This Is Where You Belong Read online

  With the moving truck finally unloaded, I paid the craigslist guys, then hurled myself onto a couch I hadn’t seen since Austin and waited for Blacksburg to woo me.

  And waited.

  Almost immediately, I realized my mistake. The day after we moved in, it started to rain, and it didn’t stop for a week. Someone let slip that the town’s nickname is Bleaksburg. The girls moped. Quinn and I argued. Even after we’d unloaded the boxes and recycled the cardboard, I couldn’t figure out my way around our rental house. Where do the cereal bowls go? I kept asking myself. Think hard—where did I put the stamps? At Kroger I roamed the aisles, a lost soul searching for black beans.

  As it turned out, the imaginary Blacksburg I’d invented in my mind was not at all the same place as the very real Blacksburg where I now lived. Life in a smaller town was supposed to be simpler, but nothing was easy, not even the easy stuff. Filling out forms at the new doctor’s office, I remembered, with consternation, that not only did I have no one’s name to put on the “Emergency Contact” line, I couldn’t remember my own address. At the hardware store, I asked the clerk about getting new door keys cut, and he burbled his reply in an Appalachian accent so thick I had to ask him to repeat himself.

  In those first few weeks, strangers kept asking me what I thought of Blacksburg. “Ooh, you moved here from Texas?” said the librarian who issued my new library card. “That’s a long way. What do you think of our town?”

  “It’s nice,” I murmured, stifling the urge to scream, “This library is smaller than my old library! We had better restaurants in Austin! Your mountains make me claustrophobic! Your trees give me anxiety! It rains too much! There’s nothing to do! I don’t know anyone! I never will!”

  I know the drill. Of course you feel upended by moving to a new city. You’re rattled by your lack of basic life skills. You don’t know where the post office is or when to drag the garbage can to the curb. You can also feel intensely alone. I heard one woman describe her move to Pennsylvania from Minnesota this way: “There was a real sense of grief, because I realized, oh my gosh, no one within a ninety-mile radius would care if I died.” Abruptly you’ve gone from being known to being no one. Moving to a new place can make you feel as if you’ve lost your very self.

  Was it inevitable, then, this slide into thinking life would be better elsewhere? Would I slowly slip back, like a serial adulterer, to real estate listings in Indiana and Michigan? Or would Blacksburg manage to win my affection quickly, before Quinn and I decided to try our luck elsewhere? Anyone will tell you that it takes at least six months and often three or four years to adjust to a new city. I suspected my feelings for my town would improve in time—I just wasn’t sure I had the patience to wait it out.

  I turned thirty-six the day we arrived in Blacksburg. Moving so often had begun to make me feel like a failure as an adult, like I was missing some fundamental grit that allowed me to commit to a place the way I’d committed to a marriage and a career. My family’s average stay in any city to that point was 3.2 years. I was starting to lose confidence in our ability to live anywhere for long.

  The Ones Who Never Stop Moving

  As lonely as moving sometimes feels, it’s a shared loneliness. Americans have long been among the world’s most insistently mobile people. Each year around 12 percent of us move—a national game of musical chairs with 36 million players. To get a sense of the scale of it, imagine every single resident of the twenty-five largest cities in the country—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and so on—boxing up the bed linens and pulling up stakes.

  We aren’t the only people who live this nomadically. Norwegians and Finns move almost as much; New Zealanders outpace us by a hair. But in countries like China and Germany, only about 5 percent of the population has moved in the past five years. In the United States, 35 percent of us have.

  Why do we move so much? If you plot the reasons in a spreadsheet, the way the census does, you see that moving is largely driven by sensible, bank-account-enhancing life changes like a new job or a lower cost of living elsewhere. Americans are as restless in employment as we are in geography, switching workplaces about every four and a half years. Often, we chase our new gigs around the country.

  Yet during the recession, economists gnashed their teeth in frustration that people wouldn’t follow the money to towns with lower unemployment rates, like Midland, Texas, or Omaha, Nebraska. If moving to a new city or state promised to dramatically improve your financial prospects, would you go? You’d likely want to know where the job was first. Most of us sense instinctively that income, housing prices, and cost of living are only part of the story. We want to be sure we’re heading somewhere we wouldn’t mind living.

  According to one survey, two-thirds of college-educated Millennials say they’d pick the city where they want to live first, then find the job to get them there. The startling realization: To many of us, place matters more than paycheck.

  Once I started asking around, I heard some incredible stories of people’s efforts to settle in a place they would love. I spoke with a woman named Holly Doggett who, in 2003, realized that she and her husband, Daryl Turicek, wanted to live somewhere other than Washington, D.C. So Holly and Daryl quit their jobs, bought a Sunline camper, and embarked on a year-long, 61,592-mile road trip through America’s forty-eight contiguous states, on the hunt for a city that had four seasons, a small-town feel, and enough of a job market that they could find work as Web designers.

  On the way, they logged factors both hard (size, crime rate) and squishy (restaurant quality, gut feeling) in a spreadsheet, eventually paring it to a short list that included Ann Arbor, Michigan; Missoula, Montana; and Asheville, North Carolina. “We never found one city that we knew instantly, ‘This is the one,’” Holly told me. “There were a lot of places where we thought we could be happy.”

  Ultimately, they chose Portland, Maine. They had no census-approved family-, work-, or housing-related reasons to go there. They knew no one and had no jobs lined up. And still, in September 2004, they wheeled their Sunline into the Wild Duck Campground in nearby Scarborough and started searching for an apartment. Ten years later, they’re still in Portland.

  The Excel spreadsheet forty-year-old Ben Bristoll made when he decided to escape the small town in upstate New York where he’d lived for eighteen years was even more exhaustive, a cascading list of thirty-eight candidate cities that Ben checked for the qualities he considered most vital in a town, like low housing costs, the proximity of family, the number of vegan restaurants, and the prevalence of Lyme disease. Harrisonburg, Virginia, looked particularly promising after a shoestring visit; so did Burlington, Vermont. Then he came to Roanoke, Virginia, during a January heat wave and rode his bike around the greenways in a T-shirt. Okay, you got me, Ben thought. I’m going to move here. In 2012, he did.

  We always want the postscript to stories like these to be “and they lived happily ever after.” Though only some of us will actually move in a given year, mulling the possibilities is practically a national pastime, especially because of this long-standing habit of conflating geography and happiness. As Eric Weiner points out in The Geography of Bliss, “We speak of searching for happiness, of finding contentment, as if these were locations in an atlas, actual places that we could visit if only we had the proper map and the right navigational skills. Anyone who has taken a vacation to, say, some Caribbean island and had flash through their mind the uninvited thought I could be happy here knows what I mean.”

  If the idea that a place can make us happy is a fantasy, it’s both sweet and pervasive. Most Americans, it seems, spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about where we wish we lived. On trips, we peer at For Sale signs in resort towns. We plot ways to buy a second home in a town we like better than our own; every year, about seven hundred thousand of us do.

  Lacking the wherewithal to cruise the country in an RV, we instead cruise social media for
the click-bait of city rankings. The Huffington Post has run hundreds of stories with titles like “The Top 12 Cities for Millennials to Live, Work, and Play,” “The Top 10 Cities for Getting Rich,” “The Best Cities for Boomers to Pre-Retire,” “10 Best Cities for Art Lovers,” and, usefully, “The Top 10 Cities for Mistresses.” Websites like Livability.com and BestPlaces.net offer “Best Place to Live” and “City Finder” tools. Print publications as varied as Money, Outside, Bicycling, and Forbes regularly weigh in on the nation’s top cities to live, work, and play in, while an entire glossy magazine covers the matter of Where to Retire.

  Meanwhile, the website City-Data, which is like a Yelp for towns, attracts 22 million unique visitors a month—about as many as the TED website—to its extensive network of forums dedicated to analyzing, debating, and crowing about America’s cities. In over fifteen thousand posts a day, members parse the relative virtues of Tupelo, Mississippi, and Trout Lake, Michigan, and add an avalanche of opinion to threads with titles like “Relocating to Flagstaff—thoughts?” or “Is southside Fort Wayne really that bad?”

  Each state gets its own forum. The most popular, with over 1.7 million posts, belongs to Texas. One particularly virulent thread, started in 2007 by a user named deeptrance, begins, “Texans, let’s admit it, no matter where we live, there are only 2 REAL cities in this state, DFW and H-town. Yeah, San Antonio, Austin and El Paso are cities but they’re not CITIES, am I right?” The replies, 12,939 of them and counting, have been viewed 1.2 million times.

  That we’re thinking long and hard about where we live makes sense, since geography dictates or correlates with so much about our lives. Some of a place’s effects are obvious: You probably have the friends and partner you have because at some point you lived in the same city. Others are more startling. The Stanford economist Raj Chetty made waves in 2014 by pointing out how decisively geography seems to influence our earnings. According to his exhaustive study of federal income tax records for 40 million children and their parents, a person’s odds of rising from the bottom income bracket to the top change dramatically depending on where he or she grows up. If you were raised in Williston, North Dakota, for instance, you’re far more likely to make that financial ascent than if you grew up in Valdosta, Georgia. Only 4.4 percent of poor children from Charlotte, North Carolina, became wealthier than their parents; 12.9 percent of children from San Jose, California, did.

  The federal government had already launched a series of place-based policies and initiatives back in 2009, in response to ongoing debates about the primacy of place in the land of opportunity. The Chetty data added fuel to that fire. I heard one White House staffer say that if she had a dollar for every time she’d heard Chetty mentioned in Washington lately, she’d have a pretty large amount to help struggling communities. Referring to the disheartening inequality among Americans from different parts of the country, Barack Obama remarked that “a person’s zip code shouldn’t decide their destiny.”

  In so many ways, though, it does. Another study found a geographical “marriage effect” that says you’re 10 percent less likely to marry if you grew up in a city like New York or Chicago. There’s a happiness effect; Gallup-Healthways’ annual Well-Being Index shows that you’re far more likely to consider yourself happy if you live in Sarasota, Florida, instead of, say, Youngstown, Ohio.

  Physical health and longevity link to the places we’ve lived, as well. Consider Fairfax County, Virginia, whose male residents live, on average, for eighty-one years, the longest life expectancy of any place in the country, according to a 2013 study. Meanwhile, in McDowell County, West Virginia, 340 miles away, a man can expect to live to be just sixty-four years old. Along with quizzing patients about medical history, more and more doctors are asking about mobility history, with the idea that where we’ve spent our lives can have an enormous impact on our propensity for illnesses like cancer and asthma. Like it or not, geography may well be destiny, an idea I’ve always believed, maybe to the extreme. It was why I moved so much. Was there an off chance I could do better somewhere else? Let’s go!

  The first time Quinn and I made a long-haul move it was from Provo, Utah, to Silver Spring, Maryland. We were bright and shiny twenty-three-year-old newlyweds, just out of college, and nothing seemed so romantic, so like a scene from an old-timey movie, as huddling inside the cab of a U-Haul, listening to the radio stations flicker past Albuquerque and Memphis. We hadn’t even bothered to line up an apartment in Maryland, but who cared? Neither of us had ever lived east of the Mississippi, and we felt deliriously footloose. Look at how unfettered we are! No ties to keep us anywhere!

  All these years later, being seminomadic had started to take a heavy toll. Maybe I was just older and crabbier, thirteen years more likely to get a bum back from lifting a sofa bed, but the move to Blacksburg had exhausted me. I’d yearned for the romance of a new geography. Now that I had it, I felt mostly anxious and lonely.

  Our children were getting older, too. Ella would be a fifth grader. Ruby was getting ready to start kindergarten. Funny, living in Maryland in 2001, we’d scrimped and bought our first house two months before Ella was born, on the basis that it didn’t feel “real” enough to bring an infant home to a one-bedroom apartment across from the Metro station. Stability and security were what children required! Only a solid brick colonial would do! Eleven months later, our money pit of a 1940s fixer-upper drove us not only to sell the house but to leave the state altogether. We didn’t stay in Maryland long enough to notch a single growth spurt on a door frame, let alone introduce our daughter to the kids with whom she might one day graduate from high school.

  That was when I became obsessed with searching for alternate-reality lives in other cities. Quinn and I kept moving and moving, dragging our daughters along for the ride—to a new job in Utah, grad school in Iowa, a job in Texas, and now another job in Virginia. Ella ended up attending three different elementary schools in three states. In Austin, she dutifully recited the Texas pledge—“I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible”—even though we clearly weren’t loyal to Texas. Meanwhile, Ruby, who was born in Ames, Iowa, can’t remember that town at all.

  Most parents worry about how moving affects our children, and we’re probably right to. University of Virginia sociologist Shigehiro Oishi and University of Toronto Mississauga psychologist Ulrich Schimmack followed 7,100 adults over ten years and found that introverts who had moved around a lot as children tended to struggle more as adults. They reported lower life satisfaction and fewer social relationships, and they were more likely to die before a ten-year follow-up appointment. Of course, another study found that college freshmen who had been “Movers” as kids made more new friends during the first two months of school than “Stayers.” Many highly mobile children do fine. Quinn had lived in twelve houses in five states before he graduated from high school, and he’s not a complete basket case.

  But at some point, I wondered, shouldn’t responsible parents pick a place and stay there? What is home, after all, if not the house where you took your first steps, the front porch where you played Barbies with the girl from across the street, the street you rode your bike up and down? In a 2002 study, Victoria Derr, now an environmental designer at the University of Colorado Boulder, interviewed children in New Mexico about their experience of place. One ten-year-old boy described the hill by his house as “my big mountain,” saying, “This is the best place.” “He knows where he comes from,” writes Derr, “he knows he has a place he belongs, and this knowing seems to give him confidence, rootedness, and stability.” When I considered my own one-house childhood in Fullerton, California—precisely the secure growing-up experience I wasn’t giving Ella and Ruby—I felt like I had irrevocably messed up as a parent.

  My first few weeks in Blacksburg forced me to a realization: I wanted to settle down somewhere. For the sake of my children, I needed to try. I just wasn’t sure I wanted my fore
ver home to be Blacksburg, a town I didn’t hate, but didn’t particularly love, either. Then I found a game changer in a place not too far away: West Virginia.

  Rooted

  According to Google Maps, Lorado, West Virginia, the town where Gertie Moore has lived her entire life, doesn’t exist. “At the red light in Man, set your odometer,” she instructed me over the phone. “Go eleven miles and take a right on Davy Branch Road.” I could call her again if I got lost, she said, but I’d have to drive back to Highway 10 to do it, since the valley that leads to Gertie’s house blocks out nearly all cell phone coverage.

  I was heading to West Virginia on assignment for Reader’s Digest, to report on the fortieth anniversary of the Buffalo Creek flood. In 1972, a coal slurry dam collapsed at the top of the valley where Gertie lives, unleashing a wall of viscous black water into the coal company towns below. Having lived through the flood, Gertie had become a de facto town historian, and she’d agreed to show me around.

  After I found her modular house on the far side of the train tracks, Gertie offered to take me on a driving tour of the area, starting with the grassy plot of land at the top of her road—the site of the house where she was born. A few doors down was the two-room home her family moved into next, followed by the place Gertie moved as a newlywed, then the slightly larger house she and her husband rented after children came. Every few years she slid a couple dozen feet closer to the main highway where the coal trucks rumbled past.

  “You’ve lived on the same street your whole life?” I asked.

  “Yep. They named the road after me, because everybody knows Gertie.”

  Gertie, who is a sprightly seventy-two and wears her hair in champagne curls, drove me in her blue minivan past the soaring steel tubes of the coal processing plant to the top of the hollow where the road petered into nothing much and the houses slumped together in defeat. Then we turned around and followed the creek past the Buffalo Foodland grocery store into the big town of Man (population: 733), with its narrow streets and frozen-in-time pizza restaurant. For twenty-nine years, Gertie had driven a school bus on these roads, and she kept up a drawling narration of the lives of people long since gone: the pastor of the church who used to live here, the “real countrified” woman who sat in her rocking chair there.