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
Your essay made me wonder if there is a different sentiment of "home" for someone born not in a rural setting but in a city, particularly New York, which has some unique features among American cities. NYC is movement and change while the landscape you describe so well and with great love has a permanence. Thanks for this Josh.
Very perceptive, David. I imagine that you have some permanent haunts like Central Park, maybe some libraries and museums. There are changes out West, too. It's drier in Montana than it once was. My parents used a spring for drinking water for many years and recently had to drill a well. The boreal forest is changing with destructive beetles overwintering farther north, more intense fire activity, and other effects of climate change. But you're right that the appeal of the place lies in its more timeless qualities -- the great fact of the land and those waters, which also haunted Norman Maclean. I'll stop here, but I have some further thoughts on "Northern Exposure," and Dr. Joel Fleischman, a Manhattan transplant in Alaska, if you're game.
Powerful and moving, Josh. I comment again to you and David both for reasons that will become clear. Unlike David, I left NYC for what turned out to be good (despite a few years back splitting time), older than you were but, like you, never anticipating it would be for good. And to respond to David directly, I have pined for NYC as you do Montana. When I started returning for summers about 15 years ago, I even felt, on long walks over Manhattan Island, that I had for the first time an understanding of what Native Americans who live on native land feel - that deep connection to place and history.
Your essay will resonate for so many I'm sure, as it did for me. It's a timeless theme made more defining in ways you discuss. I've written about a poem I was working on several years ago -- a poem I abandoned to work on my Magellan novel -- and the title of the poem is "Devotions and Departures." You see the idea; it's the same theme. I've been haunted by nostalgia all my life, yet I've rebelled against nostalgia, more all the time, in my desire to experience the world and not be tied to an irretrievable past, which a connection to place, as we age, at least partly is, I think.
As another light on this, my partner, Julia, grew up in a small town in Western Nebraska. She loved growing up there and she maintains friendships with many people there, but she couldn't wait to leave when she went to college and never intended to return. Many people she grew up with, including family, left the small town but stayed rooted in Nebraska. She left Nebraska too.
I think Julia and I believe that moving on is the way of things, like river currents. That's what we tell ourselves. But still there are these undercurrents of feeling, and probably there's only one way those cross currents get resolved. I still don't know what, given the chance to arrange it, I would choose as the place to reach my end. I plan on cremation, and for the longest time I wanted my ashes scattered in New York Harbor. These days, I wonder if the Pacific wouldn't be more to the point. Yet not too long ago, I wrote about the fantasy of dying in the bedroom in which I grew up.
Thank you, Jay -- heartfelt as always. Yes, indeed, nostalgia is something to guard against. I think David's notion of permanence is closer to the mark for me. There's not much from my childhood that I'm nostalgic for -- certainly not the fundamentalist church environment or some of the cloying strictures of family life (bans on television on overnights with friends for fear of worldly exposure, etc). I don't think that what I feel about Montana is nostalgia. It lives in tension with the political realities of that area, for sure, and some of the old pressures would resurface, assuredly, if I were to live there again. But I think I've matured enough to know better how to carve out my own independence.
My friend Jim in this thread agrees with Julia. For them, it seems, whatever permanence there is in the place is more oppressive than restorative, and I can see that. I would feel much the same if I did not have the experience, nearly every time I go back, of rekindling old friendships. And I believe that if I were living there permanently, there would be so many trails to revisit, so many rhythms and rituals of that life, from hunting and fishing to laying in enough firewood for winter, that there wouldn't be room for loneliness. But of course all of that is compared to the community where I'm still trying to build a network effectively from scratch.
Your feeling about New York Harbor and the Pacific is an interesting one. I might have felt that way about Iowa if I'd lived there for another twenty years.
Josh, to follow up a little more, my balancing NY Harbor against the Pacific isn't because of some attachment to it that has come to compete with what the Harbor has been to me -- though I do love the magnificence of the California coastline and have spent countless hours staring from it at the Pacific. But a good deal of what I'm staring at is what the Pacific represent to me as an East Coast person: movement toward the West, with all the symbolism of that -- literal movement, for me, farther away from home. The Pacific symbolizes for me movement outward into the unknown.
I won't quibble over nostalgia, except to say that it needn't be literally personal and autobiographical. I think nostalgia -- which, of course, manifests as love for what made us, and made us well, and is missed -- is also often as deeply a resistance to impermanence, what I, from my Buddhist perspective, think to be the only permanence. Often -- I've seen it many times, including in myself -- people feel nostalgia for what hardly warrants it at all. We're currently watching the screen adaptation of My Brilliant Friend. I haven't read the books, but I have read from others that the screen version is very faithful. We just watched an episode in which Lila, one of the two female leads, chooses at the absolute low point of her life (so far) -- sick, impoverished, and nearly broken -- to return with her young son to the poor Neapolitan suburb where all her talents and possibilities in life were crushed and where she was abused by every man she ever knew, including her father, who threw her out a window when a child and greets her on her return by calling her a whore and turning his back on her. And as portrayed and visualized, Lila returns filled with nostalgia for the "old neighborhood." Something in her longs to return to where she came from, where she came into being, even though she barely managed to escape its jaws of death.
Hits close to home. I spent my entire life in WA state until 5 years ago (I’m 55). I think often of migrating back towards home, though not the small-ish city I grew up in (Yakima). However I own a brick & mortar business here so it’s not simple & at the same time I’m fortunate my 23 yr old lives w/me right now while she looks for post grad work. Acceptance is crucial but I’ve struggled with making a home and accepting the craziness & stress of living in LA. Life on life’s terms.
Thank you, Chris. "Acceptance is crucial." Indeed. Balancing how much agency we have with how much to embrace circumstances beyond our control is an ongoing challenge. All the best to you and your daughter! Kids do clarify priorities. It is interesting to consider the flip side. My parents never considered moving closer to me; would I choose differently if my own children started families?
Lots of 'food for thought' here Josh...HOME is where you come from and possibly/hopefully return to for most people I know. Definitely for myself. And quite a few of my former classmates. And your former wife. Probably anyone you get to know well enough to discuss this. The adage "Bloom Where You're Planted" (something I said to myself through my many moves - Portland, Oregon...several Montana towns, back 'home', Spokane, Seattle, Bellingham) comes to mind. Even makes me wonder about my parents' longings for where their roots were in North Dakota and Nebraska upon being uprooted to Montana in their childhood due to economic or family developments beyond their control. Your parents and mine gave us roots that run deep! Thank you for this essay <3
Thank you! Yes, embracing the present and finding home where I am is the current project. I did succeed at that for many years in Iowa. And it might be possible to be present to both places by keeping those Montana connections alive. I remind myself that it took a lot of years for you to find your way back, even if you did stay in the West generally! The good news about communities like Troy and Libby is that when we do come back to them, we have old friendships to renew.
If I accept my "home is the native soil of the heart" as the postulate, my home would be not a place as a my house - home in New Jersey, which I love, but my home always was and is my Russian literature, my poets I love, their tragic fates, I think about constantly. I left my favorite city in the world, Petersburg, at the first opportunity, because I hated regime which destroyed the lives of my favorite poets and I wanted to read M. Bulgakov without call from KGB. I think my home could be anywhere my books are.
Thank you, Joshua. Right now I publish my essays about my favorite Russian poets before and after Revolution. Welcome to read them; m.b., you find someone you like.
You express the soul’s tug-o-war between places so very well. I grew up in Upstate New York, and it’s still the only place I truly exhale.
I’ve made a home here in western WA, and I sadly have no home to go back to in Upstate NY.
My soul pulled me westward for so long. It’s difficult to express, but I listened. And I hoped to understand the meaning of it all. I’m still listening for that answer.
My favorite line in this essay is : “even though my face was still turned to the West.” That says it all. 💞 heart’s comfort going out to you.
I suppose the mystery at the heart of these choices and their outcomes is what I find lacking in some of Sanders' and Berry's essays. Most of us are doing the best we can; we'd rather be rooted, but it's not always that simple.
This veers afield of your more soulful note, but I've thought a lot about this with the current precarity that many face with professional work. The days of pensions and lifelong work if you wanted it, which allowed my grandfather to stay in one place his whole life, are gone. Young people can't buy homes, so they are forced to be interloping renters. Some people who might want to move closer to a childhood community or to family are stymied by mortgage rates. These aren't excuses; they are practical realities, and they do intertwine with personal choices throughout our lives to contribute to our destinies. How much we ought to sacrifice on the altar of place is a significant question. And, as with your soul's leanings, the answers are not always forthcoming :)
Thanks for this insightful reply Joshua. And? I thought of yet challenge which complicates returning “home” : where our children settle.
I had an opportunity to move back to Upstate NY (which still feels like home) about 9 years ago, and ultimately decided not to because my oldest daughter and her husband live about 30 minutes from me right now. They are all grown up, and I don’t see them as often as some families meet up, but if I moved 3000 miles away, I’d probably see them even less.
Excellent point. Thank you for sharing. This is perhaps another illustration of the phrase, "Announcing your plans is a good way to make God laugh." I have imagined a way in which I might keep a toehold in Montana while trying to live purposefully in Pennsylvania, but it does (so far) rather hinge on that family land. Will all of my kids be in college in 14 years? Will they settle near where we live now, or will they need their own walkabout? Will they want/need me nearby? Impossible to know. Clearly deferring real living until then is not an option, but during my recent time of upheaval, the appeal of that stable point of origin has been strong.
You say "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."
Perhaps for some (many?) but my experience was the opposite, and I expect that's true for many. I found small-town life stifling and small, too intimate and too narrow on too many dimensions. I had been in this place, with these people, since kindergarten and there were no degrees of freedom left to grow or change. One's identity was cemented in the expectations of others. I couldn't wait to leave - and for 40 years never looked back longingly - other than summer work, only obligation brought me back.
I've loved the places I've landed along the way, the things I've learned, and the families of choice built in those places. A deeply vibrant urban neighborhood in Columbus OH where we bought our first house; that was heart-wrenching to leave, though thankfully many of the relationships persist. Learning the ins-and-outs of NC has been rich and similarly rewarding.
It's too strong to say my (seasonal) return has been accidental; but certainly a sequence of happenstance: a random walk through a set of inconsequential choices that cumulated in a consequence. I always saw the beauty of the place, I think, and certainly the grandeur was made evident in my time on the lookout and I'm deeply enjoying carving our place out of the neglected knot of woods the property was in when we found it. But clearly much more in line with Rushdie than Sanders.
Thank you, Jim. All good reminders of how individual that sense of home can be. Perhaps I neglected to say that for a time academe provided that home for me. Certainly I'd not have much of a writing life if I'd never left, and the writing community is a home of sorts, too. But I wouldn't feel the way I do now if I didn't run into old friends every visit back. During a time of starting over, that has a powerful appeal.
I think what Sanders misses about Rushdie's point is that word "obliged." Sometimes there's choice involved. At other times, whether it's imminent threats that force a removal or a series of choices with unforeseen outcomes, intentionality isn't the whole picture. In that case, embracing the new fusions is better than rigidity.
This piece was too long already by the time I posted it, but my visit this summer allowed me to glimpse a way in which I might keep a toe in both places. Perhaps with time, and as my community here slowly expands, the binary will soften.
Thanks for picking up the ball Josh. It's interesting to me to note the similarities and the differences in our story. We've both found ourselves seeking permanence, slowness and thoughtfulness in a world that doesn't place much value on any of those anymore.
I can't help but note that you share openly what made you leave Montana, but very little here about what formed the original attachment. I say that because I don't have an attachment to the place I grew up. Even Oklahoma, as much as my grandparents' house is an exception, doesn't feel like a place I long to return to. It doesn't feel like a place I would call home nowadays.
I have also thought a lot about staying vs. wandering. I think, for myself, I had to leave to find my way. There was no spiritual path, no deep roots, no river running through my blood. I am probably closer to Rushdie in this sense, although my life has moved me more towards Sanders. And I apply both lenses in my life depending on a number of factors.
I have much more I could say but I think for now I'll simply appreciate knowing you a little better through your home. I do love writing these with you.
Thanks, brother. A lot of Montanans feel the way I do -- we are kind of like religious fundamentalists about the place. Norman Maclean would agree with me that the quality of the water has something to do with it. Perhaps the color scheme. Perhaps it was also long days spent in the forest hunting, gathering berries, hiking to alpine lakes. Those sense memories are a form of rootedness. I always felt as an artist like I was trying to do justice to a landscape that had already been created more perfectly than anything I could invent.
That’s beautifully said and I couldn’t say more, having moved back to our somewhat shared northwest Montana region after 20 years living elsewhere and being homesick.
One of my kids is deeply attached to it all and I think will remain so, but the other can’t wait to escape to a city.
My friend Jim, who also grew up in Troy, expresses that duality elsewhere in this thread. Another high school classmate who now lives near Washington, D.C., and who I’ve recently seen a handful of times while traveling, is quite happy with where he landed. The place is not for everyone. And the human community has real limitations that not everyone can either live within or keep at a distance.
While reading many of the comments, I was thinking about a conversation I’ve had about Berry in other online spaces, specifically that many people would like to belong to rural places, especially places they grew up in, the way he writes about, but can’t because those places aren’t safe for them for religion, gender, race, LGBTQI+ identity, or an endless number of other reasons.
So true! Black scholars write about the relativity of place due to slavery and the association of wild places with human threats, which is one reason that environmental literature is so white and bourgeois. As a father to daughters I often think about how pleasures I take for granted, such as solo hiking and camping, pose a different set of considerations for women.
Beautiful Josh. Thought-provoking in so many ways with the relevant references. I love the description—“uprooted Sticker.” I realize it may apply to my acquired sense of vagabond—having been unwillingly uprooted so many times as a child by my father’s corporate climbing. I realize after reading your essay that I really wanted each place to be home but could never stay long enough for it to feel like the ground wasn’t shifting beneath my feet.
Interesting how both you and Latham kick off our series this week with so much Montana 🙏
Thanks, my friend. It is one of those perennial campfire philosophy questions whether we are more innately prone to migration or to rootedness as a species. There's ample evidence of both in our evolutionary history. Possibly an intractable paradox.
Josh, this is a great essay. We come from similar backgrounds except mine was a farm in Missouri rather than Montana. I left at the age of 18. For the past 28 years I have moved constantly, ever two or three years as my career took us from place to place. My wife is from Peru, our kids were born in different states, and no place feels like home to me except that small plot of land where mom and dad still live. I think that psychological connection to place is an integral part of who we are. Whenever I think about someday settling down it is always on some wooded land with a creek and fields of wildflowers in northeastern Missouri. Our spirits have a real connection to those places where we originate.
Thanks, Matthew! I know that rootlessness is one of the many sacrifices that military families make. My cousin, a Marine veteran, is firmly rooted back in Montana. But he spent many years in Maryland, deployed overseas, and who knows where else before he found his way back. His wife is from Maryland and has found a way to feel settled in Montana, which is also fortunate for him.
I'm not sure what pushed or pulled you away originally, but I suspect that economic viability was part of it. Farming has always been hard to sustain, especially across generations. It's one reason I find myself impatient with "reality" shows like "Frontier House," which romanticize homesteading. In reality, few homesteaders sustained their original lives; they built a school, hired a teacher, and then their kids went to college or got jobs in town. My parents imagined themselves as homesteaders in the mid-70s, and they did turn a forested mountainside into a lovely home with orchards, gardens, and chickens. But it was never a place I could stay as a young person. So that homesteader story played out in exactly the same way.
Your fondness for that corner of Missouri may or may not be shared by your children, just as Yang's yearning for Laos isn't necessarily what her kids, who have only known the Twin Cities in MN, will feel. We've never really found a way to do anything but a brain drain in rural communities. It's a shame.
Your essay made me wonder if there is a different sentiment of "home" for someone born not in a rural setting but in a city, particularly New York, which has some unique features among American cities. NYC is movement and change while the landscape you describe so well and with great love has a permanence. Thanks for this Josh.
Very perceptive, David. I imagine that you have some permanent haunts like Central Park, maybe some libraries and museums. There are changes out West, too. It's drier in Montana than it once was. My parents used a spring for drinking water for many years and recently had to drill a well. The boreal forest is changing with destructive beetles overwintering farther north, more intense fire activity, and other effects of climate change. But you're right that the appeal of the place lies in its more timeless qualities -- the great fact of the land and those waters, which also haunted Norman Maclean. I'll stop here, but I have some further thoughts on "Northern Exposure," and Dr. Joel Fleischman, a Manhattan transplant in Alaska, if you're game.
Powerful and moving, Josh. I comment again to you and David both for reasons that will become clear. Unlike David, I left NYC for what turned out to be good (despite a few years back splitting time), older than you were but, like you, never anticipating it would be for good. And to respond to David directly, I have pined for NYC as you do Montana. When I started returning for summers about 15 years ago, I even felt, on long walks over Manhattan Island, that I had for the first time an understanding of what Native Americans who live on native land feel - that deep connection to place and history.
Your essay will resonate for so many I'm sure, as it did for me. It's a timeless theme made more defining in ways you discuss. I've written about a poem I was working on several years ago -- a poem I abandoned to work on my Magellan novel -- and the title of the poem is "Devotions and Departures." You see the idea; it's the same theme. I've been haunted by nostalgia all my life, yet I've rebelled against nostalgia, more all the time, in my desire to experience the world and not be tied to an irretrievable past, which a connection to place, as we age, at least partly is, I think.
As another light on this, my partner, Julia, grew up in a small town in Western Nebraska. She loved growing up there and she maintains friendships with many people there, but she couldn't wait to leave when she went to college and never intended to return. Many people she grew up with, including family, left the small town but stayed rooted in Nebraska. She left Nebraska too.
I think Julia and I believe that moving on is the way of things, like river currents. That's what we tell ourselves. But still there are these undercurrents of feeling, and probably there's only one way those cross currents get resolved. I still don't know what, given the chance to arrange it, I would choose as the place to reach my end. I plan on cremation, and for the longest time I wanted my ashes scattered in New York Harbor. These days, I wonder if the Pacific wouldn't be more to the point. Yet not too long ago, I wrote about the fantasy of dying in the bedroom in which I grew up.
https://ajayadler.substack.com/p/the-code-a-fantasia
Go figure.
Thank you, Jay -- heartfelt as always. Yes, indeed, nostalgia is something to guard against. I think David's notion of permanence is closer to the mark for me. There's not much from my childhood that I'm nostalgic for -- certainly not the fundamentalist church environment or some of the cloying strictures of family life (bans on television on overnights with friends for fear of worldly exposure, etc). I don't think that what I feel about Montana is nostalgia. It lives in tension with the political realities of that area, for sure, and some of the old pressures would resurface, assuredly, if I were to live there again. But I think I've matured enough to know better how to carve out my own independence.
My friend Jim in this thread agrees with Julia. For them, it seems, whatever permanence there is in the place is more oppressive than restorative, and I can see that. I would feel much the same if I did not have the experience, nearly every time I go back, of rekindling old friendships. And I believe that if I were living there permanently, there would be so many trails to revisit, so many rhythms and rituals of that life, from hunting and fishing to laying in enough firewood for winter, that there wouldn't be room for loneliness. But of course all of that is compared to the community where I'm still trying to build a network effectively from scratch.
Your feeling about New York Harbor and the Pacific is an interesting one. I might have felt that way about Iowa if I'd lived there for another twenty years.
Josh, to follow up a little more, my balancing NY Harbor against the Pacific isn't because of some attachment to it that has come to compete with what the Harbor has been to me -- though I do love the magnificence of the California coastline and have spent countless hours staring from it at the Pacific. But a good deal of what I'm staring at is what the Pacific represent to me as an East Coast person: movement toward the West, with all the symbolism of that -- literal movement, for me, farther away from home. The Pacific symbolizes for me movement outward into the unknown.
I won't quibble over nostalgia, except to say that it needn't be literally personal and autobiographical. I think nostalgia -- which, of course, manifests as love for what made us, and made us well, and is missed -- is also often as deeply a resistance to impermanence, what I, from my Buddhist perspective, think to be the only permanence. Often -- I've seen it many times, including in myself -- people feel nostalgia for what hardly warrants it at all. We're currently watching the screen adaptation of My Brilliant Friend. I haven't read the books, but I have read from others that the screen version is very faithful. We just watched an episode in which Lila, one of the two female leads, chooses at the absolute low point of her life (so far) -- sick, impoverished, and nearly broken -- to return with her young son to the poor Neapolitan suburb where all her talents and possibilities in life were crushed and where she was abused by every man she ever knew, including her father, who threw her out a window when a child and greets her on her return by calling her a whore and turning his back on her. And as portrayed and visualized, Lila returns filled with nostalgia for the "old neighborhood." Something in her longs to return to where she came from, where she came into being, even though she barely managed to escape its jaws of death.
Hits close to home. I spent my entire life in WA state until 5 years ago (I’m 55). I think often of migrating back towards home, though not the small-ish city I grew up in (Yakima). However I own a brick & mortar business here so it’s not simple & at the same time I’m fortunate my 23 yr old lives w/me right now while she looks for post grad work. Acceptance is crucial but I’ve struggled with making a home and accepting the craziness & stress of living in LA. Life on life’s terms.
Thank you, Chris. "Acceptance is crucial." Indeed. Balancing how much agency we have with how much to embrace circumstances beyond our control is an ongoing challenge. All the best to you and your daughter! Kids do clarify priorities. It is interesting to consider the flip side. My parents never considered moving closer to me; would I choose differently if my own children started families?
Gorgeous writing; deep reflections and insight. This should be published traditionally.
Thanks, Michael! Yet here we are, part of the renegade Substack brigade.
Lots of 'food for thought' here Josh...HOME is where you come from and possibly/hopefully return to for most people I know. Definitely for myself. And quite a few of my former classmates. And your former wife. Probably anyone you get to know well enough to discuss this. The adage "Bloom Where You're Planted" (something I said to myself through my many moves - Portland, Oregon...several Montana towns, back 'home', Spokane, Seattle, Bellingham) comes to mind. Even makes me wonder about my parents' longings for where their roots were in North Dakota and Nebraska upon being uprooted to Montana in their childhood due to economic or family developments beyond their control. Your parents and mine gave us roots that run deep! Thank you for this essay <3
Thank you! Yes, embracing the present and finding home where I am is the current project. I did succeed at that for many years in Iowa. And it might be possible to be present to both places by keeping those Montana connections alive. I remind myself that it took a lot of years for you to find your way back, even if you did stay in the West generally! The good news about communities like Troy and Libby is that when we do come back to them, we have old friendships to renew.
If I accept my "home is the native soil of the heart" as the postulate, my home would be not a place as a my house - home in New Jersey, which I love, but my home always was and is my Russian literature, my poets I love, their tragic fates, I think about constantly. I left my favorite city in the world, Petersburg, at the first opportunity, because I hated regime which destroyed the lives of my favorite poets and I wanted to read M. Bulgakov without call from KGB. I think my home could be anywhere my books are.
What a lovely thought, Larisa. Books have always been one of my homes, too.
Thank you, Joshua. Right now I publish my essays about my favorite Russian poets before and after Revolution. Welcome to read them; m.b., you find someone you like.
You express the soul’s tug-o-war between places so very well. I grew up in Upstate New York, and it’s still the only place I truly exhale.
I’ve made a home here in western WA, and I sadly have no home to go back to in Upstate NY.
My soul pulled me westward for so long. It’s difficult to express, but I listened. And I hoped to understand the meaning of it all. I’m still listening for that answer.
My favorite line in this essay is : “even though my face was still turned to the West.” That says it all. 💞 heart’s comfort going out to you.
I suppose the mystery at the heart of these choices and their outcomes is what I find lacking in some of Sanders' and Berry's essays. Most of us are doing the best we can; we'd rather be rooted, but it's not always that simple.
This veers afield of your more soulful note, but I've thought a lot about this with the current precarity that many face with professional work. The days of pensions and lifelong work if you wanted it, which allowed my grandfather to stay in one place his whole life, are gone. Young people can't buy homes, so they are forced to be interloping renters. Some people who might want to move closer to a childhood community or to family are stymied by mortgage rates. These aren't excuses; they are practical realities, and they do intertwine with personal choices throughout our lives to contribute to our destinies. How much we ought to sacrifice on the altar of place is a significant question. And, as with your soul's leanings, the answers are not always forthcoming :)
Thanks for the reminder that I'm not alone!
Thanks for this insightful reply Joshua. And? I thought of yet challenge which complicates returning “home” : where our children settle.
I had an opportunity to move back to Upstate NY (which still feels like home) about 9 years ago, and ultimately decided not to because my oldest daughter and her husband live about 30 minutes from me right now. They are all grown up, and I don’t see them as often as some families meet up, but if I moved 3000 miles away, I’d probably see them even less.
Challenging soul choices.
Excellent point. Thank you for sharing. This is perhaps another illustration of the phrase, "Announcing your plans is a good way to make God laugh." I have imagined a way in which I might keep a toehold in Montana while trying to live purposefully in Pennsylvania, but it does (so far) rather hinge on that family land. Will all of my kids be in college in 14 years? Will they settle near where we live now, or will they need their own walkabout? Will they want/need me nearby? Impossible to know. Clearly deferring real living until then is not an option, but during my recent time of upheaval, the appeal of that stable point of origin has been strong.
Excellent piece; thanks for sharing.
You say "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."
Perhaps for some (many?) but my experience was the opposite, and I expect that's true for many. I found small-town life stifling and small, too intimate and too narrow on too many dimensions. I had been in this place, with these people, since kindergarten and there were no degrees of freedom left to grow or change. One's identity was cemented in the expectations of others. I couldn't wait to leave - and for 40 years never looked back longingly - other than summer work, only obligation brought me back.
I've loved the places I've landed along the way, the things I've learned, and the families of choice built in those places. A deeply vibrant urban neighborhood in Columbus OH where we bought our first house; that was heart-wrenching to leave, though thankfully many of the relationships persist. Learning the ins-and-outs of NC has been rich and similarly rewarding.
It's too strong to say my (seasonal) return has been accidental; but certainly a sequence of happenstance: a random walk through a set of inconsequential choices that cumulated in a consequence. I always saw the beauty of the place, I think, and certainly the grandeur was made evident in my time on the lookout and I'm deeply enjoying carving our place out of the neglected knot of woods the property was in when we found it. But clearly much more in line with Rushdie than Sanders.
Thank you, Jim. All good reminders of how individual that sense of home can be. Perhaps I neglected to say that for a time academe provided that home for me. Certainly I'd not have much of a writing life if I'd never left, and the writing community is a home of sorts, too. But I wouldn't feel the way I do now if I didn't run into old friends every visit back. During a time of starting over, that has a powerful appeal.
I think what Sanders misses about Rushdie's point is that word "obliged." Sometimes there's choice involved. At other times, whether it's imminent threats that force a removal or a series of choices with unforeseen outcomes, intentionality isn't the whole picture. In that case, embracing the new fusions is better than rigidity.
This piece was too long already by the time I posted it, but my visit this summer allowed me to glimpse a way in which I might keep a toe in both places. Perhaps with time, and as my community here slowly expands, the binary will soften.
Thanks for picking up the ball Josh. It's interesting to me to note the similarities and the differences in our story. We've both found ourselves seeking permanence, slowness and thoughtfulness in a world that doesn't place much value on any of those anymore.
I can't help but note that you share openly what made you leave Montana, but very little here about what formed the original attachment. I say that because I don't have an attachment to the place I grew up. Even Oklahoma, as much as my grandparents' house is an exception, doesn't feel like a place I long to return to. It doesn't feel like a place I would call home nowadays.
I have also thought a lot about staying vs. wandering. I think, for myself, I had to leave to find my way. There was no spiritual path, no deep roots, no river running through my blood. I am probably closer to Rushdie in this sense, although my life has moved me more towards Sanders. And I apply both lenses in my life depending on a number of factors.
I have much more I could say but I think for now I'll simply appreciate knowing you a little better through your home. I do love writing these with you.
Thanks, brother. A lot of Montanans feel the way I do -- we are kind of like religious fundamentalists about the place. Norman Maclean would agree with me that the quality of the water has something to do with it. Perhaps the color scheme. Perhaps it was also long days spent in the forest hunting, gathering berries, hiking to alpine lakes. Those sense memories are a form of rootedness. I always felt as an artist like I was trying to do justice to a landscape that had already been created more perfectly than anything I could invent.
That’s beautifully said and I couldn’t say more, having moved back to our somewhat shared northwest Montana region after 20 years living elsewhere and being homesick.
One of my kids is deeply attached to it all and I think will remain so, but the other can’t wait to escape to a city.
My friend Jim, who also grew up in Troy, expresses that duality elsewhere in this thread. Another high school classmate who now lives near Washington, D.C., and who I’ve recently seen a handful of times while traveling, is quite happy with where he landed. The place is not for everyone. And the human community has real limitations that not everyone can either live within or keep at a distance.
While reading many of the comments, I was thinking about a conversation I’ve had about Berry in other online spaces, specifically that many people would like to belong to rural places, especially places they grew up in, the way he writes about, but can’t because those places aren’t safe for them for religion, gender, race, LGBTQI+ identity, or an endless number of other reasons.
That poem Noha shared says so much.
So true! Black scholars write about the relativity of place due to slavery and the association of wild places with human threats, which is one reason that environmental literature is so white and bourgeois. As a father to daughters I often think about how pleasures I take for granted, such as solo hiking and camping, pose a different set of considerations for women.
It's a big reason why the dynamics and dialogues between Berry and bell hooks always feel so important to me.
Beautiful Josh. Thought-provoking in so many ways with the relevant references. I love the description—“uprooted Sticker.” I realize it may apply to my acquired sense of vagabond—having been unwillingly uprooted so many times as a child by my father’s corporate climbing. I realize after reading your essay that I really wanted each place to be home but could never stay long enough for it to feel like the ground wasn’t shifting beneath my feet.
Interesting how both you and Latham kick off our series this week with so much Montana 🙏
Thanks, my friend. It is one of those perennial campfire philosophy questions whether we are more innately prone to migration or to rootedness as a species. There's ample evidence of both in our evolutionary history. Possibly an intractable paradox.
Josh, this is a great essay. We come from similar backgrounds except mine was a farm in Missouri rather than Montana. I left at the age of 18. For the past 28 years I have moved constantly, ever two or three years as my career took us from place to place. My wife is from Peru, our kids were born in different states, and no place feels like home to me except that small plot of land where mom and dad still live. I think that psychological connection to place is an integral part of who we are. Whenever I think about someday settling down it is always on some wooded land with a creek and fields of wildflowers in northeastern Missouri. Our spirits have a real connection to those places where we originate.
Thanks, Matthew! I know that rootlessness is one of the many sacrifices that military families make. My cousin, a Marine veteran, is firmly rooted back in Montana. But he spent many years in Maryland, deployed overseas, and who knows where else before he found his way back. His wife is from Maryland and has found a way to feel settled in Montana, which is also fortunate for him.
I'm not sure what pushed or pulled you away originally, but I suspect that economic viability was part of it. Farming has always been hard to sustain, especially across generations. It's one reason I find myself impatient with "reality" shows like "Frontier House," which romanticize homesteading. In reality, few homesteaders sustained their original lives; they built a school, hired a teacher, and then their kids went to college or got jobs in town. My parents imagined themselves as homesteaders in the mid-70s, and they did turn a forested mountainside into a lovely home with orchards, gardens, and chickens. But it was never a place I could stay as a young person. So that homesteader story played out in exactly the same way.
Your fondness for that corner of Missouri may or may not be shared by your children, just as Yang's yearning for Laos isn't necessarily what her kids, who have only known the Twin Cities in MN, will feel. We've never really found a way to do anything but a brain drain in rural communities. It's a shame.