A military household is the worst place for any child or adult seeking some sense of belonging in their immediate vicinity.
The military family resigns themselves to the fact that in three years, there’ll be another U-Haul, another base, another house, and another set of new faces to meet.
As a child of divorced parents who were both baked into the whims of military life, I was tossed around Mississippi, Washington, Texas, California, Virginia Iowa. The novelty wears off, and perpetually surrounded by moving boxes and plane tickets, I found myself alone. Again and again and again and again.
This lifestyle, once considered an exception, is now the rule. Thousands of families and individuals in the United States are uprooted from their previous homes or birthplaces, most commonly for the sake of financial need. Few have the privilege and freedom to move solely for a personal change.
The constant flight of people from one place to the next makes small towns and megacities the growing home of strangers with at least one foot out the door. The features of towns and cities, like live music and restaurants and riverside walks, are considered amenities, as if prospective locales are to be shopped around like all-inclusive resorts.
When places are just locations of convenience for a new job, why wouldn’t they be considered as such?
Moving to Austin in 2017.
For the first 12 months of living in Austin, Texas, I hadn’t made friends with one Austin native—my writing job with FEMA attracted all sorts of out-of-state, temporary employees. When I started indoor rock climbing, I joined a 20-person climbing group, and I can only remember one member being born in Austin.
It wasn’t until I joined the Texas Conservation Corps that I met Austin natives. It felt like finding a unicorn.
It’s not that Austin natives don’t exist or are rare—you’re surrounded by them in shopping places and neighborhood streets—but when you live the nomadic lifestyle of the “never-native”, those of a different grain don’t seem to mix unless by some necessity.
When someone asks where I’m from, I get to pick and choose: I was born in Florida; three years of my early childhood were in Mississippi; another seven in Washington; eight years in Iowa (I was a luckier military brat than most, thanks to my dad’s attempts to keep the family rooted). I skip the rest as they were only months at a time when visiting Mom.
Depending on the person, I’ll choose between Iowa and Washington. It’s become Iowa more often, both because of the duration and it was the center of my most formative years. For me, the question of where someone is from appeared to be more of an in-the-moment fashion statement than an act of identity construction.
A place to be from is apparently an aesthetic choice.
So the Austin native perspective was alien to me: They were proud of being from Austin because they’re from here. Never having a sense of pride about a location, and continuing to never stay anywhere, it didn’t make sense to me that someone would find anything particular about Austin that other cities didn’t have.
My problem: I saw the city based on its amenities, and the amenities seemed equivalent or inferior to other towns and cities I had been in.
However, the native does not consider their city based on these amenities or how they compare to other cities; natives simply count their lucky stars for having been able to grow up with what the city could provide.
This is why, despite the nation’s contempt for cities like Detroit or Los Angeles, its natives have the potential to find no dealbreakers with their circumstances—it’s not a failure, it simply is.
Defining a Sense of Place
This was my first taste of a sense of place: The ability to construct innate identity from one’s home; to find the concept of home not as a list of features, but as an integration of being and location.
I began to yearn for this sense of place. But I didn’t resurrect as a completely new person in Austin, so I still thought about it from my usual perspective: I need to find this sense of place by finding a location with the most suitable amenities. My specifications: Desert and mountain access, low property taxes, no income tax.
Nevada came to mind—I had visited Las Vegas several times and was impressed by its relative affordability. Soon enough, I was again shopping for this sense of place—and it turned out to be the completely wrong way of going about it. There was no difference between what I was doing and what a rootless job-seeker would do.
I continue to be directionless in my quest for a sense of place. The ability to pick a place appears to me the barrier to any kind of grounded-ness in location: To pick is to undermine the value of location, as place becomes another frivolous decision subject to one’s personal desires. Like a piece of clothing, place is thus something to pick and later dispose of.
How does location become necessity for a nomad like myself? This is the riddle that continues to be unsolved, and why I must interrogate the possibilities of physical location for an increasingly ungrounded world.