Last winter, I decided to add Netflix to my life. I did this because I, ignorantly, thought that Netflix was a movie genie capable of delivering my cinematic wishes to the screen of my iPad. After a short while of this experiment, I realized that I was wrong, and that Netflix was not a digital catalog of all things cinema, but was, instead, a catalog of various things that in no way would be considered thorough. Having discovered these limitations, I set about searching for a video about fly fishing. It shouldn’t be so hard, after all, with this enormous digital catalog at my disposal, to find a movie about flies and fish. In fact, it was. So I settled on a movie that fell under that topic even though it had nothing to do with either, called “Happy People”. Or something like that.
It was a video documentary of sorts about a group of people who live in some far flung reach of Siberia, or somewhere similarly cold. Most of the men provide for their families by chopping wood in the summer, and presumably selling it, and then by trapping animals in the winter. They sell those, too. Summer lasts roughly 12 days, and winter makes up the remainder of the calendar. These are Russians, living in basic structures in perma-winter, and when they aren’t chopping wood they are trapping small mammals so that women in other towns can wear fanciful coats. The existence is, by any measure, difficult, and yet, here they are, the Happy People. They have forged this life, and they live it, generation after generation, in this small town that I can’t remember in a part of the world that’s easy to forget.
They stay because it’s home.
There is a somewhat famous author from Illinois who has made a spectacle out of a choice that he has made for his family. He is leaving Chicago for Tennessee, because, as he sees it, Tennessee is free and Illinois is not. This is not an uncommon refrain for conservatives (of which I am) in Illinois. They have taken great efforts to tell the world, or at least the online version of it, that they are packing their bags, and moving out of Illinois. The taxation, the corruption, the city murders- it’s all too much for them, and they’re leaving. “I can vote myself a 5% pay raise with my feet”, said one of them. It’s all rather dramatic theater, and while I can argue with them that it’s a better, more noble move, to work to fix what ails Illinois, they’d rather loudly announce that they’re leaving, and taking with them their income and their tax dollars.
I admit to worrying about the future of Illinois more than most Wisconsinites would, because my livelihood is not tied to the increasingly good fortunes of Wisconsin, but rather to the increasingly dwindling fortunes of Illinois. It’s true that other states may have better job prospects, and other states have no state income tax. But those states with jobs are generally jobs in larger numbers and not necessarily in larger salaries, and not everyone is going to embrace a job in North Dakota just because it exists. The truly desperate may, but this isn’t about the desperate minority, this is about the comfortable majority. No matter that I wouldn’t move to Texas if my life depended on it, and I’ve driven through North Dakota enough to know that I’d never live there, this isn’t about voting pay increases with our feet or fleeing a Chicago murder scene that only exists in neighborhoods where famous authors don’t live, this is about the notion of home.
I’ve long struggled with my friends from Steinbach, Manitoba. They,too, live in perma-winter, but they don’t have many animals to trap and firewood splitting isn’t as fun as it sounds. They pay exorbitant taxes on income and on every item they buy, they wait in line for months to receive medical diagnosis, and in winter they go to movies and leave their cars running for the entirety of the film- to not do so is to risk a frozen car that won’t crank, let alone start. Their job prospects are not great, and the only wealthy in that area own car dealerships, chicken farms, pig farms, or some other variety of farm. I have long argued against the concept of living there. I tell the people that there are better things elsewhere. There is better scenery, fewer taxes, faster MRI’s, and longer summers if only they’ll move. And yet, year after year, generation after generation, few do.
They stay because it’s home.
Today, I could close up this office, it wouldn’t take much. I’d just stop paying for this website, turn off the lights, and I’d be retired. Of course, I’d be broke, but that’s not the point. I could move to some enticing destination on some far away island, the kinds that fat Midwesterners buy vacation homes at on television. I could fish in the morning and fish in the afternoon, and I could walk to town and barter for some fresh vegetables. I could wear sandals every day, all day, and I could, over time, forget what winter was like. My kids could assimilate, I suppose, and we could blend into this new society in this chosen setting. I could get a job as a bamboo salesman, and I’m betting I could do pretty well at it. Did you know that bamboo is approximately one million times stronger than steel? That would be my closing line.
But I wouldn’t go there, and I wouldn’t do that, because that far away island is not my home.
The notion of home is powerful. Home is not where we hang our hats. Home is where we grew up, or where we settled down. Home is where we know what each day looks like and more times than not, we like what that means. Home is where our work is, where our friends are, where we grew up or where we became adults. Home is where we raised our families, where we made partner. Home is not where we move to avoid taxes, and leave behind our families and our childhood memories in the process. If we’re moving somewhere out of choice, and that new destination doesn’t feel like home, what exactly are we accomplishing? Are we running from the familiar to the unknown simply because we are too immature to remember that the grass isn’t always greener, even when their grass is, at least in spring, generally greener?