My grandparents, both sets of them, were born, grew up, married, reproduced themselves, grew old, died, and were buried, all within an area of about a thirty mile radius in northeast Ohio. The same could be said for my parents, although my father and his brother fought in World War II which took them far afield — respectively, to India and to Northern Africa and Italy for brief portions of their young adulthoods.
This was the early half of the twentieth century, and by the time I came along in mid-century, the pattern was starting to alter. Awash in media images of distant lands and exotic but accessible foreign territories (even, by way of science fiction, of other planets or the prospects of exciting unrealized futures), I and many other members of my generation were drawn away if not actually seduced, Pied Piper-like, from territories circumscribed by that radius. Place as a thing that mattered was an insubstantial construct, easily modified, unable to take root when confronted with the charms of elsewhere.
Some of us were, in fact, still being shipped out to fight in foreign campaigns, but many of us, as we grew into our teens and twenties in the 1960s and 70s within a protective bubble of affluence, began to absorb the tenets of a counterculture that had commenced to grow and nurture generations, that celebrated the virtue of rejecting the place you were from, for reasons that had little to do with what other waves of immigrants had experienced in the past. It was, more than anything else, a kind of cultural diaspora more than a flight from intolerable or desperate conditions.
That wasn’t always the pattern, of course. My parents had come of age during the period of the stock market crash and the Great Depression, an era that must have seemed like a door being slammed shut, the closing off of economic opportunities, an expanding horizon suddenly shrinking down again to that thirty mile radius. I can feel their ambition for a better life, if not for themselves then for their children.
Our family has a record of a distant relative who traveled by sail from his home in Scotland in the 1700s to Baltimore, a voyage paid for with indentured servitude. We do not know under what sort of conditions he felt compelled to make such a journey — whether it was a certain bleakness in future prospects for finding a partner, for succeeding in business, for establishing a home and family — or the allure and attraction of a comparatively unknown land, glimpsed through a scrim of wishful thinking. We do know that he was able within a few years to settle on farmland near the current capital of Pennsylvania, that he married, that he and his sons fought in the Revolutionary War, that he continued to farm in the new United States of America free from British rule and raise his family within the confines of an area similar to the one that constrained my grandparents.
And we know that some of his family eventually moved on, westward. Some of them fought in the Civil War, and at least one of them, my great grandfather, traveled far enough west to enjoy a brief career as a cowboy. He eventually returned to the family occupations of farming and coal mining, neither of which was on my menu of career choices when I graduated from college in 1971. Somehow I had been, in the space of twenty or so years, converted into the ranks of the cultural hunter/gatherers who would roam about, selecting a little of this, a little of that, sampling what was offered wherever we went and transporting it on to the next destination, or leaving it abandoned on the side of the road. I had been taught to reject the conventional pattern and apply a different set of cultural values, less a victim of a targeted advertising campaign than a willing accomplice to a process I gratefully embraced.
I realize, as my parents and their parents could not, that I have lived through a time of great material abundance, engineered with warfare, powered by fossil fuels — a period in which I was encouraged to ignore limits, to take another helping, to buy yet another product — to grow, to travel, to move beyond the imagined boundaries, even the boundaries of the planet itself. The place I have settled at last is over a thousand miles from where I was born and from where my parents and their parents and other members of our family are or will someday be buried. Late to the game, I am trying to lay claim to a place where I can grow old, and where quite possibly I can still set down patterns of living I did not devote myself to during my lifetime, that may offer some support to my offspring in an unknown but likely quite dangerous future. My wandering has brought me here, without knowing who or what exactly acted as my guide.
It may very well be the case that I have rather been afloat in the movement of a great cultural wave that has deposited me on this distant shore — that lifted me up, pushed me forward and abandoned me here, not at a place but simply at the end of a process.
