For someone who has spent a decent amount of his grad school career critically examining the mythologization of the American West, I have to admit that ironically (and a bit shamefully) I bought into this very myth as a child and young adult. In fact, had I not, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
I grew up in northeast Ohio, in a disorienting, alienating patchwork of post-industrial wastelands, the bones of old strip malls, and the shiny, squeaky-clean illusion of suburban cul-de-sac communities. As is often the case, I experienced the side-effects of growing up in such a place before I was old enough to understand or critically examine the cause(s) of those effects. When it came time to choose a college for my undergraduate work, I was excited to get out, to move on. I didn’t yet know why I was excited. I was having the existential equivalent of the reaction of a bear caught in a bear trap: I didn’t know what had ahold of me or why. I just wanted to get away.
I had two main options. One was to attend the uber-liberal semi-erudite College of Wooster, which was somewhat outside my price range but which had an excellent program in English Literature and Creative Writing (two of my major possibilities at the time). The other was to attend the slate-grey urban sterility of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. I was leaning at the time towards majoring in Computer Science and Case had one of the better local programs. Somehow, instead, I ended up enrolling at Kent State University. Forty-five minutes away from my hometown, it was still a geographic, demographic, and existential revolution for me. Partway into my first semester, the activities I engaged in in my spare time (of which there was admittedly little) had already changed from sitting at my computer playing video games to hiking in metroparks, going on road trips, attending free piano concerts at the music hall, reading things like Nietzsche just for fun, and riding my bike around town (as opposed to walking). It was a life-changing experience already, and I still had four and a half years to go.
After those four and a half years, and then two more years of working random blue-collar jobs to pay my rent, Kent hadn’t so much lost its charm as it and I had simply reached the limits of what our relationship could be. There wasn’t anything new for me there, and I’ve never been one to be content with simply being content.
Throughout my college career, spending time with a group of friends who enjoyed travel, I had cultivated a desire to “see the world”; of course, at that point in my life, anything beyond the borders of the US was - either financially or logistically - beyond my reach. So, as so many Americans did before and likely have done since, I turned to myth of the West. I decided I wanted to go to California. Partially for the sake of the trip itself, partially for the experience of living somewhere new, but mostly because of the culturally-produced idea that somehow, by traveling to the west coast one could be cleansed, transformed, allowed to have a second chance to find meaning in a world that seemed willing to sell it to you, but never willing to share it freely.
Because of my obligations to my studies (complicated thorougly by the fact that I changed my major to English late in my third year of classes), I wasn’t able to take off to California right away (though a few of my friends did). For years I kept the dream in the back of my mind, the one thing I truly wanted to do, once I had dealt with all of my responsibilities and was free to be reborn.
That chance came two years after my graduation when I received a TA offer from WSU. It was a school I knew nothing about in a place I knew nothing about. I was settled at the time in Kent, Ohio, with a TA offer to do Ph.D work at Kent State. I was renting a nice house. I had a fiancee who was living right down the street. My family was less than an hour drive away. But in spite of all of those things, I saw my chance to try the dream, and I knew that if I didn’t take that chance, whether it worked out or not, that I would regret it for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t recommend making a major life choice based on fear of potential self-loathing, but in this instance it was the best way for me to make the decision. I left for Pullman a few months later.
I still remember clearly arriving here on the first day. My disappointment in seeing the green forests of western Idaho fall away to present the desert-dry hills of the rolling Palouse. My realization that this, whatever it actually was, was not California. It wasn’t the dreamland of redwoods and acoustic guitars and sudden, inexplicable rebirth that I had imagined for all of those years. It was different than Ohio, sure, but if I was going to recreate myself I was definitely going to have to work for it.
So I did. And in so doing I acheived what I had hoped I would acheive simply by going to California - self re-definition, etc. - but I did so in a much less magical and much more engaged and rewarding way. What I found instead of a blank spot on the map to start my life over from was a town where everyone smiles and says hello, where you can drive an hour in any direction and find some of the most beautiful landscape in the country, and where I was forced to, for the first time, make my way completely on my own, completely away from anyone who would feel obligated emotionally, professionally, or financially to help me. And I think that was the experience that was mythologized into a much simpler, less intimidating version of itself.
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