These were the men who raised me, brothers and coworkers, all of them better men than I. They taught me what they knew and many things they didn’t. They said, “Drive safe,” which was a banal thing to say. I checked the tire pressure on the car while they talked about their work for the day, work I had no quarter in for the first time in ten years. We circled each other warily, then finally gave each other awkward man hugs. When I drove away, I cried like a baby.
My life was spent in the company of these men, and now I was leaving. I knew my people would move on without me, perhaps even forget about me. Babies would be born, businesses would change, friends would be fatter. My irrelevance to my community would be illuminated, and what little vacancy I left would be filled by people who do it better than I ever could.
We quartered Indiana, driving north on I-65, blinkered by fields of corn and only finding relief by climbing Indiana’s mountain range, the highway overpass. And as we drove there was no feeling of going toward, only the desperation of leaving,my thoughts stretching backward to what I had known all my life and what we had put together for a life as newlyweds. There was nothing to dislike about our community; it was filled with generous and wonderful people and we had no reason to leave. There was a pit of self-doubt in my stomach.
We camped the first night on the south-eastern edge of Wisconsin. The next morning, we drove an hour to Baraboo, Wisconsin to visit Aldo Leopold’s farm, one of my literary heroes. The most remarkable thing about his farm was its ordinariness.
But we were travelers, and this was a waypoint, not a destination. We cut off the bottom of Minnesota, barely needing to twitch the steering wheel for the roads that led straight into tomorrow. Entering the prairie of South Dakota, we camped by a small lake, fried supper, showered at the shower house. I swam in the lake. All around us were the vehicles of the transient: the RV’s, Subaru’s with Thule racks, hundred-thousand-dollar rigs of the weekend warrior. Eavesdropping on the couple next door, we heard they lived in their camper and traveled for work. They were mooching their way to South Carolina and were in no hurry because the next stage of his job did not begin for a week. For a moment I envied them, cut off as they were from any loyalties, living a compact life with wheels under it: no roots.
As we took up the road again through South Dakota, across the prairie with its canicular slant of sharp light, I looked hard at the inhabitants scattered in the towns and surrounding landscape. Some of them are there because their daddy was there, and because his daddy was. Maybe Great-great-grandpa came for the gold or lead or copper mines, the cattle or the homesteading. Yet others have arrived in modern times, seeking some life that this landscape has to offer such as the ranching or open skies. Still others came not for a love of the land or the people, but for a career, with an allegiance no higher than a paycheck, a product of an industrial economy that displaces to give you a place. What is home to all these people, and what do they mean by it?
America, with its huge temperate zone land mass, has always been one of shifting populations. For so many years, America has had a bit of promising territory on the horizon where a man down on his luck might go to gain a purchase in the world. Or where a man might strike it rich. Thus the frontier has been driven back, both by honest pioneering and economic lust.
The ideal, in my view, are the homesteaders who went to stay, who proved up their quarter section and lived well within in it. But we know that many frontiers were also driven back the extractive industries that promised to make you a millionaire before nightfall: Gold, copper, lead, uranium, the government-induced wheat boom of the Dust bowl. This was driven by an economic lust, and the goal of any kind of lust is instant gratification and please let’s not talk about the repercussions. But the excitement peaks quickly, and we fall off the high of immediate satisfaction into a corresponding low. Boomers and busters. They are inseparable and we would be fools to think of ourselves as the exception.
I was thinking about all this as we drove. I knew we would be attempting to integrate ourselves into a new community. There would a period of about a year in which we would be great friends with everyone, because we wouldn’t have enough history together to develop any grudges. But we would get over that.
Our spiritual lives can devolve into a version of the American boom-and-bust: Across the states we go, booming on the new energy that a new place offers, the kind that is rooted in ignorance of land and culture, the kind of ignorance that allows you to overlook many faults, then busting when we realize that these people are petty and mean exactly like the people back home. Disillusioned, we leave a ghost town and set up for another boom, which is followed, with perfect logic, another bust.
What we get is a spiritually displaced people who have not been in one place long enough to grind it out with the people who rub them the worst, proving their ability to forbear with, or develop love for, the people and place that come with the cycles of offense, forgiveness, drought and flood, poverty and riches, helping and being helped.
A journey from Kentucky to Alaska reveals similar stories, in various stages. We looped through Montana, and Idaho, then into British Columbia, flanking the Rocky mountains on the east side, then driving through the stunted spruce forests of northern British Columbia and the Yukon. And from the cornfields of Kentucky to the northern spruce forests, there have been the gold rushers and the pioneers. Some of them stayed to become “stickers”, as Wendell Berry or Wallace Stegner would call them, while the “boomers” went off to seek their fortune.
Barry Lopez said in Arctic Dreams, “What one thinks of any region, while traveling through, is the result of at least three things: what one knows, what one imagines, and how one is disposed.” Something like this goes for our homeland too. I am ashamed to admit that for many years I saw my community as a place to leave, and, secretly, a place to transcend, which proves my arrogance. Mostly, I just wanted to go elsewhere. It hurts to have that out in the daylight.
I don’t think you must be a farmer to be a “sticker.” You might even relocate many times in your life and not qualify as a boomer. You might live in one place all your life but be no less a boomer than the gold rushers. A sticker is an attitude, a way of looking at the community and recognizing its limitations and humanity, but loving it by choice and action. Like being married to one spouse for life, we accept the fact that we will live together for the rest of our lives even if a better option turns up. It is only inside those limits of commitment and promise that we provide security and a place for human flourishing. We accept the mystery of What Could Have Been when we make a commitment such as marriage. We’ve cast our lot, we are in it for life.
In that way, we ought to view our communities. We may never know what it would be like to live in the Rockies, or on a Florida key, or in Europe, or in a community that shares your political or personal interests. Anyone can move around and appear respectable to a community he doesn’t know. But to live with people whom you would never have chosen, in a place not suited to your interests, and still stop casting about for something better is to be a sticker, the stuff good communities are made of. What would happen if we all refused to leave each other, even after the most painful altercations? Surely, there would be bitter people, people with a suppurating hatred for each other. But some of those would heal, like adults, and it would be that much more beautiful.
A friend used to say, “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” He was joking, but I took him serious, at least quietly. Now, I was elsewhere. Was it any better than home? What made me think that I could do any more good here than I could at home? How can I even begin to be useful to people I hardly know?
We blew an alternator in the Yukon, which was depressing. Our situation was further complicated by the shipping logistics of the wilderness and post-covid international border crossings. Finally, with the help of friends we barely knew, who drove eleven hours one way and on their own dime to rescue us, we arrived at our rented house, incurring a wake of debts into new territory. The books under the mattress in the camper had a layer of Alcan dust. Our filthy, broken vehicle sat in the driveway. My wife was twenty weeks pregnant. Had it not been for a sense of honor, I would have tucked my tail between my legs and ran back to the comfort of my Kentucky hills.