I feel most at home when I am far away

Dispatch from the East Coast.

We all want to leave this widening night,
            this barking at the thing we can’t see.
No one walks through their story un-stung.
            This yard, this life, like a book of changes,
the moment buzzing by like a prophecy,
            your body a constellation of pain.
We spend our time stumbling through the white fog,
            searching the doctrine of our own breath
when all we need do is crawl deep inside 
            the silence that comes after and face
the teeming hole in the ground, the wasp’s nest, 
            that cousin of the eyelessness of space.  
Do not fear the ache and swell my sweet boy.
            It’s easy to hate what we’re given.

— Peter Grandbois, "When your son abandons the lawnmower for the second time in as many days"

I want to start this newsletter and tell you how beautiful the world is. I want to tell you the way it feels to return to a place and know the taste of home on your tongue. I want to tell you that I know where home is for me and I am sturdy within it— that I do not waver in the declaration of the place. I want, to put it simply, to know where I belong, unconditionally. I would like to start this newsletter with all the right words to say, though the more time passes the more I grow sure that there are never right words to say, that we are all stumbling through this experience looking for meaning somewhere within it. Will we find it? That’s the question I can’t stop thinking about lately.

Somehow this summer has blurred into August. I spent the last two weeks driving a good portion of the East Coast, from South Carolina to upstate New York and back. Most of that time was spent alone, observing the world around me. After years and years of seeking control in every aspect of my life, learning to observe is a newfound practice, one I am still coming to terms with. In observation, I am not projecting my own judgement, needs, or desires onto what lies before me; I am simply letting it unfold. The world is an open road, a wide field, a curving river, and who knows what waits around the bend.

If you have never spent extensive time driving across the country, I highly recommend it. I truly believe there is no better way to experience modern day America; perhaps only train travel comes close— and side note, who do I need to talk to to better fund train travel in this country? Unlike airports, which feel to be a type of purgatory between places, car travel forces you to exist in everything in-between. It forces you to see it up close, and you cannot look away. Highways in America are often ugly, inconvenient, full of construction and traffic, dissecting entire former neighborhoods, drawing clear divisional lines between cities. They are rarely beautiful. But they show you this place as it really is.

There’s a kind of fascination in American culture with the road trip, one that feels unique to this place— I think anyone could argue that narratives like On The Road and Into the Wild seem to have become a cultural symbol for an entire generation of young adults looking to find some kind of “realness” in their lives. Road trips in the cultural canon provide substance; they offer their protagonists the opportunity to peek behind the curtain of everyday life and see what lies beyond.

As a lover of road trips, I understand the appeal of these narratives. They force the reader into a type of unknown, and in a country where control and structure dominate over almost every facet of our lives, that unknown often gets mistaken for a type of freedom— and the characters themselves become archetypes of the type of person willing to seek out that freedom. The type of person willing to lose themselves in that unknown. For much of my young life, that was the only kind of person I ever wanted to be; in one of the very first pieces I ever wrote about the South, for a memoir course I was taking in college, I described the ideal vision of myself as a girl alone in an old car on an empty highway. This piece specifically revolved around ideals of Southern womanhood, and this version of me was tough, independent, unshakeable. She wore red lipstick and black boots and smoked out the window and there was no one who could hurt her, at least not any more than she would ever hurt herself. I thought for a long time that this is who I would become if I moved back home; this was the only type of Southern woman I could ever stomach myself becoming. She didn’t seem like someone made by a place, but someone who made the places around her.

I ended that piece with a type of premonition, something that even then, years before I would truly return, I already knew to be true: I don’t know how to be this person or if I even really want to be, but that’s besides the point, I had written. The point is that this person fails to exist outside of the highway, outside of the movie clip where she dissipates into the distance and doesn’t come back. She goes where she knows nobody and nobody knows her and she isn’t afraid. In all the versions of myself I have ever known, she fails to exist. I go, but I’m afraid, afraid to truly leave this place behind, afraid of who I might become out there on my own. In this version, I do the one thing I promised myself I never would: I come back.

In the end, I did come back, and it was that return that allowed me to find the most essential truth of who I am. But I never set out to become a regional writer; I never set out to tie myself to a place. I just wanted to unpack my complicated relationship to place and home and where I belonged within that. And sometimes, still, I question if I have made the right choice. The last two years I was in New York, I had already known that I would end up leaving. But I still thought that the choice would be in my hands. I held on to an image of myself with a car packed full, the skyline of the city fading into the background, and Canned Heat’s Going Up the Country blasting through the speakers. This image alone is more or less what got me through, and when it was taken, when I did not leave the city in a car but on a flight in the midst of a global pandemic, I mourned that version of myself, the girl who had felt so sure that the leaving would be the most satisfactory part. That the leaving itself would affirm my decision, and I would know I had made the right choice. I needed that physical drive away to make a clean break between the life I thought I could live and the reality of the person I had become. I needed that, I thought, to reach the other side, to get to the core of who I really was.

In narratives of the road trip, we usually follow a character’s inner journey; these are stories that tend to follow an emotional experience mirrored by the external, which is the catalyst for that growth. Without the open road, or trail, or ocean, or any blank horizon really, the inner journey is rendered impossible. The land itself strips back characters to show viewers or readers their true selves, beyond the discernible surface. Novelist Tiphanie Yanique describes it for Lit Hub like this: “The form’s argument is that land, this American land, makes you who you are— the various locations that the characters visit, pass through, and stay at, do the work of character development.”

In this line of thinking, the land becomes a character of its own, a boundary that one must pass through to reach the essential core of themselves. It’s an especially American ideal; our cultural narratives have always hinged on the idea that to “make it” you must strike out on your own. In isolation, out there on the open road, there are certain truths that reveal themselves to you— truths about both yourself and this place. In America, we are presented with two options: buy into the fantasy and the myth and the propaganda, or uncover those truths for yourself. History books won’t give them to you. Modern media won’t give them to you. Even the internet won’t reveal to you to truth of things. Often, the only way to do that is to see it up close.

Learning to look up close is key to our survival in this country. It is key to where we go from here. It is paying attention to all the small details of life around you. It is opening yourself up to be surprised. It is learning how many of your judgments about other places or other people are spoonfed to you because it is far easier to breed division than to cultivate empathy.

We place so much importance on place in America— where you’re from becomes a representation of who you are, more than any other place I have ever seen. This is especially true, I think, if you have only spent time in one place. We define entire identities and communities based off of physical location, and then learn to judge based on those stereotypes rather than seeing things as they really are. We are city people or country people or we love the suburbs or we hate the suburbs or we come from red states or we come from blue states or we have to live near to the mountains or we have to live near the beach. We change and we morph and we move, and yet we all seem to also be searching for roots, and looking for home.

There is a larger argument here about settler colonialism and forced migration and many of us having no rooted claim to the places we find ourselves, but I want to distill it down to this: we are looking for home as if home will help us understand who we are. As if this metaphorical home provides the key to unlocking our places in the world. Finding that home will give our lives meaning, substance, connection. Road trip narratives offer a different perspective: that we can find a new home, or make one in the open road, or even, if we’re lucky, make one in ourselves. They also offer the notion that distance helps one to understand the familiar— that with distance, you can also see the places you are from for what they are.

I’ve never loved the South the way I do when I am far away. I’ve never felt more myself than when I am alone on an open road. But I’ve also made some mistakes, I think. I’ve let this land become the thing that has shaped me most. I’ve let it become the largest character in my own story. It has provided me more growth and challenge and frustration and joy than any other character possibly could. But this land is not all I am, nor should it be. I am who I am because of the places that made me, but they are not all that I am. My feelings for home can root me in place, but they can also allow me to spread out and roam. And in that process, I will learn new things about myself, and this country, and the way I feel about both. I’ve spent so much time the last few years looking for roots, and now I am staring down another essential question: perhaps I am not meant to be rooted at all. Perhaps my roots are only meant to allow me the foundation to stretch out into a new horizon and see what the world looks like from there.

Deep thoughts for a new month, and I certainly have more to say on this topic, but I think this is enough for today. I’m sure we’ll end up with a part two soon, in which I will tell you all the fun, thrilling, and stressful details of this particular trip— which only served to reinforce my belief that we are not all so separate as we think. There is beauty everywhere, if only you are willing to seek it out.

— SG

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