number of movie theaters and a parking garage designed like a rat maze.

To the north was Lake Forest, another of the new generation of tripod malls with no corners and no clocks, where shoppers stand in the central air-conditioned square and spin round and round, clutching their bags, looking futilely for an exit.

I had no will to relearn the map, to discover the new department stores and video game parlors and Pizza Huts. Montgomery County seemed for the first time beyond my comprehension. Interstate 270, the backbone of Rockville and Gaithersburg, had grown so wide that at the Montgomery Village off-ramp they were knocking down the pillars of a railroad bridge so all the new lanes could fit underneath. Caterpillar land-movers plowed through hills to make way for new ramps that looped and double-looped in the psychedelic manner of L.A. freeways. The business culture had changed too -- there was little room anymore for the likes of Murry's Steaks. High technology had arrived. The interstate was lined with mirrored-glass office buildings bearing words like "Biotech" and "Genetech." I wondered whose biology, whose genes were being altered there.

One cold December day a year after we returned, our first child was born at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. Joyous and dazed, I stumbled into the snow-smattered parking lot. I wanted to shout to the hills. Here was something eternal -- a mortal child, yes, but immutable, not subject to Montgomery's master plan. She had come headfirst into the world just a few hundred yards from the theater-in-the-round where I had graduated from high school nine years earlier. Here was the sinking of generational roots, I thought, the seeding of common ground, the rejuvenation of the village.

But the theater-in-the-round no longer existed. It had been replaced by an office park. Just up Shady Grove Road there was a hotel I'd never seen before. Several new office buildings. A solitary steel crane hanging above the gray horizon. Dread.

It would be fair to say that we ran away, first to Manhattan, more recently across the oceans to India. From this safe distance we sip our sweet lime sodas and talk about the past, and about the future. Amid the cholera and malaria and riots and threatened wars that surround us, we talk about what truly frightens us -- that it seems inevitable we will return some day, and that, with three children now, Montgomery County will seem a sensible and comfortable place to live. We talk about Virginia, foreign territory that sounds suspiciously like Maryland, and about distant outposts such as Brunswick and Harpers Ferry, and about whether we want to try to raise our family in the city.

The unstated premise of these conversations is that we will never go back to Montgomery Village. But I wonder. The longing for belonging runs deep, and may not be so easily expunged. I imagine myself back on the Pike, subdued by middle age, with unruly children in the back seat arguing with me about whether it should be Hardee's or Arby's and whether there is time for Putt-Putt. I imagine being directed by them to toy stores and sporting goods stores and clothing stores hidden in previously uncharted mini-malls, where they have begun to make their own maps and discover their own pleasures, however transient. As I conjure such scenes, there is both satisfaction and a kind of vertigo -- residue of an unfulfillable wish to call an alien landscape home.

Steve Coll is The Post's South Asia correspondent

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