What if You Don’t Like Where You Were Born
On heading home to Indiana
Dear Friends,
I have moved around so much in the past five years, that when I first wake up, it takes me a moment to remember what reality awaits. Maybe I will awaken in a rich person’s guest room in San Diego, wrapped in high thread count linens, with their dog nestled at my feet. Or in the van, parked on a sweltering, fly-dense farm field in South Dakota. An icy parking lot in Elko, Nevada or a smoke-filled forest outside of Flagstaff. A hotel room in Denver.
In a week and for the rest of the year, I’ll know exactly what reality awaits each morning. I’ll hear the familiar creaks of an antique bed. Inhale the history of coffee spills and puppy accidents that rises from the carpet. Open my eyes to a long-forgotten and preserved scene of teddy bears, pink wallpaper, quilt tapestries, and yellowing boxes of potpourri. I will remember that I am in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the house where I grew up, my old childhood bedroom. A place I jokingly and not so jokingly call The Shadowlands.
When people ask “Where’s home?” I answer, “The Road.”
Inevitably, they ask again. “Ok, but where is home?”
If I feel like being annoyingly mysterious, I will persist and pat my heart. “It’s inside me.”
Their eyes will roll and they will ask a third time and finally get an answer that makes sense to them: “I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana.”
While Fort Wayne is legally where I live, vote, and pay taxes, receive mail and visit at least once a year, I don’t actually live there. I don’t consider it my home. Only the place where I am from, and I’m at peace with it now, but for most of my life I was reluctant to admit that.
As a child I lived in the fantasy worlds of Dangerous Liaisons, The Thorn Birds, Young Catherine (a mini series about Catherine the Great) and thick Harlequin romance novels about vikings and highlanders. I wanted to live in those places - aristocratic France, the Australian outback, 18th century Russia, Scandinavia, Scotland. Not the mundanity where I lived in a Midwestern suburb with restrictive rules and unimaginative routines at home, church, and school. In middle school, I fantasized about living in New York and began to understand that what I was craving in all these far flung fantasies and of travel and leaving was culture. I wanted, desperately, to belong to a culture.
When I left home as a young woman, I avoided speaking the name of my hometown like it was a terrible secret. How could I reveal that I was from the most average place in the world? I might be suspect of being average myself.
“Everyone in the Midwest needs to die,” a man I once respected as a great intellect said while dead drunk in a New Orleans bar on a steamy spring night. He had been building up to this theory all night, pontificating about the blandness of the Midwest and its big box stores and office parks spreading across the whole world like a shadow, Disney-ifying any culture in its path and turning all of existence to grayscale. First they gobbled up the culture like it was something to be consumed instead of a real way of life. Then they bulldozed the place down with uniform businesses and conveniences.
“What about me?” I asked, trying to gauge if he recognized that I belonged to the Exception Class – those who were too enlightened to be from the Midwest, and therefore permitted to live in places more suited to their specialness.
“You can live,” he said. “I guess.”
I was so relieved.
We were likely ten cocktails in a piece by that point.
As extreme and absurd as this idea was, I understood his pain. He was from New Orleans, from this place of rich culture that was being over-consumed and commercialized at an alarming rate post-Katrina. Traditions, ritual, meaning and belonging on fire-sale. He blamed the Midwesterners, the culture-deficient. I also, over my years there, encountered many bitter people in New Orleans who shared his views and I got sick of it. I felt, unless you are indigenous to a land or brought against your will, you have no right to it either. You are just experiencing a much lighter version of what those before you experienced. Now I’m not sure what to think.
In the past few years of traveling around the country while casually feeling out a new place to live, I’ve heard a very different viewpoint of roving Midwesterners.
Three years ago on a trip back to Fort Wayne, I stopped for a few days in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I parked on the street and as I put coins in the meter, a man approached who had long hair, a Carhart jacket, and steel-toed construction boots.
“Where in Indiana are ya from?” he said, pointing at my license plate.
“Fort Wayne.”
“Yeah? I know Fort Wayne. Not a bad little town. Not bad.”
“Are you from Fayetteville?”
“Born and raised,” he said, actually puffing out his chest. “Take a picture, ‘cause this species is going extinct.”
Things had truly gone to shit in Fayetteville, he said, now that all of the Californians and Texans had gotten wind of this little slice of heaven.
“I’m starting to get wind of it myself,” I said. “I love it here.”
“Well, it’d be okay if you moved here,” he said. “You’re from Indiana so you’re cool.”
I remember this moment distinctly because it was the first time anyone had ever said that being from Indiana meant that I was cool. It’s possible that this man was hitting on me and it wouldn’t have mattered where I was from, but I’ve since received invitations from many others along the way, giving their blessing to move to their hometowns. Memorably, a Blackfoot elder said I was welcome to settle down in Montana because Indiana folk are honest folk, not like the Texans.
Hoosiers are considered innocuous. We are the rust belt. We are humble folk. Not opportunistic and rich. We can be trusted not to jack up the housing prices or build fancy coffee shops or spas to call in more of our kind. That seems to be the current belief, at least.
It’s not so bad, Indiana. There are actually things I am looking forward to when I return next week. I have a few old friends and a local bluegrass band that I love. There’s the public library, which has the best and biggest collection of rare and out-of-print books I’ve ever combed through.
Still. It is Indiana. It is also not just Indiana. It is largely a homogenous sprawl in Fort Wayne, like many places in the US. Little trace remains of the old wilderness that once was. My hometown makes me homesick for the mountains and sagebrush, the ponderosas, the palm trees and the redwoods, the coyotes, the ravens and the javelinas. I am at peace with being from Fort Wayne. I even enjoy visiting. But after too many weeks or months, I long for the west. I don’t want to live in Indiana. It’s not as much the culture that I miss anymore, but the wild.
I am currently participating in a weekly listening series with Stephen Jenkinson called Neverland/Severland. His ideas are not soothing, and sometimes feel merciless. He is not, for example, like cozying up with John O’ Donohue or David Whyte. He talks about death, duty, land rights, belonging, place, elderhood, and ancestry. One thing he said felt like a mortal stab in the gut and I can’t stop thinking about it: that you belong to the place you were born to, and maybe it’s time to start seeing that as less of an affliction and more like an assignment.
Not that I expect life to be fair, but this prescription seems unfair because my father chose Indiana because of a job. We don’t have deep roots there, the Isaacs. It doesn’t seem enough reason for me, a woman of free will and independent spirit, to be obliged to make a home out of her father’s choice as her life’s assignment.
Yet considering the devastating state of our world, which is rooted in a history of humans who were pathologically unable or unwilling to live where they were born, something feels true in what Stephen says.
Consider, he says, the impact on where you were born because of your absence from it. I do. I think about a patch of forest in a park behind the house where maybe 20-30 red tail hawks nest. I call it the Hall of Hawks and I love to walk among them. It makes me sad and full of hope, this small and wild persistence. And that maybe it might need an advocate. If I don’t like where I was born, why not help it rather than leave it?
These are deep and heavy meditations and something that is turning around in my mind at the moment as I make my way back to my father’s house to spend the holidays, reflect on the year and think about what’s next.
I’d love to know your thoughts, and how you feel about the place where you were born.
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From one midwestern girl (suburbs of Detroit) to another, I can relate to so much of the challenging territory you're navigating here. I would lose myself in making collages from fashion magazines, dreaming of a life of fame and glamour. I've often reflected on the fact that I never return home because my parents left the home I grew up in for Vermont due to the rampant sprawl. And much of my creative life has been driven by a feeling of 'cultural-deficiency'. This I feel the most. But I am also so proud of my midwestern, grounded, salt-of-the-earth practicality, friendliness, generosity, neighborly care, and delight in simplicity. But I can't live without the wild. Nope. I've now lived in my home in Oregon longer than any other place, so here feels like home. And yet, there is such a deep part of me that lives on that middle ground, and its a tender spot.
Wow there is so much richness here. I have so much to say about all this. I am going home for TG and everytime I go there is a deep conflict of belonging and repulsion. I grew up in NY with lots and lots of culture but I still couldn't wait to leave and be from somewhere else. Keep an eye out for an essay about it soon inspired by your essay which I will certainly link to.