Questions From and For the Road
In which your Unsettling author finds themself 'unsettled' once more
I’m on the go again. Two weeks visiting a city in which I used to live, tracing the changes, stopping by many of the old haunts that still remain, happy to find them intact. A few nights ago, attempting sleep on a coach seat on the Amtrak. Then a night on the fold-out couch of friends who helped shuttle me to this small town on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert, where I have a room in something approximating an old boarding house for the next five weeks. After that: more trips on cars and trains, more short and long stays.
I’m trying to better understand this tendency of mine to keep in motion. I’ve often struggled against it, viewing it as an unhelpful habit acquired from my parents, who moved our family often. I’m wary of the way people become so quickly uprooted, almost without thinking—apparent marionettes of capital, tugged about by the strings of either labor or real estate markets or whim (“We like the restaurants here, so we moved”).
“Most Westerners live out their lives as a series of uprootings,” Wallace Stegner has said, and while some may idealize the image of the individual wanderer, I join Stegner in his concern about the result:
"But the rootlessness that expresses energy and a thirst for the new and an aspiration toward freedom and personal fulfillment has just as often been a curse. Migrants deprive themselves of the physical and spiritual bonds that develop within a place and a society. Our migratoriness has hindered us from becoming a people of communities and traditions, especially in the West. It has robbed us of the gods who make places holy."1
Stegner seems to worry little about the destruction of the pre-existing communities who indeed had and have their own gods that mark, and make holy, many places not just in the West but throughout all of Turtle Island. There are questions to be asked here—which many these days are asking—about the twinned processes by which Europeans became detached from their places, both voluntarily and involuntarily, and then required others to be as well. Might the answer to them be as easy as stopping one’s itinerant wanderings, staying put?
“Stop moving once every three years. Sink some roots and really get to know the place you decide to call home,” says the poet Gary Snyder, who is slightly more attuned than Stegner to the cultures already deeply placed in those spaces the children of settlers find themselves wandering through. Snyder may have rambled about during his own younger days—one needs only to read a poem like “Night Highway 99,” capturing a Bellingham to San Francisco hitch-hiking adventure, to see that—but at 40 he stopped, built a home, and some 50 years later, is there still. His advice, then, comes with some experience to back it up.
Still, such an admonishment may do little to change the habits of the perennially uprooted. Some truths are better learned as felt sensibility than memorized as part of a set of abstract ethical principles, and the goodness of staying in place is surely such a truth.
Myself, I felt as though I had such sensibility literally shaken into me, on a long and bumpy ride to Petrolia, CA (territory of both the Mattole and Wiyot peoples). It was the summer of 2007, and we were heading for the "Lost Coast” so that my partner and I could backpack the route along the beach. Larry, my host—he was a volunteer for the community organizing group with whom I was temporarily working, one of several offering host housing for summer interns—was generously shuttling us to and from the trailheads. Truly generous: it was not a short drive, and the Mattole Road is “technically paved,” as people say.
We took curve after jolting curve in his truck, and with each one heard a new story from Larry about the landscape through which we traveled. I would only just perceive a set of banks or crested hillside, and he would be talking about the particular creek below, the flow levels of this year, its impact on fish, the increased rate of erosion on one stream over that was a source of concern, the project that another community member had done on the road and bank around the next bend, and whether or not a similar technique would be effective elsewhere.
It was a lesson in the language of land: at the rate we were moving, I could barely make out half the words, could not interpret much of the green blur through the dusty window. But Larry, he seemed to know how to read everything around us. He had, of course, lived in that county for a long while, had taken part in decades worth of efforts to halt excessive and illegal logging. Though we’d never walked through the forest together, I gathered that he knew individual trees in the way he knew these streams. In between details on creek restoration, we got to hear about nefarious corporate clearcutting schemes or plans to log old growth, and the various tricks he and friends had come up with to stall or deter both the economic and physical machinery of deforestation.
Bouncing along in his truck, I couldn’t absorb half of what he was sharing, but the broader lesson stuck: there was a practical kind of knowledge that I sorely lacked, one that came from living in one place for a dedicated time. A way of attending to all that place’s inhabitants, and to the land itself, that I had not yet learned. Turns out, one could be intimate with a watershed. With watersheds within watersheds.
Larry was also the first person to serve me salmon roasted on a cedar board, and to do so with story, telling me about the friend who had gifted the fish, and how he had learned to prepare it that way. I’ve had a little trouble eating salmon in a more casual manner ever since. Later on, I came to remember these two things together, the respect he showed the single salmon we shared, and all he knew about the waterways between Hwy 101 and the coast.
I had taken the internship that summer to learn how to build connections between people, that we might achieve something greater together, but I left understanding that the broader cultural change for which we advocated required other forms of connection as well, and that somehow I was going to need to know about trees and fish and streams, not just how to get people to a city hall meeting. Most of all, I was coming to see that this would take time; that to steward a place, or protect it, one needed to stick around, see its own cycles of change for enough years to know when something was off—to recognize when the number of logging trucks was unusually high, to notice a new bit of fence or a “keep out” sign where none should exist.
Then a funny thing happened: as soon as I really understood this, and felt like I was letting it settle within me just like all the dust we kicked up on the drive, my life became precisely the series of dislocations that I hoped to avoid.
Yes, I returned to Chicago, where I had been based, ready to dive in. Within the year I was not only participating in multiple community-building efforts but also giving talks on local environmental history— sharing basics such as how the neighborhood had once been a birch forest, used as a seasonal home by the Potawatomi, or that the yellow brick one saw in so many Chicago bungalows in fact came from underneath our very feet.
This, I thought, was it. This was the work: knowing the place I lived, and truly becoming part of it. Only there was a hitch. My partner, at the time, was an academic still in the early part of their career. All you in the world of academia can guess what happened next: there were, of course, no offers for positions in our vicinity, so we made the decision to accept a post-doc elsewhere. Off to another part of the country we went. That relationship didn’t survive the move, and I found myself—on what I at first presumed to be a temporary basis—becoming more transient, relocating once, then twice, then a third time. There I was, the little marionette, moving about in search of an apartment, chasing people or jobs, finding myself in yet another new city. When at last I found myself with work and a partner both in the same place, and my family not too far away, I dug in, and dug in hard.
But adherence to an ideal for its own sake, with disregard for on-the-ground realities, can cause pain and trouble both—be it the ideal of some On the Road cross-country trip as the dubious equivalent of freedom, or, in my case, dedication to staying put for the sake of staying put. I made it past Snyder’s three year mark, and felt some accomplishment in doing so. But then—like many others—when the pandemic came, everything that needed to burst apart in my own life did so. I’ve not lived any place longer than six months during these last two years.
It all has me trying to reframe some of my old questions and lessons, as I find myself more mobile yet again.
For instance: what if my ability to tear up one whole version of life, and to rethink my foundations, is a strength, not a deficit? My first therapist seemed to think so. “Usually the problem is that people get stuck,” she told me, “and they don’t know how to introduce change.” It was our second session, and I had come in announcing a goal to leave my job and do an extended solo wilderness backpacking trip. I’d already set a target date. She looked at me, and tilted her head. “I don’t get the sense that this is your issue.” (That was fine; we had plenty else to discuss.)
Possibly, my issue is failing to accept that my contributions to the world don’t always look like what I came to think they should look like. That I am not, at least not yet, a Larry. And that maybe I don’t need to be. When I visit friends who have lived in the same apartment for a decade, or the same city their entire life, or who have dedicated their entire working career to a single institution, it becomes a little more conspicuous: something different seems to be organizing my life, and it may be more than just the semi-mysterious forces of capitalism. Is it just the migratory drive of the white settler? Some epigenetic impulse that has yet to be understood? Does the origin of my mobility matter? What if I quit focusing on the source or its meaning, and instead looked to the effects of life lived on the go?
While I was living in Seattle (Coast Salish and Duwamish territory)—the city where I kept trying to dig my heels in, and seemed to be causing a lot of unhappiness as a result—I had lunch one day with a friend, who asked me why I was trying so hard at it all. I explained my theories about staying put, this sense that I was somehow losing my chance to really be somewhere, to have the kind of relationship with place and community that I had witnessed elsewhere and found so inspiring.
“Huh,” she said, “I always thought of you more as the kind of adventuring and traveler type.” She said it without any judgment. If anything, I could infer she felt appreciation for my wanderings, but now seemed unsure about offering it.
We knew each other through place-based work—organizing around better public transportation, safer bike routes, and the like. She’d been in Seattle for years and lived the kind of life that I was just then espousing: she knew lots about the city and its history, its past and present changes, and could envision strategic interventions as a result, gaining momentum through past work and a broad and tangled network of relationships built over time. Yet she was happy to know me, her friend, not as the same kind of resident, but as a traveler.
It was one of those moments where you suspect someone is telling you an obvious thing about yourself that everyone else seems to know, and take for granted—everyone except, of course, yourself.
I thought about this conversation in early December, when my restlessness kicked in, and I seemed to involuntarily keep imagining new ideas about where I might venture off to, other places in which to live for a little while, curious to know what they might be like. I booked those two weeks to visit old friends, thinking it would help. The go-roaming demons were appeased for a day. I started to give myself the old lectures, then stopped, and asked: what would it mean to accept this desire, at least for a little while? What if I had failed to stay rooted because I had, in my ideological dedication to earlier ideals, refused to learn the lessons that rootlessness could teach? What if there is a kind of benefit I might bring by being displaced, even if only to serve as the wandering storyteller to friends who opt to stay at home?
I let myself ride the impulse. The week after solstice still found me scouring internet listings for affordable sublets. Nothing was feeling quite right, until I saw the ad for where I am now; a room in a town I’d looked at many times before, previously unlucky in finding an affordable accommodation. I made myself sleep on it, but within the week had it booked, had timelines mapped out for when I needed to give notice at my place, arrangements made to move my furniture into storage.
Now, here I am, and now, it is time for new questions: What does right relationship to place mean when one is not a permanent resident? Can we avoid the harms so often caused by the more mobile classes? Can we make meaningful, deep attachments to multiple places? The phrase “polyamory of place” came to mind recently, as I thought about how poly folks attempt to love multiple people deeply at the same time, against social expectations that would limit the number of our intimate relations.
Can answering these questions help us see an ethical path forward, for those of us who cannot claim indigeneity, whose ancestors were themselves settlers with broken roots, or otherwise displaced, memories of home discarded or forgotten? What might I learn when aiming merely to be with a place, rather than seeking or presuming either ownership or belonging?
And most of all, what questions have I been missing, have I not yet learned to ask? What questions might each new place teach me to raise?
What might this place, this town in a mountain canyon in a wide expanse of desert, be asking of me?
How might I go about answering?
Guess I better go find out.
Until next time,
Meg
Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space. (Though if you’re considering reading this, maybe check out my review of it before you rush out to acquire a copy.)