When I was 21, on a study abroad trip for a semester in the UK, we had a fall break where we could split off and travel where we wanted for a week. I went to Florence, Italy. One day my travel companions and I hiked up to an overlook where we could see the whole city and the Tuscan hills surrounding it, the Duomo roof sparkling rust in the sunlight.
As we snapped photos of each other in front of the view, instead of wonder, I felt a wave of anxiety. The world, at that moment, felt impossibly vast. If an earthquake happened, or a flood, or a terrorist attack, I would be at a complete loss as to what to do. No one would know who I was in this great swarm of people in this city, this country, this continent. I was utterly alone in the big world, and nobody cared but me.
This 15-year-old memory resurfaced on a road trip I just returned from. I drove south from my northern Minnesota town through the midwest to Tennessee, where I met up with friends. I sourced vintage clothing at thrift and antique stores along the way for my vintage clothing resale business.
As I drove alone through the cornfields of Iowa, the small hills of Missouri, and into the green of Tennessee, with stops in small cities along the way, I felt quite homesick. I felt small and unaccounted for, even though plenty of people knew generally where I was.
While I’ve previously lived in a big-ish city and traveled abroad plenty of times in the past, it’s been a while since I left the Midwest. I know it’s not cool to say, but I don’t love to travel. Leaving my home and cat and routines to go somewhere new honestly doesn’t appeal very much these days. I always lose my center a little, even when I travel for something fun like this recent trip, and it takes me several days after I return to feel like myself again.
These days, I live within sight of Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake by area. Living by a large body of water feels purposeful. The water is an anchor, a reason to be somewhere. I feel unmoored when I am away from the lake that has been the backdrop and forefront of my life these past six years. The lake is why I keep fighting to live in a place that’s very challenging to live. It’s why when I find myself on a trip, I feel out of sorts, like something essential about me is missing. It’s why I seek out the water wherever I go, why I feel immediate relief when there is a creek to walk by, when a lake emerged from the prairie landscape I drove through.
It made me wonder, in those small cities in Iowa, in the backwoods of Tennessee, in the suburbs of St. Louis and Memphis and Minneapolis, how we decide to live where we do. What draws us somewhere, keeps us there, what our lives consist of in those places. My eye would be drawn to certain houses along the two lane highways and wonder, who lives there? What do they love?
I know it’s important not to get too comfortable, to be careful not start to think that the entire world is contained here in this little town where I live, where there is little diversity. The years pass so quickly and if I’m not careful, I’ll look up and realize I haven’t left the Midwest in six years, except to go an hour further north into Canada for a day in Thunder Bay. (Which is exactly what happened.)
It’s important to taste the smallness that travel inspires every once in a while. To be reminded of my general insignificance, and appreciate the immense privilege in having a safe home in a town where I feel like I belong, because not everyone will have that in their lives.
And to remind myself that humans will find home in a million ways that look nothing like the way that I have found it—anchored by their families or jobs or ancestors or, like me, landscapes—and their ways are worthy of witness, important and beautiful and valid.
I love this piece so much! I am someone who is always torn between the two opposites - I need routines and to feel settled, but at a certain point I feel absolutely drained, then I need to go away and sometimes for long periods of time, but then I start missing the routines again 😅 and so in circles it goes
Minnesota and Lake Superior are beautiful! I also wonder about the people that live in towns that I pass through or visit and what their lives are like living there. I also sometimes forgot that people actually live in the places I visit and they aren’t all just tourist like me