Many of us don’t know how to answer that
When we are young, we live where we’re born. For some of us, the place of our birth is a perfect fit and we never leave it. For others like me, something is missing there, and we look for home in places we have never been but long to find.
After college, my wife and I stayed in my birth state of Alabama just long enough to save a little money, have a baby and decide where it was that we belonged in this world. Somehow we knew then that home would be north of Alabama, and we understood that our lives were meant to be lived among mountains.
When we found southwest Virginia in the mid-seventies, we felt we had come home. Or at least that we had found the larger neighborhood of round ridges and gentle valleys where some day, we would put down roots and stay.
We have lived in or longed to return to Virginia ever since. And now, finally, we’re here in Floyd County for good. But in all the world, I wonder: why here?
Something has drawn us here over the years, brought us back. A longing we cannot name has caused these hills to hold a nutrient we cannot live comfortably without. Maybe the force that has pulled us home could be called a persistent, inborn “sense of place”.
Others have used the term, defined it for themselves, found it—in the Far North, the Mid-West, the desert or shore. But what is it?
Is it an essence in the air like the salmon sense as they migrate relentlessly back to the creeks where they were born? Is it a magnetic compatibility with geography, an imperceptible, persistent resonance in our bones that tells us that we are home? Or not?
“Where are you from?” a new acquaintance will ask.
There has never been a family home place for me to go back to. How would I ever know when and where to settle down, to make roots for my children’s children, to bond with a particular place for good?
It’s odd how and when they happen—those flashes of insight that seem to be openings in the heavens, when light pours down into our own private darkness.
When I had my revelation of belonging as a new writer in November of 2002, it was through the words of Sharyn McCrumb, speaking at the Presbyterian Church in the tiny community of Floyd. I wondered if others felt the tremors I felt that night.
She described the serpentine rock under the Appalachian chain, along the full length of the ancient colliding continental plates. This was the core of stone that binds the great backbone together. I perked up my ears: it plunges deep just south of my home town in Alabama, she told us. (And remnants can still be found under the “mountains” of Arkansas and Missouri!)
From there, it stretches north underneath Floyd and all the way to Ireland. (And maybe this explains why, briefly on my first and only visit to Scotland the hair on my arms stoodup: “I have been here before!” It felt like home.
The image of this long unbroken line of history and stone conjured in my mind a map, and on it, I could see them in a perfect line: all of the towns I had chosen for homes in our wanderings.
I guess it just never occurred to me before that moment: In all of my seeming rootlessness, I have never lived far from the southern mountains. In my epiphany that night, I saw that I never could. The mountains held a gravity I could not escape; I had always been Appalachian.
The mountains were my source, and I was a native son. And I knew then that I would come to feel more akin to others who claim this calling to place than to those who by accident of birth were born where I was born.
But what kind of allegiance does a native son owe these ridges and valleys? How much of who I am is because of where I’ve been called to live?
Would I have become the same person had I been born on Midwestern prairie or Arctic tundra? How am I—how are we—shaped by the form and pulsing life and the history of these hills and this forest?
Whether we know or deny it, place molds into each of us its latitude and elevation, its geometry and chemistry. Where are you from?
The irony of my revelation of belonging is that these mountains will not contain my life, start to finish. A few months back, we moved half a continent away to a place I never longed to find, that I will call home for whatever years remain.
Yes, this was a turning point. But so what?
Just for giggles, I cobbled a visual for myself to lay out the pieces of the puzzle that came together after—and because of—that epiphany.
I was able to talk with Sharon McCrumb that night after she shined a light into my ‘placelessness.’ I did not just live in these mountains. I belonged in them. To my surprise, and responding to my obvious zeal, she told me there was an “Appalachian Studies Program” at Virginia Tech. I had no idea such a focus existed in academia.
By the next day, I was signed up for “Appalachian Identities” to be taught by department head, Anita Puckett. Over the following years, Anita invited me to present several few guest lectures in her App Studies classes at VT.
“Floyd County: Tourism, Identity and Culture” was my self-assigned research topic. To complete it, for the first time ever at 54, I threw myself into the life of a community. I would come to know those people, places and stories well and feel like a part of it all until August 2024, when elder-needs carried us far away from a place we had once belonged.
But wait! They have those features here, too. If I can just live close enough to them to know and tell them well and share new stories with you and with new readers from this new land-and-peoplescape . . .
Time will tell.
– Fred First is an author, naturalist, photographer watching Nature under siege since the first Earth Day. Cautiously hopeful. Writing to think it through. Thanks for joining me. Subscribe to My Substack HERE
