A sense of place

Photograph of an Athens County creek

"The land was ours before we were the land's." --Robert Frost


Wendell Barry wrote that if you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are. Barry, a great environmentalist and lover of the land, considers himself a "placed" person, as opposed to a "displaced" person.

Our country was settled by hordes of displaced people, but many of them settled in places that reminded them of the land they'd left behind, and they named towns, rivers and other landmarks after similar places in their cherished homelands. Still, a lot of restless people came to this country and transformed it, not always for the better, building in the desert, along the coastlines and in other inhospitable places, seeking challenges that spurred them onward, ever onward.

In one of my favorite books, Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck found when he criss-crossed the U.S. in the 1960s that the more conservative, "placed" people stayed near to where they initially settled, in New England or along the East coast, while the more adventurous, the "displaced," pushed westward, explaining why California is still considered to be more innovative than, say, Chicago.

All of this makes me wonder how we come to have a "sense of place" and how it is that after I left Athens, eager to make a life anywhere but there, I lived in Panama, Colorado, Kentucky, Virginia and Massachusetts before I felt an inward tug that pulled me back close to where I started. I loved Cape Cod, but I always felt like a visitor, and I began to long for the familiar.

So after coming to Shepherdstown, West Virginia, almost due east from Athens, Ohio, just on the other side of those same Appalachian foothills, I was nearly overcome by a sense of belonging here, of completing the circle and coming home. Part of the mystery was solved when I learned that the earliest Simpkins immigrants came into this country through the port of Baltimore and settled in the Shenandoah River valley, only miles from where I live now.

Do we carry a genetic sense of place? Without knowing it, are we so closely related, generations later and without any awareness of how it happened, that we come like homing pigeons to the place where we started?

For years and years, Dad and his restless spirit wanted to go to Florida, to have a permanent change of scenery, but some 15 years later, he told Mom that it was time to go home. She was more than ready, not having wanted to leave her home in the first place. I think he longed for the hills and streams, the creeks he played in as a boy, the familiar sounds and cadences of family names and birdsong. He told Lois that he wanted to get back closer to the cemetery where he's buried now. He wanted to die in the place he belonged and be put to rest among his own kind. I know how he must have felt, because I now feel that way too.

It's comforting somehow to know that generations before me loved this land, these rivers, the hardwood forests and wildlife, that they found it could satisfy their needs and was "good enough." Something drew me here, and I'd like to think that it was the spirits of my ancestors, inviting me to come back home.