Joe,
The subject you wrote of in "On Native Ground" has been gnawing at me these last few years. I struggle more and more with who I am and where I am from. Although my birth -- in a hospital -- took place in downtown Los Angeles, I have resided in Norway since I slipped through the cracks in the Green Machine in 1966 and absconded to a draft card free zone up on the northern rim of Europe. I planned to stay for three years, it's been over forty.
This is Scandinavia, not Virginia and the differences are much greater than any gaping, gasping tourist taking a two week cruise on the Hurtigruten can appreciate. We are not the descendants of colonizers; we have been here thousands of years. Here, where you come from is a matter of the first importance in any social situation. It places you; you're from there, not here. Or you're from here even if you don't sound like it. We still speak dialects that place you geographically.
In a country where 3% of the land surface is arable, you'd think people would be used to moving around to survive, but the bountiful ocean and the tempering Gulf Stream have made surviving on this tongue of moss-covered bedrock easier than the stony fields would have you imagine. But the abiders were always the eldest sons and their get. The younger sons had to leave or remain unmarried. So this is also a nation of leavers: "Roving is the Norseman's way" says a hackneyed poem. And I'm a descendant of generations of leavers, expatriate in the fourth generation, from stock that moved up and down this endless coast, yo-yo'd across the Atlantic so many times we've almost lost sight of the first bearded patriarch who first made his way across "the Blue Bog".
The nation of first sons ruled the day and rules to this day. Though the farm no longer provides the focal point for all of society, returning home remains a virtue. Being able to make a living in the place where you were born is considered almost a right, and the policy makers agree. Towns and municipalities all have plans and projects and campaigns to lure the young ones back. And they succeed to some degree. The fluid world of being on the road, moving from house to house, town to town, state to state that so fills the myth of America is not this world. Once the young have had a few years of roving freedom, they're often more than willing to return.
There is no one spot is this land where I can sit and feel that attachment you do. I can walk the land where my maternal grandfather was born 120 years ago, I can knock on the door of the house where it happened, but there is no echo of his life or his forebears for me there. The rocky, treacherous arctic coast where my other grandfather was born, the waters he fished from open boats in the dead of winter, they are just as dead to me. My roots have been wrenched out and replanted so many times that I have lost that affinity. No direction home. So where do I abide? I am the son and grandson of leavers. When my father's father sat in his church and looked out the window he knew, quite early, that wherever he might be buried, it wouldn't be there. My great grandparents were the last generation who were buried in the same place they were born.
I can't relate to one particular place like you, but I do know where I belong. It happened in a revelation so clear and sharp it remains with me to this day, over thirty years later. The oil platforms in the North Sea have made Norway one of the wealthiest countries in the world (and one of the best places to live according to many. Of course you have to stand being a socialist in practice if not in creed, cold and rainy summers and long, dark winters.). That wealth was still years away when an oil well in the North Sea blew its cap and started gushing out of control. The newspapers were full of hysterical articles about raw oil gushing for years, seas polluted, the entire Norwegian coast awash with crude.
By that time, my leaver genes had lead me to Paris, where I was living and working, still feeling myself as much American as Norwegian. I read the reports from Norway and clear as a bell the thought crystallized: "If that happens I have to go back home". In those minutes I ceased to be solely a leaver. Norway was my home, I realized, and I could not abandon her when her existence was threatened. So I left Paris. This land is long, cold and inhospitable, but it is mine.
I have acquired an affinity for a land of my own choosing and imparted it to my sons, perhaps. One of your forebears settled in Virginia for the first time too, a leaver who became an abider. I have made my home and with luck future generations will tell stories of me here, hopefully not just the embarrassing ones.
I mentioned a struggle. I may call this land home, but that doesn't mean it calls me anything. The abiders can hear I'm not from here and that sets me apart. I struggle with my feeling of home and the first sons' descendants who would have me be forever foreign. There is that American childhood humming in the background, telling me "You may love Norway, but I loved you first". And of course, the leaver genes cannot be denied, I feel the tug of other places, other climes. Once you leave, you can leave again. Even if you never do, you know you can. I still think I'm better off than the sons and the grandsons of the abiders, the first born. I have chosen my place, it didn't choose me. I tell them I chose to live here, whereas they've just simply stayed put.
I can sympathize with the campfire my name-brother spoke of in the letter to you ("In firelight and in darkness"). I think I've found mine and I'd be lying if I said I never think of what will happen when the hologram projectors shut down and all the shit waiting to happen happens. But for the most part, I just pour myself another glass and have a good look around, smiling and jeering gently. I can always leave.
Peace,
John in Norway
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John,
I can add nothing to such eloquence of reflection. But I can share it with readers of this little blog.
In art and labor,
Joe
