I never feel more like an “internal exile” than when I have traveled from my current residence near Atlanta to the place where I grew up, just upstream from Toledo, Ohio, along the Maumee River.
I took the long fall-break weekend to drive up I-75 to visit my mom, my siblings, and a few of my nieces.
On my way back south, yesterday, I had plenty of time to think about why the experience is so disorienting.
Northwest Ohio has more claim to be home for me than any other place. It is a landscape I know well: I was steeped in its geography, its natural history, and its human history from early childhood. In my senior year of college, my final paper for one of my courses was an environmental history of the Great Black Swamp, which dominated most of the region before the surveyors and engineers had their way with it.
Everything there just seems to be as it should be, right down to the precise color and feel of October sunlight through yellowing leaves, or the way great fleets of cumulus clouds sail across the too-large sky in July. While others may find the landscape flat and dull – and it is among the flattest places on Earth! – it rests easily on my eyes.
I find it captivating.
But I have not lived there for more than three decades and now, when I travel there, I find I am returning to an increasing weight of absences: my grandparents, my dad, my parents’ siblings, most of the people I would have known in my youth. I am also entering into the webs of new and continuing connections my mom, my siblings and their children and – now – grandchildren have cultivated in my absence.
I’m still part of all that, more or less assured of my welcome, but with a certain distance and with the knowledge that the few direct ties I have to that place are brittle and will be severed all too soon.
It is home, but it is not home.
I have lived in the same small city near Atlanta for more than two decades and, while I am familiar with this place and its ways, I have never been fully grounded here. I know something of the history of this place, less than I should of its geography and natural history, but always with the sense of being an outsider.
That, and my work as a philosopher and the tendencies of culture and technology have me living as much or more in abstraction as living in place.
It is not home, and yet it is home, at least insofar as it is the place I happen to live.
I remember several points in my student years and in my early career at which I felt a pull in contrary directions: one would take me back to a life closer to the ground, in a place known and loved, caught up in the existing connections of family and community; the other would lead me to Cosmopolis, the universal city where I could live as a citizen of the world, a citizen of everywhere . . . and hence a citizen of nowhere.
On the drive back south, yesterday, I imagined a possible life in which I became a historian, or a hybrid environmental historian/environmental philosopher, burrowing into the landscape of the Great Lakes region, or even just the watershed of the Maumee river, learning and writing and teaching at home.
I chose another way, more or less deliberately, with more or less foresight.
Did I choose well?
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