This is where you belong, p.30
This Is Where You Belong, page 30
Make your own personal resilience plan. Identify the most common shocks in your region—earthquakes, floods, wildfires—and figure out what you need to do to deal with them. Do you need a weather radio? A supply of water? Make an evacuation plan and assemble seventy-two-hour kits for each member of your family. You’ll feel less stressed if you know what to do when a Bad Thing happens.
Learn to be more self-sufficient by picking up helpful practical skills—gardening, hunting, canning, clothing repair. They’ll be super handy when the zombie apocalypse occurs.
Find out what your city is doing to prepare for resilience shocks. Read about, for instance, new plans to prevent flooding. It will tamp down your anxiety and perhaps present ways to become civically engaged—if only by cheerfully paying the new storm-water abatement tax.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Settle Down
Summertime is moving season—more than 40 percent of long-distance moves in America happen between May and August—and in a college town like Blacksburg it takes on a particularly manic quality. One day the students are there, the next Blacksburg is awash in U-Hauls and pickup trucks, and the day after that half the population has left en masse and you can get a table in Cabo Fish Taco anytime you want.
A bit more slowly, the townies scatter to the winds. This year, Quinn had colleagues take new jobs in Buffalo, Charlotte, and West Lafayette, Indiana. People we’d seen at church every Sunday for three years one by one left for Omaha or Austin. My friend Brittany burst into tears announcing that her family was leaving for Las Vegas. My walking buddy Laura, the one with whom I’d been rained on hiking the Blue Ridge, decamped for Laramie, Wyoming. For two years we’d paced past the municipal golf course and the new houses on Willard Drive, hashing out our anxieties about job searches and real estate. Then one June day, she, too, was gone.
Like a virus, the idea of moving began infecting everyone else. People had fever dreams of starting over. My friend Nicki, who’d lived her whole life in nearby Radford, confessed, “Sometimes I think it would be fun just to try living somewhere else for a while.” My friend Jen agreed. Wistfully, she said, “I think about how it would be to move to a new town and just chop off this commitment and that commitment till there’s nothing left.”
Listening to them talk was like hearing a recording of my Texas self in the full throes of my starting-over fantasy. I’d been there. I’d said versions of those things. So it was weird that, for the first time in a while, I didn’t feel the urge to uproot. Things had changed for me in Blacksburg. I actually wanted to stay put.
I had begun my Love Where You Live experiments with a few theories about what would happen to me if I consciously and effortfully attempted to become attached to where I lived. I suspected that I might recognize more people in the grocery store. That I’d make a few new friends. That I’d become more involved in the goings-on of my town. I figured that the more place attachment and placemaking behaviors I mimicked, the more settled I’d feel.
At first I couldn’t tell if the experiments were working. Every so often I’d grab a stick and poke at myself: Do I like it here? Huh? Do I? The pace of my emotional evolution was so glacial that for a long time I wasn’t sure it was happening at all.
Only at the end of all my Love Where You Live experiments did I get a clear picture of the Before and After. Before, that awful first drive into town made me feel as if I’d been stranded in a foreign country whose language I barely spoke—forlorn and lonely and awful. Before, when people asked me how I liked Blacksburg, I could barely muster a “meh.” Before, I wasted hours on Realtor.com trying to find a new life for myself in a different city.
After, I said hi to my neighbors. After, I took pure pleasure in my morning walk past the golf course, in the crisp loaves of sourdough at Our Daily Bread, in the way the leaves turned yellow in the fall. After, I realized I felt homesick for Blacksburg when I left to visit other cities. The homesickness was a revelation in itself. That meant Blacksburg was familiar now, which it hadn’t always been.
Evidence for my change of heart kept piling up. When people asked me how I liked Blacksburg now, I blurted, “I love it!” without feeling like I was selling something. The sight of Blacksburg’s green hills filled me with tender affection. I’d become possessive and defensive of Blacksburg’s honor. I’d turned into the woman who posted annoying articles on Facebook about Blacksburg’s ranking in a new “best places” list.
Precisely how had this all happened? When and where had my narrative of my town changed? According to Katherine Loflin, the place guru who’d led the Knight Soul of the Community study, place attachment peaks three to five years after one moves to a new city, and I was rapidly hurtling toward my third anniversary in Blacksburg. Surely time had healed some of my moving-truck-inflicted wounds. Had I simply acclimated to my new environment in a way that would have happened regardless of my Love Where You Live experiments?
Possibly. Then again, emotion follows action, and my experiments had driven me to actions in Blacksburg that I likely never would have dared otherwise, like joining the Blacksburg Citizens Institute, running the 3.2 for 32, volunteering at the Lyric, and buying into the Glade Road Growing CSA. In the library not long ago, I walked past some volunteers trying to get passersby to write e-mails protesting a proposed gas pipeline through the county. I actually climbed into my car before doubling back to talk with them, thinking, This is what a person who loves it here would do.
Asking myself, What would someone who loves Blacksburg do? had become a regular mental refrain. Would a person who loves their town go to the concert in the park? Would a person who loves their town pick up the nasty piece of trash in the road? Yes. Yes, they would.
Learning about placemaking, too, had reframed the way I viewed Blacksburg’s deficiencies. Toward the end of my Love Where You Live experiments, I took a trip to Lynchburg, Virginia. A city park there had a freshly built splash pad, the kind that sprays small beings into an ecstatic frenzy. I watched a little longingly as car-sized buckets of water doused a dozen joyful, screaming kids. Nothing like a splash pad existed in Blacksburg, and a few years ago, I would have taken this as a sign that my family lived in the wrong place. Look, here was the evidence! Better cities existed. Time to move.
At some point, however, I’d accepted that I would never find my Platonic ideal of a town. No matter how freakishly low the cost of living or how joyous the splash pads, any place would be aggravating in its own special way. I had two choices: Deal with it or change it. So I tweeted a photo of the splash pad to @Blacksburg_Gov, the town’s official Twitter feed. “Seriously,” I wrote, “we need one of these splash pads in Blacksburg. How can we make it happen?”
Within a half hour someone tweeted back. “That seems cool! Contact Parks and Recreation. They can share with you what it would take.” I felt both accomplished and heard. Certainly Nancy Barton would have already written a grant or convened a community meeting about it, but if I was ill equipped to be a powerful placemaker myself, at least it had become a habit to consider and feel responsible for Blacksburg’s improvement.
So time had changed me, but so had effort and will. After three years in Blacksburg, when I looked at the place attachment scale statements researchers used, I found I could agree with almost all of them:
I feel rooted here.
I know a lot of people here.
I know my way around.
I feel comfortable here.
I like to tell people about where I live.
I rely on where I live to do the stuff I care about most.
If I could live anywhere in the world, I would live here.
I can rely on people in this town to help me.
My town isn’t perfect, but there are a lot of things that make me love it.
Things were going so well that I started thinking about buying a house. Quinn and I had been renting since we moved to town, in deference to our unceasing mobility, but having worked so hard to fall in love with Blacksburg, I had no interest in pressing the reset button—in which case, didn’t it make sense to buy? Giddily, I began to do drive-bys of For Sale signs. I populated an entire Pinterest board with bungalow floor plans.
Then, sitting in Lefty’s one night, Quinn swirled his fork in the pan sauce from his steak au poivre and dropped a bomb. The holy grail English professor job we’d moved for? It wasn’t feeling like the holy grail anymore. Maybe he wasn’t the right fit in his department. Maybe he wouldn’t earn tenure. Maybe he was just feeling that familiar itch to try something different. Maybe in a different place.
I froze. “Don’t tell me we’re moving again.”
“I don’t know. I hope not. I really don’t want to uproot our kids again. But if I don’t spend the next thirty years as a professor, I’m not sure how to keep us here. Blacksburg isn’t exactly a big city.” He glanced at me nervously. “Look, I’m not talking about packing up our stuff next week. I’m just not sure where we’ll be in a few years.”
If that was on the table, why was I bothering with Love Where You Live experiments at all? Rooting was the point, right? You chose a town, you settled down, and you became a Stayer, like Gertie Moore. The line on the place attachment scale about “I don’t want to move anytime soon” spoke to the heart of the matter. When you loved where you lived, you stayed. You tried to, at least.
Katherine Loflin explained it to me with this story. Back when she was heading up the Knight Soul of the Community study, she was like a faith healer who’d lost her religion—preaching the gospel of place love at town halls across America, then flying back to Miami, a city where she’d never really felt at home. On the openness, aesthetics, and social offerings that Soul of the Community said mattered most, Miami did well. It was the person-environment fit that felt off. “You have to find your heart match,” Loflin tells me. “It’s not just about having the amenities, but how they show up in your life. Even though on paper Miami is perfect, its manifestation of its perfection was not working for my narrative.”
Eventually, Loflin moved. She sold her Miami condo. She rented a house in Cary, North Carolina, near her hometown. One morning as she was reading the paper there over coffee, her daughter walked into the room and said, “We have lived in a lot of different places that I’ve liked. This is the first place I never want to leave.”
“And that is the difference,” Loflin told me, “between place satisfaction and place attachment. Liking where you live is satisfaction. Never wanting to leave is attachment.”
I hadn’t expected forever. I’d always known that Quinn’s job might not last. In the beginning I didn’t care. The best I could hope was wanting to stay in Blacksburg right now, getting through another day or month or year. It wasn’t until I observed my own visceral reaction to the specter of moving again—disbelief, depression, generalized anxiety—that I understood what Katherine Loflin meant. I didn’t want to leave. Not now. Possibly not ever.
So there it was. I was place attached. I’d done it.
Which made the idea of leaving even more ironic, like getting divorced a week after you finally learn to love the guy. Heartbreaking. Pointless. I started wondering why I’d tried so hard to fall in love with my town at all.
Then I remembered Greg Tehven.
Paint Another Picture
Greg Tehven grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, one of the most sneered-at regions of America’s flyover, and early on he absorbed a general sense of geography-related unworthiness. He recalls a teen at the Mall of America in Minneapolis jeering, “Do you live in a teepee?” At a summer camp he attended in Colorado, the joke was “Have you heard of the Internet?”
As a child, Greg implicitly understood one of Fargo’s foundational truths—that those who could get out did. “Inside the community, I remember a lot of headlines and politicians talking about brain drain,” he says. “I never wanted to stay there because if I stayed that meant I wasn’t smart. If you were going to make anything of your life, you wouldn’t want to be one of those kids who wasn’t able to leave or couldn’t cut it outside.” To escape, he got a business degree at the University of Minnesota, then traveled for almost a year through Europe and Asia.
After a while, he had an aha moment: No matter where in Europe he went, nobody knew his name. Whereas in his hometown, which had been settled by his great-great-grandfather, he’d been the fifth generation of his family to attend the same church. “I missed feeling part of a community,” he told me.
So in 2011 he went home. Within a few months Greg had pulled together the first-ever TEDx Fargo, then two more in quick succession, one with the theme of City 2.0. He began an event called Startup Drinks, which morphed into Startup Weekend, a fifty-four-hour entrepreneurial competition that attracted participants from as far as San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Grad school plans were forgotten as Greg realized, “Hey, I love it here. I want to make a great city.” He became a placemaker.
Greg saw artists and entrepreneurs as the two primary patrons and producers of Fargo’s renaissance, and he liked to combine the groups in unexpected, magical ways. Midnight Brunch, which Greg conceived in 2013, did this perfectly. Fifty people gathered at a downtown art gallery at ten p.m. on a Thursday night for a mix-and-mingle cocktail party, followed at eleven p.m. by a white-tablecloth vegan meal catered by husband-and-wife chefs who’d moved to Fargo from Colorado. Creative types and businesspeople, Movers and Stayers, settled on both sides of a long table for what Greg described rhapsodically as the closest thing Fargo had ever seen to a nineteenth-century European salon. At one Midnight Brunch, a violinist from the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony provided a soulful accompaniment to the stylings of international yo-yo champion John Narum, who lives in town. At midnight, there was a toast.
In other cities, ideas could float around for a few months before dying from bureaucratic paper cuts or neglect. In Fargo, the start-up mentality fostered by people like Greg Tehven effectively shortened the lag time between idea and iteration. Hipster businesses began opening—a craft store and arts market called Unglued, a food truck turned wood-fired pizza restaurant. A man named Rory Beil organized Streets Alive, a local version of Open Streets that for two afternoons a summer let loose a flood of bikers, walkers, skateboarders, Rollerbladers, wheelchair riders, stroller pushers, and Segways into a three-mile loop of closed downtown streets.
One day, a friend told Greg that he wanted to plan an alley fair. A few months later, a fully realized street festival, with bands, food, and art, was happening in a derelict downtown alleyway. All someone had to do was mention a good idea and people clamored to bring it to life. Communal living for entrepreneurs? Sure. Free dinners for city visitors? Why not? People in Fargo weren’t necessarily calling those efforts placemaking, but they had the effect of genuinely making Fargo a better place to live.
That’s not to understate Fargo’s geography-related challenges. The city is isolated, and brutally cold; in January, the average high temperature hovers around 15.9 degrees Fahrenheit. One man who moved to North Dakota from England told me that when he first arrived, he walked to a convenience store in January. By the time he got back to his office the bottle of water he’d bought had frozen solid in his pocket. Several transplants impressed upon me the absolute necessity of a midwinter tropical vacation.
Despite all that, the revamped Fargo was fielding so many new arrivals—often under-thirties from Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Arizona—that the city’s annual growth rate doubled to 2 percent. Mike Williams, one of Fargo’s city commissioners, told me that in surveys of local high schoolers, “it used to be that if you asked the students where they were going to live once they graduated, 65 percent said, ‘I’m moving.’ Now 65 percent say that they’re staying here, and another 10 percent are staying in the region. That’s a hundred-and-eighty-degree change, and it just happened in the last ten years.”
On the surface, maybe what was happening in Fargo resembled gentrification or a Brooklyn-style hipster takeover. The real change was that people felt empowered to make where they lived better without waiting for a forward-thinking mayor or a well-endowed foundation to do it for them. As Ethan Kent of the Project for Public Spaces pointed out to me, the “maker” ethos is infusing towns; people want to feel like they have a hand in creating the city where they live. The kind of change that was happening in Fargo was starting to happen in cities all over the country where people were actively starting art centers, clubs, conferences, and festivals, painting murals, volunteering, breaking trails, and writing letters to the mayor. Fargo had one of the purest manifestations of the spirit of placemaking I’d seen. With people like Greg Tehven in the vanguard, everyone else said, “Hey, I can change my town, too.”
I figured that leading a placemaking movement in one’s ancestral homeplace might seal the deal on geographic permanence. Greg would stay in North Dakota forever, I assumed. But when I said this to him, he seemed taken aback. “I will always be committed to this community, and it will always be part of me,” he said. “But I’ve always dreamed of living in multiple cities and being engaged in multiple communities. I’m not a person who thinks of one place as home.”
I was pretty much laboring under the impression that thinking of one place as home was exactly what Stayers did. If you went all in and invested big-time in your city, you’d eventually experience a kind of religious conversion from Mover to Stayer. You’d be magically shielded from wanting to move ever again. That’s what the Love Where You Live experiments were all about.
Except Greg Tehven was doing all the things that placemakers and place-attached people do, and he still kept an eye on the exit sign. He told me he had a twenty-year plan to stay and fix up Fargo before moving on, so it was a long-term strategy. But still.
