Connections

I need connections. I need a place to be and to be a part of. Since I was 17 I’ve been somewhat of a drifter. I finished high school, moved out of my parents’ house, and set out on a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to make it on my own.

Growing up in King, North Carolina, never quite suited me. I dreamed of being other places, of being someone else. I remember hearing a song on the radio at my grandmother’s house when I was about 12 or 13; it said, “I’m gonna be somebody/One of these days I’m gonna break these chains/I’m gonna be somebody/You can bet your hard-earned dollar I will.” This was Travis Tritt’s “I’m Gonna Be Sombody”, one of his first singles. I didn’t know who Travis Tritt was at that time, but I knew I wanted to be like the guy in that song. Unfortunately, I thought that meant having to leave behind everything and everyone I knew, since what I knew didn't quite encourage being "somebody".

I first visited New York when I was 17. I loved the city and came to realize through that weeklong experience that there was a MUCH bigger world out there for me to get to know. Sometime around my 18th birthday I took a trip to Alaska as a graduation/birthday present to myself. This was too much—seeing the two extremes of the quintessential urban landscape and, a few months later, after I had had a little time to process the first experience, the closest thing to wilderness America had left to offer proved more than my small-town-North Carolina self could handle. I wanted out.

After a year of community college a couple counties over from where I grew up, I began to feel drawn to work in church ministry. A few months later I decided on a college—in Saskatchewan, Canada, of all places. Three years and a bit later, looking to fulfill the internship requirement for my ministry degree (at a different college in a different Canadian province), I decided to take a job in Casper, Wyoming, basing my choice on driving through western and north-central Wyoming in 1998 and the eastern half of the state, including Casper, in 1999. I arrived in Casper one fine day in late August, 2000, not having a clue as to where I was going to live, much less sleep that night. Thankfully, Dave Tenney, the kind fellow who had been called out to welcome me on behalf of the school I was to teach at (pardon me, at which I was to teach), happened to have a garage apartment for rent. His sweet little children were the first to introduce me to my new title: Mr. Calloway.

I worked at the school and at a church, fulfilling the requirements for three different internships during that year. I loved it—I was busy, I had my own life for the first time, I was important to a lot of people. I developed some of the deepest friendships of my life during that time. But, due to the combination of a couple bad experiences and the lack of maturity necessary to handle them well, I decided to leave my chosen home, taking the easy way out by blaming the decision on having finished my internships and my desire to finish my degree. A part of me regretted that decision for several years. A part of me still considers Casper my home.

I spent two years in Alberta, finished one degree and came within one assignment of finishing a second, drove back to Casper, spent six months there trying to work through my regrets, and then finally returned to North Carolina, penniless, with not a bit of direction for my life. So I decided to do what nearly all directionless people do—go to university. I thought I’d become a professional at some academic abstraction, finally become somebody, finally break those chains of indecision and regret. Well, a bit more than two years, two universities, $35,000 of student loan debt, and the failure of the most serious romantic relationship up to that point of my life later, at the age of 29, I moved back in with my parents, ostensibly to help care for my partially disabled dad, but in reality because I had nothing else left. Six months later I drove out to Montana for a job interview, and on a whim took a little jaunt back up to Saskatchewan. Thank God.

Over the years I got to know a lot of people and a lot of places, but I’m about as rootless as a store-bought onion. Sure, I have my favorite places scattered over the U.S. and western Canada—a little cove in a waterfall in North Carolina, the spot beside the Snake River at the base of the Tetons where I first heard coyotes sing, decaying pioneers’ cabins here and there, great little Indonesian restaurants in Calgary and New York, a krumholtzed five-foot-tall relic of a tree on Wolf Rock, a nearly redwood-sized 500-year-old tulip poplar tucked so far back into the mountains of Tennessee that it somehow survived the loggers’ saws, the glistening stream in Wyoming where I first flyfished, a muddy trickle of a spring in the Smoky Mountains that once quite possibly saved my life. And I know people scattered all around the world who have had profound influences on my life, with most of whom, however, I carry on little or no correspondence. I now have a beautiful wife and child to ground me somewhat, but what I lack is a deep and abiding relationship to A place and A community of people.

I have been reading Wendell Berry’s essay, “A Native Hill”, in which he looks at his own life in terms of the place in Kentucky where he grew up and to which he returned after he tired of his successful literary career in New York and other famous centers of magnificence. His relationship with that place and the people there show me what I do not have, what I never have had, but what I desperately want.

I think there’s something missing in most of us products of suburban life and modern transport. And I think that thing that’s missing has a lot to do with our general dissatisfaction with our circumstances here in the most wealthy region of the world, the erosion of our culture and decency, our rates of depression and suicide, our extreme individuality, escapist religious teachings, extractive consumer economy, and progressive destruction of the earth. I think most of us suffer from a fundamental sickness, and it comes on us because we never truly belong to a place. And if we never belong to a place, we cannot in any meaningful sense belong to its people—no wonder we escape into virtual online worlds, collect friends on Facebook, and absentmindedly chat on our cellphones nearly constantly. If we do not belong to any place or its community of people, we are all nothing but individuals passing one another every day, getting to pick and choose our relationships based upon how they benefit us, seldom being required to develop the humility necessary to see ourselves as small parts of a greater whole. This hubris of the self is one of the most devastating forces humanity can wield, and, unfortunately, our contemporary culture and its consumer economy are geared to create just that pathos in each one of us.

So how does the drifter find a home? How does he make a place his own and begin to belong to it rather than the other way around? How does the self-centered man be truly present with other self-centered people? How do individuals create genuine community where it does not exist, and how can we genuinely enter into it where it does? I’m not asking how we make friends—most of us are capable of that. But how do we create interconnectedness—healthy interdependence—in a world of individuals and an economy of consumers?