I moved to Montpelier in January, after many years of transience and wandering. I've paid rent in a lot of different cities, but I have the feeling that Montpelier will be the first place I've really lived since leaving my native Pittsburgh 13 years ago. By which I mean that I'm finding myself interested - maybe for the first time - in being where I am.
For a better part of my life, I was preoccupied with places 'away' and things 'other'. Growing up in a small midwestern town, anything non-American fascinated me: in high school, I befriended the exchange students, and was active in Amnesty International. At university, I majored first in anthropology, and every class in my schedule signalled a distant longitude: Religions of India, Asian Art, African Literature. Later I would finish a degree in international relations.
I cast my net far, perhaps because I had felt, for various reasons, that my home did not protect me as a child. At age 8 I started having epileptic seizures. By its nature, any neurological disorder admits the sufferer's demons into her head. One does not learn to seek shelter from the obvious quarters of home and family, because they are, in many ways, powerless to provide it. Though my family's hilltop homestead - with its apple trees, corn patch, and raspberry bushes - was an idyllic kingdom for an outdoorsy tomboy like me, it was indefensible against epilepsy.
So instead I imagined that safety lived over the horizon, and I pursued it first through books, and later travel. I became a consummate escapist. I believed, simply, that life was elsewhere.
When I was 21, I decided to move from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, though at the time I'd never set foot west of the Mississippi. I stayed in San Francisco for 12 years, except for an ill-conceived foray to Philadelphia one winter, an eight-month stint overseas, and an autumn in Berkeley. Within those 12 years, I had as many apartments. Between its high cost of living and nearby fault line, San Francisco always seemed ready to shake me loose.
Of course, if I had obtained the safety I sought, I would have found it a strange and slippery beast, repulsive and unmanageable, and myself as unable to cope with it as to net a giant squid. It was the act of pursuit, the constant thrilling possibility of leaving a place, that gave me the only kind of leverage over my life that I understood. My thumb was always on the eject button. I suppose it's analogous, psychologically, to pre-emptively dumping your boyfriend because intimacy seems too threatening, the work of partnership too daunting. (Not that I would know. Ahem.) I can see now that it is a cowardly way to live, which is odd, because so many people mistook me for brave and adventurous.
I guess it wasn't an accident that I found myself in two places of marked transience: first, the San Francisco Bay Area, where no one is assumed to be a native, and most cocktail-party banter opens with, 'So where are you from?' Later I moved to The Hague, a city in The Netherlands that's home to several international organizations and an expat population of almost 30,000. And no matter where I was, I took comfort in the idea that I might just as easily be somewhere else.
But here in Vermont, I find myself among people who feel genuinely connected to their land and communities. At first I found this charming, in the slightly detached manner of a bemused anthropologist. But as Montpelier becomes more familiar, my reserve is being supplanted by something far more discomfiting to an inveterate wanderer: a sincere desire to feel at home here myself.
I've registered to vote, joined the Hunger Mountain Coop, and got a library card. I've even bought a sewing machine, which many of my friends regard as the real certification of my intent to stay. Also, I have accepted that maple syrup is not just a condiment but a way of life.
And I find that my fear of fitting myself into a friendly, functioning society - of the sort I encounter at the local farmers' market and on Montpelier sidewalks - has matured into something more encouraging: respect, and a little envy. I wonder if I am finally ready for the daunting adventure of settling down, being where I am, and leaving all that untrod ground... untrod.
