Returning to a city you once called home is like going back to your house after midnight and finding yourself locked out. You prowl your own domicile looking for a portal, tapping on the windows of your memory, searching for a way to get back in.

A thousand times in 20 years I have driven from my home in northern Minnesota to Minneapolis. I’m an expatriate. I used to live in the city, but I don’t anymore; now I live in the woods. I’m sure there are times when I’m driving down to escape my cathedral of trees that some of you are driving north to escape the steel and the glass. Both of us have more than a two-hour drive, so there’s time to figure out our motivation. Sometimes just moving down the road is motive enough.

I keep returning to Minneapolis to get something that I can’t get anywhere else. It could be simple, like a chocolate parfait or an India Pale Ale, or something that takes time, such as visiting the Guthrie or the Apple Store. I’ll drive down for a Louise Nevelson show anytime. Something just gets in my head and stays there until I make the trip. It’s more than an urge, and sometimes I think it might be unfinished business, something I forgot to do before I left in 1980.

When I left for the woods, all of my friends still lived in the Twin Cities. Most of them have since gone to live on the sand by the sea, which means that I have to eat in restaurants and sleep in hotels when I come into town. The home-cooked meals and the couches and the bottles of Chateau Nuf de Pap have gone to Florida. I check in at the Hyatt. When you have supper alone at street level and your bed for the night is on the 20th floor, you know you’re just a guest.

Years ago we would come and go comfortably. We could run into town in the VW bus wearing our Red Wings and faded Wranglers; I would amuse myself at B. Dalton and later join my wife at Dayton’s Oval Room where I’d find her digging through a rack of Oscar de la Renta, her goose down jacket draped on a French provincial chair. We’d walk over to La Casa Coronado for a long, easy lunch. Minneapolis was familiar then, like an old pair of shoes.

When you’ve gone to school at a place and worked in town and you buy a house in a neighborhood and park a couple of cars and boat, you feel like you’ll always own a piece of the city. You come and go with abandon and wouldn’t think of leaving for anything less than money, and you mow the lawn and paint the porch and pump the basement and still have time to get dressed for an evening party. You never think of what your life looks like to someone on the outside—because you never think about the outside. You don’t have to.

Twin Cities expatriates think about the inside and the outside of places all the time. For us there are places that are frozen in the time of our occupancy. They are invisible to you. From the moment that we slip into town via one of the transient corridors until the wee hour that we depart, we try to live as you do, atop the cultural heap. By day we expats look just like everyone else. We walk fast among the walkers. We lunch with the lunch crowd, and we meet with principals behind the glass and steel. We dress like you, we think like you, and we enterprise like everyone else. We can verb a noun and noun a verb and propose and purport and go forward with the best of them—until 5.

At 5 o’clock Minneapolis goes home for the evening. Our associates might have a beer with us, but they look at their watch at 5:37 and call home. By 5:45 they want to drop us off at our hotel and at 6 they do.

We change clothes, have a hamburger in the bar, and then go out to the ramp and free the Ford Windstar. We creep into the Minneapolis evening, driving along vague memories now jam-packed with commuters. We try to find an exit—a portal to our own time. Like archaeologists, expats sift through today and last week and a year ago quickly, searching for artifacts of a very specific time.

Expats’ history is buried under parking lots and fast-food parlors, so we linger in empty places looking for clues from our era. We babble to ourselves, machine-gun fashion: There’s the tree that I hit with a Volkswagen in ’66 and there’s my first apartment. Oh, here’s where I used to get on the roof for an afternoon sunbath with Abby—whatever became of Abby?

Most of us have places in the Cities where we damn near died and alleys where we leaned pathetically against cold stone walls and swore off Kingsbury beer. And there are places, too, where we were once more alive than we have ever been since.

Our casual restaurants have become landmarks—like Vescio’s in Dinkytown where we swore various allegiances to a variety of lovers—in the first booth on the right, when we were in a hurry.

Graybeard expats visit these places and, yes, we are the ones who stare through bleary eyes and scratch our grizzled jaws while kids swear allegiances anew in our sacred booths. And yes, yes, we are the ones who smile at the young waitresses and ask if Mariah is still around and learn that we are talking to her granddaughter.

We motor from portal to portal, stopping at unexpected places where we sense that we have been before—a corner grocery that has become a tattoo parlor, a neighborhood pub burned to charcoal and boarded, the high school where we taught a few night classes. We circle twice, forgetting that if we drive too fast past the schoolhouse we’ll get busted for endangering the lives of children. Too slow and we risk charges of lurking.

Alas, four women, all young post-prandial walkers, have spotted us and determined that we are a threat to the neighborhood. They have just photographed our license plate with their cell phone cameras. Our circumstance is being text-messaged to the local TV stations.

We are so busted. Expats at large in Twin Cities.

In some ways, an expat is just a fugitive waiting to be spotted by a neighborhood watch group. We are all vulnerable to suspicion because we suspect ourselves of some misstep that has taken a lifetime of return visits to comprehend. I see myself in the rearview mirror, staring ahead with a kind of urban myopia that lets me be in the city without seeing anything. That was how I operated when I lived here.

I was prisoner of my dreams in Minneapolis, serving a life sentence so I could acquire things. I couldn’t see myself with any clarity; I could see only the artifacts produced by my having lived. Each day I sailed in the wake of the stuff that I had acquired the day before. For many of us, life was a collection of possessions that fortified our houses and occupied our yards and filled the garages.

We built a prison with our stuff but finally escaped one night. And we became expats before we were old enough to understand that Minneapolis and St. Paul are internal organs—a part of us that we could no sooner reject than we could our own heart.

And yet we cannot return to the Cities to live if by doing so we would expect to step back into the lives we had vacated. We lose our bedroom forever when we leave home and go to college; it becomes a guest room and we become guests.

But it’s good to come back. Minneapolis and St. Paul are a part of me. I can walk around Lake Harriet today and the University of Minnesota campus tomorrow, wallowing in remembered mud, yet ogling the present magnificence from the vantage of the past.

I don’t think we expats visit in search of closure. It isn’t closure that we look for but a way to understand the story of our having lived there. We are revisionists at heart, however, always looking for a fresh view by standing on the heaps of our past. That sounds like a bit of expat bull, but it’s one of the conceits of being an expat: We have to be able to live in a believable story. So we rewrite our story as many times as it takes to get it right.

I left, last week, in the daylight this time, slipping out of the city as I had slipped in, hidden in full view. I watched Minneapolis in the mirror for a while, as one might watch a friend turn away and go back to work. I’ll be back soon to dig around again, to find some more pieces, to start the story again. ¦

Richard Coffey (B.A. ’70), a writer and pilot for the past 30 years and author of Bogtrotter: Notes from a North Country Cabin, lives with his wife, Jeanne, in Moose Lake, Minnesota. His grandfather Walter Coffey was president of the University of Minnesota from 1941 to 1945.