“Where do you call home?” a reporter once asked me in an interview for her newspaper.
“Iowa,” I said.
“I thought you lived in Chicago,” she replied.
“I do,” I said. “But I’m out of Iowa. I’m from there, and I left there.”
Then, I explained that I’d lived in Chicago for most of my life but was slowly migrating back to Iowa the whole time. We lived in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side for six years, then moved west to Oak Park, on the city-suburb border, for six years, and then to Glen Ellyn, a western ‘burb, for another six years. We were returning to Iowa in 10-mile increments every six years and would arrive at the Illinois-Iowa border when I was 104.
Though that westward migration stalled long ago. And since then, my idea of home has evolved. Now it’s less a physical location than a kind of belonging. It’s where my sense of being and my vast longings converge into one thing, something wordless — a kind of knowing, or belief, that I belong to creation. I think of the big bluestem or blazing star on the prairie — how each plant is anchored by its searching — for water, for life. As patient and persistent as an Iowa farmer, the roots keep spiraling deeper into the darkness, on their way home.
I first came across this sense of home 30 years ago in a field studies course on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In a sweat lodge, Francis White Lance, a medicine man, shared a core belief: mitakuye oyasin, meaning “all my relations,” or “I’m related to all that is.” Home as relationship — with birds and bugs and rivers and rocks, and other people. The phrase serves as a kind of closing prayer in Lakota ceremonies and connotes a home that is both physical and spiritual.
On the Pine Ridge, and elsewhere, I would learn that I had to leave Iowa to understand all that home could mean. This paradox suggests why that dull, flat, beautiful state now serves as my trailhead for a book of travel essays. Some of my journeys are “out of Iowa,” as in from there, and rooted in my family and childhood, while others are “out of Iowa,” as in away from there, and describe my treks through vastly different cultures. But these two strands of memory — “from” and “away from” — also converge into a single braid of meaning: travel that takes you home.
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves,” writes Pico Iyer, “and we travel, next, to find ourselves.” Iyer has written a dozen travel books about exotic, far-flung cultures — from the Philippines to Kathmandu. I loved these books, but the one I reread is a critique of all the others: “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere,” in which Iyer explores the necessity of the inner journey — of being lost, and found, and then lost again. This kind of searching is implied in the French origin of “travel” — travail: labor, toil, suffering, trouble. Travel involves struggle, and a process of discovery and transformation.
“It matters not where or how far you travel,” Henry David Thoreau writes, “the farther commonly the worse — but how much alive you are.” When I read “Walden” in college, this line confused me. So did his claiming that he’d “traveled a great deal in Concord,” the small town where he lived his whole life. It made more sense many years later, when I reread the book, and pondered my own life in a small town. Thoreau knew he belonged there.
And maybe that’s the whole point: We are always on some detour, and always on our way home. But as the birds remind us, that word — “home” — is both a verb and a noun, both a journey and a destination. Which is why we’re never quite sure when and if we’ve arrived — whether in small-town Iowa or the South Side of Chicago.
Tom Montgomery Fate is an emeritus professor at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. This lightly edited essay is excerpted with permission from Fate’s new book “The Long Way Home: Detours and Discoveries.”
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