Leaving Holm and Making Home Somewhere

My town is a place my parents physically escaped to. Young and pregnant they moved their lives to the countryside where the dog had freedom to run, and my parents could ride their bikes on backroads. Now 25 years have passed, and my mom is nostalgic, laughing each time she tells the story of the move at her family’s horrified reaction—you’d have thought they were moving to Vegas (!) instead of a mere 45-minute drive south of the American suburb where the extended family had lived two generations. My mom always downplays the distance, but I think her family had a point. By moving their lives to the countryside, to a town I’ll call Holm, my parents brought me to a space on the map I call the middle of nowhere.

What do I mean by “nowhere”? To define nowhere, maybe I have to first define “somewhere.” From where I sit and type this as a senior in university in New York City, “somewhere” has culture. Somewhere has coffee shops where people sit and exchange ideas. Others perch in high stools and write on their laptops. In contrast, my parents raised me in a disconcerting nowhere: Holm has one traffic light, a startling number of cows, and no place to sit. There are no internet cafes, and I don’t recommend bringing your laptop to open Word at Holm’s public library—nobody does that so people will give you funny looks. I always estimated growing up that without digital media, my town wouldn’t hear about an important global catastrophe until about a week later. But maybe I’m the only one who enjoys finding a seat in a crowded New York coffee shop, right at the last moment when you thought it was impossible, no, it was just too packed to ever get a free table. Isn’t it bliss plopping down there to read MSNBC Breaking News?

I think seeking the freedom to sit and think and work through things is a pursuit many of us have in common. I know that this is something I at least share with my dad. In fact, I think the pursuit of freedom to sit and think is the reason he steered our lives to Holm in the first place. This may seem odd, as I’ve thoroughly debased Holm as a “nowhere” devoid of culture. But my dad’s version of working through things from a chair vantage point is different from mine. For my dad, a spiritual guy, I think there was something romantic about moving to the woods. He lived a long life before marrying my mom and struggled with OCD and depression. Writers like Thomas Merton and Richard Rohr inspired him to view rural retreat as something sacred. He built his retreat in bookshelves in our sunroom and really started to live it after he retired from teaching high school. That’s when he started his novel about 10 years ago.

My dad went to the countryside to make a place for his future self to write, somewhere with a slower pace for careful spiritual reading where attention to detail could spin itself endlessly without repercussion. This is a kind of knowledge production and pursuit of peace rightly earned by a 75-year-old retired teacher turned mystic thinker. Yet this model and location of intense imagining may seem, to a critic of “nowheres” not unlike myself, surprisingly, unattached from any university, monastery, or office building.

It may be helpful, in the midst of this confusion, to return to the notion of “retreat.” Why was my dad drawn to sit and think in a nowhere instead of a somewhere? Was my dad retreating from something? This is important. My dad’s family story is hard, as many family stories are, and as the eldest of seven brothers (two whole, one half, one step, two dead) his liberal politics and gentle demeanor do annoy my God-fearing navy veteran uncles. This makes things uncomfortable for him. If I had to guess, I’d say my dad viewed Holm as distant territory untouched by and out of reach from any of this. So perhaps, for this reason, Holm is holy ground for him to contemplate unfettered.

I think Holm marked the start of a new freedom for my dad in his imagining. We always used to make fun of my dad for his pile of thesaurus texts next to the desktop computer in the hallway by the kitchen where he now writes (log cabins don’t have offices). But what I didn’t realize then was the glorious (tremendous?) fun he was having with the endlessly (eternally??) consuming thesaurus. The older I grew, the more I read of his writing. He passed us printed notes here and there, a page about tranquility in the cabin to hang in the kitchen, a typed-up prayer shared before a road trip. I teased him, and it bothered him, about using big words for the sake of it. I’d say “Dad, why are you choosing the most complicated words possible?” I think I had been in school long enough at that point to understand that jargon didn’t help a novel’s readability—wisdom didn’t ride in the longest dictionary words. This is the beginning of where my dad’s path to freedom through thinking really diverges from mine. 

There was a time when I could enjoy rural cabin pondering alongside my dad. On quiet nights growing up, we’d sit on diagonal stuffed chairs and read—him, The Way of a Pilgrim and me, obviously his studious protege, Harry Potter. I loved the stories and I dreamed of witches, perhaps compelled to imagine by a lack of action in Holm. But, despite the mystery I found in books read slowly, over the years I longed for something different. I began to chafe in Holm public schools where tired teachers couldn’t quash an anti-intellectualism bred among students. All day long and year after year we sat in chairs at desks, but we didn’t think. I was frustrated to learn recently that my parents didn’t research or compare local school districts before moving to Holm. Their cabin is, coincidentally, three quarters of a mile from the residential boundary line with one of the top 60 performing public high schools in the state. If my parents had chosen a cabin slightly west, maybe I’d have been made to think during all those school years in my chair at my desk. These are formative years we spend sitting comfortably unchallenged in our small-town beliefs! And yet, there wasn’t much difference to sift through or figure out as a kid in a nowhere like Holm anyway. Thinking doesn’t get you anywhere within such a place. 

I’ve now spent time living far from Holm in a big somewhere for university. To survive, I’ve learned how people from big somewheres sit in the library, how they read, and how they write papers. Sometimes it seems that having my laptop out in front of me and opening my Google Calendar is the baseline process of functioning for humans in a somewhere. This kind of disciplined sitting is a skill I’ve now acquired. Tapping into this world of shared knowledge production has scratched the itch of my younger self who knew there was a place people went to learn how to write better than a thesaurus could instruct. Faced with different ideas my sitting has been challenged and been made uncomfortable. There must necessarily be thinking in order to survive in a somewhere where there is difference. For me, there has been freedom in understanding how to navigate such a place and in the possibility that through this navigation, other somewheres may be within reach, too.

Sitting and thinking in a somewhere has created distance between myself and my parents. It’s stark when I visit Holm to realize how my university papers and typing has changed how I think to be different from how they think. The top 60 school where my parents could have lived has a new bookshop on Main Street. My mom and I first saw it in the dark when its interior was lit up warm with Christmas lights. We saw tables by the front windows inviting people to sit and read. We slowed the car to a crawl pace and craned our necks, surveying the inside. I was sure it was closed but my mom got excited and determined to take me in. She’d heard the owners were from a somewhere and the shop had the kind of social justice window sign that excites liberal mothers from nowheres (sorry mom). It was after hours but the owner saw us and met us at the door. My mom said she’d heard about their business and heard he was from…? I grimaced. He responded kindly that he was from Hong Kong… but really from the Bronx. I nodded emphatically in understanding and vague apology. Shoving forward some city professionalism I promised we’d return in the daylight opening hours.

I went back to the new bookshop alone one of the last days I was visiting Holm during winter break—I was totally charmed. The single room of the shop is a maze of shelves, mismatched in size and orientation. Fiction and nonfiction, there were rows of authors and themes familiar to me through my essays painstakingly crafted in college library chairs. I wandered around just excited to walk on the wooden floors. I was proud of this man from the Bronx who wanted to open a local bookshop so close to Holm. Wanting to support his business, I surveyed my options and settled on a book of collected poems by Audre Lorde. The owner complimented my choice as I left.

I could have settled in to read for a while at the tables by the front windows of the new bookshop, but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to and because nobody else was reading by the windows. I felt kind of giddy instead taking my new book on the train back to the city where I could read with a free mind—in a somewhere where the tables by the windows are always full. The compounding miles between myself and Holm made it easier to slide down my tray table and break the spine.