There’s no need to go looking for home… unless you’re lost…
from Staying Put, Scott Russell Sanders
For a long time, I have been reluctant to call Pittsburgh home, to think of myself as “from here.” I’ve resided here since 1995, when my parents moved from the Philly area, and my address changed while I was still a student at Geneva College. That’s going on 30 years ago, but it’s only been in the last 10-12 years that I have been able to say, “I guess I’m from Pittsburgh.” Still, so wishy-washy. Still, so unenthusiastic.
Brian grew up here, as did his parents– he’s from Pittsburgh, not me. In those early years of having a Pittsburgh address after graduating from college, I didn’t really have a problem with being here because I was in love with Brian, and he was my home. I felt at home wherever he was, whether in Pittsburgh or at the New River Gorge staying at Roger’s in a tent and climbing on rocks every weekend, or on long road trips to other states where we would go to climb on their rocks– same tent, different campgrounds.
I grew up in a small Kansas town and was 14 years old when we moved away. We moved to Willow Grove, outside of Philly, where I went to high school. We lived there for such a short time, and I don’t think I ever considered it home. My friends were my home through those four years, more or less, but not those roads and not that small row house on Knock-Knoll Circle. For a long, long time, that small town in Kansas remained part of my body’s landscape as home, its streets and alleys and buildings and parks and creeks, mapped on my heart and mind, kind of like a ghost haunting me, or a phantom limb smarting. That small town was not beautiful except in the love I carried for it as a young girl. It was beautiful, and I loved it because it was mine, completely part of me. I have always had a deep yearning for wide open sky and flat land that allowed you to see far like I could in Kansas. And to this day that love remains in me as nostalgia.
The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 as a medical term to provide an equivalent for the German word meaning homesickness. We commonly treat homesickness as an ailment of childhood . . . and we treat nostalgia as an affliction of age. On our lips, nostalgia usually means a sentimental regard for the trinkets and fashions of an earlier time, for an idealized past, for a vanished youth . . . [That] is a shallow use of the world. The two Greek roots of nostalgia literally mean return pain. The pain comes not from returning home but from longing to return . . . A footloose people, we find it difficult to honor the lifelong, bone-deep attachments to place. We are slow to acknowledge the pain in yearning for one’s native ground, the deep anguish not being able, ever, to return.
from Staying Put by Scott Russell Sanders
But last summer, driving back to Pittsburgh from CO, Brian and Oren and I stopped off in Hays to look at my childhood home on 1101 Downing Street. I hardly recognized it at all. Gone was the yellow house with the brown trim. Gone was the big wide concrete front porch with the long steps. Gone were the tall juniper evergreen trees that blocked the bedroom windows from the street. Gone were the cottonwood trees. Gone was the red-stained fence that wrapped around the backyard. It was actually terrible. I didn’t even get out of the car, and we didn’t linger. I don’t know why this time felt particularly awful. We’ve stopped off to look at the house before, and it has been a really long time since it looked like anything recognizable to me. I was dealing with grief on that trip for other reasons, so it must have bled through. But I don’t think I’ll ever do that again; I’m done going back to look at that old house. I’d rather live with my fuzzy nostalgic pictures.
Since I was a little girl, I always thought, dreamed, planned that I would live somewhere beautiful where there were mountains. And by mountains, I mean the Rockies, not the Appalachians. We visited family and went to church camp in Colorado every summer for many, many years, and I wanted to live there when I grew up. At some point after marrying Brian and living in Pittsburgh for a while, I started thinking, Hey, I’m not supposed to live in Pittsburgh. What are we still doing here?! I’m supposed to live somewhere out West, somewhere amazing. Becoming a climber made this feeling even more intense. But we needed to stay here where we had family, and I got Brian to agree that if we were going to live in Pittsburgh, we were going to have to travel a lot to those beautiful places in the mountains and the deserts that I yearned for.
I know that many Americans don’t live where they are from, where they were born, where their family has roots. SRS says we are “a footloose people, unable to honor life-long, bone-deep attachments to place.” I wonder how many people know what it’s like to be from a place like Brian’s family is, generations and generations living in the same city. I think it freaks a lot of people out and makes them want to get the heck out of Dodge. Being from a place sounds more like being stuck there. This is true for me. I have extended family spread far and wide over the US, many cousins whom I barely know, and its because my parents and their siblings were never from one place. Both of my grandfathers were pastors and missionaries, and they moved around a lot, wherever they were needed, where they were sent. That’s what we grew up with, what we thought was normal. Movement was our legacy rather than rootedness. My sisters and I married into families who were from a place though, and so we went to where they were from, but separated from each other.
I don’t mean to suggest that people who move around are wrong. The US is full of people who are here from other places, immigrants and refugees, as well as people born here, who have pulled up roots for far more urgent reasons than beauty and sunshine. For some relocation is necessary for survival. One of my sisters moved to Pittsburgh because we were able to help find my bro-in-law a much needed job. Now they are stuck from here too, but digging up those roots was hard on them. I think Americans will always feel free to leave and move around, it’s part of being American. It’s truly American to leave just for the adventure of it. It’s viewed as freedom to be able to move wherever you want to go. You leave because you can. Staying put is not romantic or sexy. It’s responsible, sensible, homely, mundane. Staying seems less free. You stay because you have to.
Many of us would rather live in beautiful places, to call spectacular places home. It’s why those places are so expensive: location, location, location. When I go with my family on road trips, I’m always looking around the towns or cities we spend time in, wondering, what would it be like to live here instead? I’ve always been on the look out for the perfect place. It’s easy to think there is something better than Pittsburgh somewhere. Pittsburgh is ordinary– and very cloudy. There are so many more interesting cities where it seems like the sun shines more days of the year. Especially if you are an outdoorsy person, like a climber, and natural beauty and good weather is as important as air.
My kids occasionally talk about other places they could go and find work, and it’s true, they could. They can probably go anywhere in this country and find the kind of work they like to do– they are willing to work hard and with their hands. I haven’t really pressured them to stay put, yet. Maybe part of being young should include going away for a while, to get it out of their system so they can come back home with the understanding of what gets lost. Don’t tell them I said that. I haven’t told my boys what it might mean for them to lose the deep sense of home they have here, a landscape that is written on the map of their mind and body, something that sits heavy in their bones– to stay comes with a certain ease of being settled; to leave is discombobulating, disorienting. It makes you feel lost for a very long time. Some people might have something they want to lose, find freedom in being lost. But it’s one reason I have capitulated to staying in Pittsburgh– I don’t want to be lost anymore, constantly searching for someplace else to call home. Plus, I don’t think the perfect place to live actually exists.
Pittsburgh is better than anywhere else because of what we have here: our family, our friends in our faith community and the climbing community (if only they would all stay put too). Then there’s the view of the city driving through the Fort Pitt Tunnels, the hills (even though they block the sky) and rivers, the seasons, the bridges, this old red brick house with the big front porch where the boys have done all their growing up, driving fast on 28, the close proximity to some good places to climb (good enough anyway, I suppose). This is a quick list. I’m sure that there is more.
And truly, after being on the road, traveling for two or three or four or more weeks, there is nothing like coming back to a place that is so familiar that you can’t remember driving to the grocery store or church or your parent’s house because you could do it with your eyes shut.
