Home Is The Native Soil Of The Heart

“No Turning Back,” by Veryl Goodnight. From Western Horseman.

Today’s essay is part of a new series including me,

Latham Turner

,

Bowen Dwelle

,

Sincere American Writing

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Lyle McKeany

. In the past we’ve written about trust, fatherhood, recovery, and work. This week, all of us wrestle with what home means to us.

Home Is The Native Soil Of The Heart

One August day in 1993 I caught a plane from Spokane, Washington, to the Tri-Cities Airport near Bristol, Tennessee. I recall the long drive from my Montana home to the airport, through the Kootenai River Valley in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, horse ranches and alfalfa fields all the way to Sandpoint, then the long sightlines across Lake Pend Oreille. 

It’s a gorgeous drive, two hours of mountains and timber, the landscape that still beats in my blood. It didn’t matter that my father drove it in the dark to catch my red-eye. I knew that road, still know it, can see the next bend playing over the screen as I write.

My family accompanied me to the gate, because you could do that in those days. I don’t recall any fear of leaving. I’d made the decision many months ago, and I lost not one wink of sleep over it. So I was surprised by the tears in my father’s eyes, and most of all by the lump in my own throat. As a Montana man, you’re not supposed to feel those things. You make your decision and get on with it. So after all the hugs I shrugged on my backpack, picked up my guitar, and walked away.

That was the moment I left home. And even though I’ve visited more than a hundred times since, I’ve never come back. Not really. Not in any permanent sense. 

Part of me wants to reach through the years and shake that young man, ask him if he knows what he’s about to do. You are going to spend the prime of your life hungering for this place, I might say. Would he do it if he knew that thirty years later, still more than two thousand miles away, he would fall asleep picturing the mountainside where he was raised, where he hopes to die someday if he is lucky enough?

Boomers and Stickers

I never meant to become a wanderer. But since that August day I have moved eighteen times if I count every dorm room, every one-year rental. Even over sixteen years in Iowa I had four different mailing addresses. How a homebody who loves gardening and a quiet night in could have spent less than two years, on average, in any single dwelling place, is a mystery indeed. 

Perhaps it is inevitable that most Americans, having crossed an ocean or a border to get here, would keep on migrating for the rest of their lives. Even families who manage to keep a farm through the generations know that their origin story begins elsewhere. It’s hard to be fully committed to a place when you know that home in its purest sense lies in a distant land, even if you also know that by the time they left, your forebears saw no future there. 

The result, according to Wallace Stegner, is a nation of boomers and stickers. Boomers skim the cream from a place and then chase the next thing. Stickers settle in and make sacrifices, fight for the places they love, put down roots. But even Wendell Berry, who studied under Stegner and has become a paragon of stickerhood, attended boarding school and spent his young adulthood traveling the U.S. and the world. He was thirty-one years old when he returned to his family farm.

Most young people, like Berry, learn they must leave home to find success. If Harvard or Stanford lets them in, surely they must go, no matter how far it means they must fly. Packing up in the spring and unpacking again in the fall becomes the native rhythm of their lives. They come home for Christmas, maybe for the summer, but they never stay. Even the college down the road requires a young man or woman to become a traveler rather than an inhabitant.

No wonder Lori Arviso Alvord, the first Navajo woman to become board certified in surgery, felt such dread about leaving New Mexico, the land she knew as Dinétah. Navajo people believe that the four mountains marking the borders of Dinétah in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado provide a protective shield, and that danger lies beyond that sacred ring. They are not wrong. 

But home, especially in rural places, can pose dangers of its own in poverty, addiction, and ignorance. That’s one reason I left. And I can’t say that I was wrong, either.

Know the World Or Know the Parish?

I often asked my students whether it was better to stay committed to a single place, as Scott Russell Sanders argues, or to embrace migration as necessary for human innovation and opportunity, as Salman Rushdie does. 

Here’s Rushdie, from “The Location of Brazil”:

The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves – because they are so defined by others – by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.

And here’s Sanders, from Staying Put, describing a choice familiar to many Americans:

…whether to go or stay, whether to move to a situation that is safer, richer, easier, more attractive, or to stick where we are and make what we can of it. If the shine goes off our marriage, our house, our car, do we trade it for a new one? If the fertility leaches out of our soil, the creativity out of our job, the money out of our pocket, do we start over somewhere else?... I wish to raise here a contrary voice, to say a few words on behalf of standing your ground, confronting the powers, going deeper.

I knew it was an unfair question. Many of my students, like me, were the first in their families to attend college. Not one person had ever told them *not* to go. No matter how much they might want to take over the family farm, they knew too well how thin the margins were, and how stacked the deck was against anything but soybeans and corn. I sometimes took my classes on farm crawls, where they saw how a goat dairy worked, how you could diversify vegetable production as a kind of insurance, incorporate beehives and sheep, sell value-added products like jam and dyed wool. 

But half of those farms are gone now, too, even the award-winning ones. One farmer converted a century farm from conventional crops to organic, built a quarter-million-dollar packing shed, and became a standard-bearer for sustainable agriculture in Iowa. I went to many potluck dinners there, including an early date with my ex, and later took my children on his hayride tours, learning something new every time. But even the most visionary farmer in Iowa couldn’t compete with Trader Joe’s. He sold all his equipment and is now managing someone else’s farm in Virginia. I imagine every morning he wishes he could wake up in Iowa on that family ground.

So I wish for more honesty from Stegner, Berry, and Sanders about how much privilege and luck it requires to stay put, in addition to effort and sacrifice. Sanders held tenure at a flagship university in Indiana during the best years in higher ed. Stegner and Berry likewise developed their ethic of rootedness only after securing livelihoods largely independent of local economies. Saving the family farm looks different if you’re also drawing a salary at the University of Kentucky, as Berry was for many of those years. 

My students weren’t boomers at heart or by choice. They didn’t choose to leave home simply because the “shine” had gone out of it. Like me, they were making the best decisions they could with the information available at the time. And like Rushdie, they tried to adapt, to find some good in the strange fusions of their lives.

It’s not quite as simple as Sanders claims when he says that “[a]ll there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look.” How do you learn how to see what’s under your nose if you’ve never crossed a border, never had to think about your own otherness, never explored unfamiliar terrain? Could Sanders himself have done that if he’d never left his native Tennessee?

Looking Homeward

Near the end of her memoir The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang describes a Hmong funeral ceremony in which a shaman guides her grandmother’s spirit back to her birthplace. The ritual requires retracing every other dwelling place in reverse, which is no simple matter for a refugee. There are all the U.S. apartments and airports, then the camps in Thailand, crossing the Mekong River back into Laos, and trying to follow the family’s flight through the forest, where they took shelter from Vietnamese soldiers. 

The Hmong migration is one of the mass removals that Rushdie describes, and it makes Stegner’s boomer/sticker binary seem juvenile. As Warsan Shire writes, “no one leaves home unless home chases you.”¹ Yang’s grandmother would have loved nothing more than to remain in Laos, living as her forebears had, honoring and stewarding that ancestral place. Yang has been obliged to contend with otherness all her life, first as an immigrant to St. Paul, Minnesota, and later as a graduate of Columbia University returning to her immigrant community. She has dropped anchor in St. Paul, but nearly all of her books hunger for that home over the sea. 

Yang’s story and mine could scarcely be more different. Yet I hear an echo of her yearning for home in my own. We aren’t the kind of people who vacation somewhere and wonder if we could be happy living there. Home isn’t even defined by happiness for us. It is, simply, the native soil of our hearts. 

While Berry and Sanders frequently credit their wives with building homes that enabled their success, neither author says much about what Tanya Berry or Ruth Sanders gave up to allow their families to stay put. I don’t want to project sorrow where it doesn’t belong, but Veryl Goodnight captures one lesser-told story of Western migration in her sculpture “No Turning Back,” which shows a woman gazing eastward with one hand on a wagon wheel. Many pioneer women left their hearts back in Ohio, Pennsylvania, or upstate New York to follow their husbands’ Western dreams. Some of them died of homesickness. Those women weren’t boomers, they were uprooted stickers. Many of us are like that.

One of my Montana friends joked, when he learned that I’d be moving from Iowa to Pennsylvania, that I kept going the wrong direction. I couldn’t deny it. My dream ever since taking the job in Iowa had been to find my way back to the long sightlines that make the Big Sky. I’d just never found an economically sustainable way to do it. 

I interviewed at Gonzaga, the University of Idaho, and a handful of other schools, once even stupidly changing my desktop background to bear fur in anticipation of a phone interview with the University of Alaska-Juneau. But there were inside candidates and the ever-elusive question of fit, which took the outcome out of my hands. For a brief window in my thirties, I wondered if I ought to just move back and cobble together seasonal work the way some of my friends did, hoping I could eventually sign on with the Forest Service full-time. But was that why I’d worked so hard for a PhD, to live hand to mouth as a firefighter? One of my friends, who had left her native Philadelphia for two jobs in prairie states, said I was being a prima donna about it. I had tenure. What was I complaining about?

So I did my best to make a home in Iowa, to embrace Bill Holm’s idea that “the human heart can be filled anywhere on earth.” I met my ex there, and all three of our children are Iowans by birth. My eldest still speaks fondly of the Dutch town where we lived. It was her first native home. 

We didn’t leave lightly. It took a pandemic, an unhappy marriage, and multiple systemic crises in higher ed to force our hand. I left for Pennsylvania like a pioneer in reverse, following my spouse’s dream of returning to family and her birth state and hoping that my own center might shift with time, even though my face was still turned to the West. But it turned out, after years of trying, that there wasn’t a marriage left to save. There’s no staying put in such a house, no matter what Scott Russell Sanders might say. 

As a result, I have spent the better part of this year starting over again, trying to make a new home from scratch, starting with bed frames and blinds, my kids’ favorite meals, slowly expanding outward to neighbors and friends. The enormity of it sometimes still knocks me to my knees. But the whole notion of home shifts when you are responsible for three other lives, when you want to make lasting memories together, not just feed them and clothe them and get them to school on time. I know that for my kids to feel at home with me, for my house to be theirs equally, I must give my whole heart to homemaking — to making it a soulful place where we both want to be. 

A year before Covid, when my parents first began thinking about downsizing, possibly selling their place, they asked if I might ever want to live there again. But my son was just six months old, his sisters were four and eight, and no one had any inkling of the trouble to come. How could I have said yes? My place was with my wife and my kids, wherever our family life might lead. 

But this year I felt differently. I couldn’t say where my kids would be once they left home, how much they might need me nearby, whether by then I’d have made my peace with the East. But I felt strongly that I wanted my story to end where it began, on that mountain that looks down on the great Kootenai. For the first time, my father offered to walk the property line to show me where he might build a smaller house, even a plot or two where I might build my own if the timing is right. 

One corner of my parents’ land settles onto a bench before the slope drops off again toward the river. I lost track of time standing there with my father looking out over the valley, down on the bluegreen water. For now my home is where my kids are, where my highest purpose is filling their days with warmth and light. But part of my heart stayed in Montana when I boarded that airplane three decades ago. Even if I don’t find my way back to the timbered flat high above the Kootenai before I die, I will have guided myself home a thousand times before sleep, all the way through my many removes back to the place that first captured my heart — the only place, I suspect, that ever truly will.

The Kootenai River. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

More in the Home Series ⬇️

Setting down roots

Nothing said “home” to me more than an empty house

Home: A Place or a Feeling?

A Homecoming

Home is where your people are

1. Many thanks to

Noha Beshir

for sharing this poem.