I restlessly veered from one short-term job or teaching assignment to another, from temporary-permanent work to unemployment, and back again in a cycle that seemed to go on and on with no end in sight. The long road west on my travels during the 1980s beckoned time and again -- in the vast deserts of Wyoming I could find at least a small measure of clarity in the great emptiness and silences, but they threatened to engulf me if I stood still too long. So I kept moving.
I remember when I came across the essay by Sanders which first appeared in Orion Magazine, and in which he wrote these words at one point: "To become intimate with our home region, to know the territory as well as you can, to understand your life as woven into the local life does not prevent you from recognizing and honoring the diversity of other places, cultures, ways. On the contrary, how can you value other places if you do not have one of your own?" I’ve just re-read this essay from a collection of his writing subtitled, "Making a Home in A Restless World." The first time I read it, I was still adrift. Now, I am at last home, and it is indeed the place where, in the back of my mind, I always thought I might be at some point in my life.
It seems unreal to me at times that I have lived these past twelve years in Charleston with no need or desire to cast off for far shores, to answer the siren call of the road muse who lured me off on many a grand, but short-lived odyssey of travel in the past. Necessity drives a hard bargain, but since I knew no home port, I gladly accepted the temporary happiness of flight into the unknown. At least I wasn’t spinning in one place with anxiety and dread, but aiming for some distant place, heading who know where, and hopeful, at least, that travel would not make the current situation I was in any worse. Each leafy town I passed through, each cafe on the square where I had breakfast, each early morning stillness filled with new and exotic sounds and smells only drove home more intensely the fact of my rootlessness. "Thanks for coming, come back soon," the signs would say as I’d exit one town after another and be back on my way along that long open highway.
Maybe that’s why the taste of freedom from obligation and responsibility is so pleasurable. You don’t have to come back soon if you don’t want to. You keep on moving. Keep on keeping on.
And then, Sanders says, you become "an inhabitant rather than a drifter." I suppose, in a way, this marks the end of youth, whatever age that signifies today. When you reach the end of the road, you can no longer drift aimlessly. You have to make a stand. And that point may come, or be forced on you, quite unexpectedly, again out of dire necessity or through something as simple as the exhaustion of possibilities.
As I return to my home day after day, following the familiar contours in the road, looking at the big oak tree at the curve, slowing down at the same, precise spots with a kind of attunement to cosmic laws of motion, I realize I am not running any more, but home. The sameness is not dull or monotonous as I might have once thought, but reassuring and familiar. An indifference to monotony, and, therefore, a rejection of it, takes hold. There comes at last a knowledge and deep familiarity with a place, with the landscape that surrounds you, that is so abiding and so seemingly permanent, that you no longer think as often about taking off for faraway lands in a car loaded with all your belongings and hugging an endless country road leading only to some temporary shore far off in the imagination.
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