Years ago, I went into my high school guidance counselor’s office to inquire about being an exchange student. “I’ve never had anyone ask me about being an exchange student,” she said, looking at me as if I’d just introduced her to a completely foreign idea.
“You know, where you move to a different country to go to school.” She shrugged and shuffled some papers on her desk; likely application forms for the closest community college nearly thirty miles away. “I’m sorry, I’m just not sure how to help you.”
So, I helped myself.
After doing some research, and pleading with my apprehensive parents who finally conceded, “Well, I guess everyone needs roots and wings,” I found myself living in Southern Australia the following year. I came to love the strange cackling of wild cockatoos, and the thick accents of my classmates. I met aboriginals in the Northwest Territory, narrowly escaped wild dingoes, and swam with Great White Sharks off of the Great Barrier Reef. I had cross-cultural conversations before I ever heard the term cross-cultural. The experience opened my young eyes to a world of infinite possibility. It was a bummer to go home.
Home was an agricultural community in rural North Carolina, a town so small it didn’t even have a McDonalds. To stave off boredom, my friends and I learned to paint landscapes and how to play the guitar. We wrote letters to people we’d met on vacations, and traded pen pals.
When I turned eighteen, I left again. I lived in Mexico and Ecuador. I met people of diverse backgrounds and interests. I took up photography and worked at a Pulitzer Prize winning publication. But something was missing. Much to my surprise, by the time I was twenty-five, I wanted to go home. I was living in Boston, by way of Maine, by way of New York then, and it shocked my parents to learn I was returning to live within a two-hour drive of them. They were thrilled with the announcement of my return, but they questioned, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
There is a feeling akin to failure that comes with returning home for my generation, even if you’re not residing in the cliché of your parent’s basement. Unlike our parents, as my generation navigates the professional world we are faced with a job market that expects us to move on after a few years so they can hire younger, inexperienced workers whom they can pay less. The corporate ladder may have been in place a generation ago, but we’re the ones for whom the rungs have been spread out across the country and all over the world.
Since returning to my home state, several people privy to my earlier adventures have questioned incredulously, “What are you doing back here?” as if I must have suffered a nervous breakdown, be wanted by the law, or be absolutely out of my mind to prefer my Southern Appalachian hometown to the comparatively exotic rhythms of city life.
Keeping the same job in today’s business world for an obligatory thirty years would seem a failure to the outside world, as would be living in one place for the same amount of time if it wasn’t a center-of-the-world city like New York. But there is more that one way to gauge failure. Over the years I have come to understand that, for me, failure would mean not knowing my next-door neighbor, and not knowing the natural world in which I live. I thought of my parents “roots and wings” comment on a recent trip to a local nature conservancy. While there, I noticed a placard noting the habits of the Golden Eagles that swoop through these mountains. It explained that when these birds come into the world, they have an innate imprint of the landscape where they were born.
Despite the fast pace of our culture, I believe that humans have this imprint too. It is important to explore the world and develop a sense of the diverse riches of our planet from a distance, but it is also important to land somewhere you can apply your perspective.
I’ve begun to notice others returning to their roots. My local comrades include 20- and 30-somethings' who’ve lived in cities across the United States. They’ve come home to save the family farm, care for their aging families, raise their children, or simply to reacquaint themselves with the landscapes they were imprinted with at birth. Like me, they’ve followed their hearts home to lead impractical lifestyles full of challenges and great joy.
As we replant ourselves, we all piecemeal ways to make a living. Some of my neighbors are artists, others naturalists, novice farmers, or entrepreneurs. I’ve been a substitute teacher, a small-town newspaper reporter, a caterer, and a wedding photographer; all of which have their days.
My fellow hardscrabble ex-urbanites and I swap our own addresses rather than those of pen pals in foreign lands, and spend long evenings sharing ideas on how to make a living in an area where the classifieds offer more pets than professional positions. Despite the trials of rural living, we have happily returned home after a seismic-size shift in our formerly anyplace-is-better-than-here perspective. We recognize the sweet power of boredom, an affliction caused by higher-than-normal levels of peace and quiet. And after using our wings to see the world, we’re finally ready to dig in to grow.
