A Moving Experience
The statistics reinforce what many have suspected. America is on the move, once again. Couples, singles, and retirees are pulling up stakes and heading elsewhere, perhaps looking for greener grass and friendlier tax rates. Urban enclaves along both coasts are belching out some of their discontented, many of whom are seeking refuge in Florida, Texas and sanctuaries in our mountainous interior. It remains to be seen if our political red zones turn into 50 shades of pink, and if once solidly blue landscapes lighten into more powdery hues. At any rate, people are in motion.
Politicos are following this latest migration with great interest. Voting patterns are certain to reflect a shifting in the power equation, as counties and states on the receiving end of resettlement begin to exercise more voting clout in state and national elections. Those with diminished representation will be asking themselves why, and what next? Could it be that we will become even more polarized in our partisan preferences? Or might the moving of voters create an ideological distribution that gives more voice to moderate sympathies?
Having moved more than the 11.4 lifetime relocations the Census Bureau says is typical for Americans, I know how each change of address can be both energizing and traumatizing. So many goodbyes arouse grief not unlike that of attending multiple funerals for the friends, colleagues and neighbors we’ll likely never see again. And then there’s the effort we must expend in closing up a house, finding another in a new locale, settling in, and reestablishing all of the contacts necessary to keep ourselves and our children healthy and happy. Moving is nearly as exhausting in its anticipation as it is in its execution and aftermath. If I learned anything over the process of my twenty-three moves—some just around the corner and others measured in hundreds, even thousands, of miles—it is that they all evoke much sadness and a measure of regret. Yet they also provide us the chance to start over, to rewrite our story, to reflect upon and apply what we have learned from past mistakes and triumphs as we set about composing the next chapter of our life’s saga.
The impulse to be on the move is neither new nor foreign to Americans. We can all trace some recent or ancestral arrival on this continent as wanderers who came from someplace else. Even those we regard as native or indigenous once traveled here via land bridge over 15,000 years ago, and their descendants crisscrossed plains and forests in pursuit of buffalo herds and other survival necessities. A few came on Viking longboats and many more in European two- and three-masted sailing vessels—whether as pilgrims and fortune hunters, or bound by indentured contracts or the shackles of enslavement. Once here these new Americans kept moving the line of the frontier ever deeper into the seemingly endless track of wilderness, hills, grasslands, and mountains. that lay before them at every turn. Always in search of something more, whether tillable soil, navigable rivers, animal pelts or mineral wealth, they pressed ahead as far as their ambition, stamina and luck prevailed. They travelled on foot, on the feet of horses or in the wagons they dutifully pulled. As invention allowed they rode over tracks of iron, in vehicles powered by steam, coal, gasoline and electricity, along waterways or on roads and turnpikes carved in dirt, stone, macadam and asphalt. More recently they flew overhead in airships powered by propellers and jet engines.
Many of our ancestors took Greeley to heart and ventured West, sensing a destiny in their grasp in seizing and controlling the expanse that stretched from sea to shining sea. Along the way they trampled the grounds held sacred by children of the first migrants with whom they seemed unwilling, or unable, to coexist as equals. And they extended their designs on lands once claimed by Mexico, settling for a sieve-like boundary through which multitudes of men, women and children seeking both asylum and exploitive opportunity continue to migrate. Over time our people have stayed on the move, some forsaking the farm for the city, others trekking from South to North, East to West in search of freedom, justice, and a better chance to make a living or raise a family. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised in learning that new patterns of relocation are reversing some of these former migrations, forcing a recalibration of census reckonings and the redrawing of Congressional districts.
My own moving experience often transports me back to the rear seat of my Dad’s 1950, slope-roofed black Chevy, our one and only conveyance for the first thirteen years of my life. I sat behind my father back then, no seatbelts encumbering my ability to move about, pester my sister (“he touched me!”), or stand on the transmission hump to gaze out the front windshield. A window decal, pressed onto the glass of the left rear window that served as the lens through which I took in the passing landscape, proudly declared: “We Are An Air Force Family.” That identifying sticker revealed much more than its six words alone could ever capture. The occupants of that car were, indeed, migrants, thanks to a Cold War military culture that kept us ready, on a moment’s notice, to react, to strike, and to move. As a result my sister and I had no home save the car, or trailer, or apartment in which our parents were able find safe lodging for the duration of dad’s current assignment. For our “nuclear” family—and for millions of others who have come to life in the transient world of post World War II America—memory is a series of video glimpses we can replay in recalling where we were, when we were, and with whom we shared some relationships in an episodic journey through time and space.
Perhaps that is how it has always been. Those who find their identity in the faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam do well to recall what the writer of Deuteronomy 26:5 urged his tribesman to never forget that “a wandering Aramean was my (our) father.” Our story seems a continuation of theirs. From one of civilizations’ cradles in Mesopotamia these ancestors migrated to Canaan, then Egypt, then back again. In bondage they were carried back to Mesopotamia in its Babylonian moment of empire, then released back to Canaan, where they found themselves subjects to the imperial designs of Greco-Roman overlords. A near two-millennia global diaspora made them a homeless people until a few managed to return after World War II, the dream of Israel (literally, “one who struggles with God”) finally realized. Being at home has been the exception, not the rule, over their long existence. They were, instead, sojourners, folks who rarely occupied any place for very long, never really owning the land on which their passions and dreams were so attached. Their life was one of migration, exodus, and exile, and their greatest undoings seemed to occur whenever they talked themselves into believing that their land, and their kingdom, were inviolable and permanent. Could it be their wandering spirit is ingrained in the marrow of our bones and the code of our DNA, experiencing life, as they did, on the move?
As I ponder how the latest Census Bureau’s stats reinforce the migratory history of our predecessors, our collective American transitory experience and my own personal journey, I find much sensibility in these three maxims:
· We never really own the places in which we live. We are, as the Bible reminds us, sojourners living out our days on borrowed landscapes. The original American immigrants seemed to have understood this better than those of us who followed the likes of Erickson, Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, Cartier and Coronado in trying to create New World versions of their beloved England, France and Spain. Our European predecessors bought up, staked out and took over the real estate formerly occupied by the original immigrants, never fully grasping how temporary and of their possessions would turn out to be. Any dive into the history of deeds and property, even in the relatively short time frame of America’s existence, will discover that land may be claimed by many tenants, but few, if any, remain its owners.
· Rolling stones can and do gather moss-—that is whenever they invest themselves fully into each place they reside, give as much as they receive to their homes, their work and their neighbors, and never lose touch with the people whom they knew, and loved, along the way. Perhaps this is how our national identity has been fertilized over this vast continent, blending our migrant ways with the regional and parochial identities and cultures that have made us more salad bowl than melting pot.
· No matter where one ventures in a life marked by mobility and transience, home is less a geographical location than that place in the heart where the people whom we love, and by whom we are best known and loved, endure.. No matter where we locate ourselves by an address—for the most fleeting of stays or over years of habitation—we are surrounded by “a cloud of witnesses.” Whether living in our present, or sustaining us in their memory, these traveling companions keep us, forever, close to home, our real home, that neither relocation nor separation nor time can ever destroy.
Yes, Americans appear to be on the move once again. But since that is the only way Americans have ever known how to live, the revelation is neither unexpected nor even unwelcomed. For our heritage is that of the sojourner, forever stirring us to move beyond those places and possessions that neither our hands can hold nor our contracts ensure in perpetuity. Perhaps this realization will help us find life-enriching meaning and life-sustaining satisfaction in each new place, each new job, and in each new friend we meet along the way.
