Rootless

From Harrop's op ed this week questions whether we need a "place called home".  It's an excellent piece, questioning the value of rootlessness.  Ironically, the local paper today also features a front page article on an English woman who seems fairly rootless, having moved from a small city in England, to Paris, and whom is now studying range management at the University of Wyoming, after having worked on a Big Horn Basis ranch.

Harrop quotes from As You Like It in her article, although she doesn't quote the whole text, which reads:

Rosalind:  A traveler.  By my faith, you have great reason to be sad.  I fear you have sold your land to see other men's.  Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

 Jacques:  Yes, I have gained my experience.

 Rosalind:  And your experience makes you sad.  I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad--and to travel for it too.

Forrop goes on to note who we seemingly envy the traveling, but there's something to be sad about their rootless lives.  And she wonders what occurs to these people in their old ages, do they settle in someplace new, where they have no connections, or return to the place they abandoned and pick up their old lives.

Well, by observation, at least some do.  My home state, for many years, exported its young population, some of whom remained sort of romantically attached to the state for their careers, and then whom return later.  As Americans, with Freedom To Travel written into their organic foundational and mythological law, the Constitution, they have that right.

But Farrop is on to something, although she's hardly unique in noting it.   Agrarian poet, educator and novelist Wendell Berry earlier noted it in his essay Becoming Native To This Place.  Berry notes that unless a person has real roots in a place, he's lacking a bit in something and by extension, everything suffers form a rootless population.

Indeed, that's the irony of travel. Travelers travel, usually, to see the authentic, unless they travel to one of the Disneyfied locations that Americans so love to visit.  Absent that, when the travel to see Hawaii, or Paris, or Ireland or Scotland, they travel to see the real places, not a bunch of people like themselves who have a generic culture and no roots.  They sense, really, that those cultures have something deeper, in being attached to the land and knowing it.

Americans have always been somewhat rootless, but in prior days they tended to move within their immediate regions.  In the Frontier era, people moved, but often less than ten miles before establishing a new home.  Some moves, of course, were huge, but they tended to be a big singular move.  Now some people move constantly, and while relocation within a region remain very common, and because they are within a region are not really the type of move we mention here, the phenomenon of some people moving again and again, following a career, or just moving, is not unusual.  

Well, it is a big sad.  By constantly moving they never become, as Berry would have it, "native" to a place, and they lack something as a result.  If our culture becomes more fluid, as it seems to threaten, and as some hope, this will become even more pronounced, and an era may arrive when people have no attachment to their region, don't even know it, have no attachment to their communities, and don't even know them, and have no attachment to each other.