no place like...

After reading Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow and Ivan Doig's This House of Sky, both memoirs of rural life, I am struck by how central the agonies of leaving are to each book, and to others like them. The aching desire to be done with a place, the habits, memories, and compulsions that draw one back. Rural America is many things to contemporary culture--nostalgic heartland, political touchstone, cultural wasteland--but one thing it isn't is heavily populated. Leaving so dominates the narrative of small-town life that it's easy to forget such places were once the stuff of sod-busting, nation-building dreams.

It isn't so much the lack of consumer niceties, like espresso or malls, but that rural life is hard, physically and often socially. The lonely work of making a living off the land, often in harsh or isolated environments, knits communities together in ways that are both boon and burden to their members.

Or perhaps it's just a function of genre, that truth that, with time, we're all haunted by the past, by the things that shaped us before we could comprehend them. Geography only reinforces temporal distance, and so we return, asking memory and place to yield time's answers.