Of Roots and Self: A Personal Study on the Sense of Place

I used to think roots were something you were born with. The place where you were born was where your roots were, for better or worse.

In that case, I was born an outsider. I never lived where I was born. I was whisked away at a few months old to where my father's roots were. I lived there for 13 1/2 years, a cottonwood puff on the wind with nowhere to land. I didn't fit in anywhere, not where I was born, not where I was planted.

Homeless in my own home.

I was spirited away to a different place shortly after my 14th birthday, this time to New Mexico. It was a completely foreign place to me, although we all technically existed under the same national banner. This is when I learned that a country was not a home, just a political designation.

It was easy to exist in Albuquerque because it was a land of no roots. Those whose roots withered in the desert soil were mostly gone, victims of the Spanish, the Americans, and each other. Those who came later were mostly rootless like me, pretending that the desert was where they belonged because they simply had no where else to go.

I fed my mind with visions of a home I wasn't sure even existed. Perhaps it was fueled by my insatiable love of books. Perhaps the epic movies of my childhood provided the fodder. Whichever it was, I had a vision of home.

It would have trees. Soaring pines and firs, nearly touching the sky and way to large to encompass in a hug no matter how many friends you brought with you, would grow thicker than the grasslands of my youth or the tumbleweeds of my teens. The blue skies would be impossible to believe, but the rain would still come often enough to keep my fiery temper and passions doused to a healthy glow.

At first I set my gaze on Colorado. I could reach it in 4.5 hours on a single freeway when I let my lead foot rest heavily on the gas pedal. I could run away there, perhaps set down roots, maybe belong. At 18 I threw everything I owned in the back of my truck, latching onto someone else's future as my ticket to going home.

I was wrong.

Colorado felt close to home, but not quite. There was a brief time, in spring or fall, when the smell of pine resin and the mustiness of the wet soil permeated the air that I almost believed I was finally home, but it never lasted long. I could escape into the Rockies, skipping along a single track above tree line, and almost feel as though I had arrived.

Almost, but not quite.

Eventually, even the mountains couldn't hold me, rootless thing that I was. I turned to my family's own history in my quest for home. To Scotland I headed, with nothing but a train pass and a single backpack. For a month, I sought home. I almost felt it a few times, but it wasn't home I had found, just a memory of what was but could never be again.

I returned to the desert, fractured but not quite lost.

I fell in love, gave birth to a baby boy, and tried to belong. Yet, even growing a family wasn't enough for me to grow the roots I craved.

Perhaps it was the media of my childhood. The summer of my 4th year was shaped by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Ash reached us as far south as Texas, and that summer was mainly spent inside due to my childhood asthma. I was obsessed by the eruption, in the way that only a young child can be obsessed. That year, my favorite book arrived in the mail via a Weekly Reader subscription, the Weedle on the Needle. The eruption must have also put the PNW on the map for movie makers -- The Goonies, Harry and the Hendersons, The Journey of Natty Gann -- I remembered these more vividly than my own geographical history.

So on a whim, we moved to Washington. Unfortunately, where we landed was a patchwork quilt of all the things that made all my other places decidedly not home. Spokane has the winter of Colorado, but longer and colder. It has the scrub desert and heat of New Mexico, but without the stark desert beauty at night or the refreshing rains of the monsoons. It has the rivers and trees of north Texas, but it also has the same simmering misogyny and bigotry.

I remained rootless.

One year my father died. He was, and then he wasn't. My father had roots, but he had been away from them too long. I watched him wither and fade. How much longer could I last with no roots at all? A depression so deep that it went unnoticed by everyone, including myself,  puts a veil over the years immediately following this upheaval. I went through the motions of living, but those were the years of my death.

My life had been defined thus far by a slow journey westward and northward. Packing up the kids and the spouse, we headed as far west as we could to the Olympic Peninsula for a summer vacation.

I am not a pretty crier. I hold in my tears for months, sometimes years, until they burst out ugly and violent. My body can feel wasted for days after a good cry. Yet, when I stepped out of the car, with the odor of the rainforest behind me, the sea before me, and the living soil and rock beneath, tears welled unbidden to my eyes. They coursed down my cheeks, silent and peaceful.

Peaceful. I was at peace for the first time since an angry mountain a million miles away covered my summer with ash.

I sit today staring at a melancholy sea that is the same shade of gray I see when I close my eyes. The cool breeze folds me into a comforting hug that smells of cedar and salt. The rain falls gently on my naked head, making me a part of the landscape.When I lean against a tree, an electric shock runs through me, from my head and to my toes that I am digging into the ground. My roots were always here, waiting for me to come home and find them. I wasn't so much a cottonwood puff with no place to land, but a tangled strand of lichen looking for the perfect tree in which to find anchor.

I'm here now. I am home. I am whole.