Life imagined as movement…
Putting down roots
I KNOW THAT I am not alone in feeling this way. What I am talking about is this pull between living-in-place and life as movement, between putting down roots, as the cliche goes, and wandering.
My dilemma is that I like living both ways. Once, I lived the wandering life. Not nomadism. Not living out of my van or in some location for mere weeks or months. More living in a place for longer periods and then moving on. I have lived in places for years at a time, however I could never shed that feeling of temporariness, of being there with no intention of staying.
Rootedness is good, I think. By that I mean finding somewhere you like to live, setting up home there, learning about the place’s history and society, ecology and economy, geology and geography. That, as they say, is ‘putting down roots’. The expectation is that you are there for good, or for a long time, anyway.
Colleagues of mine have set down roots. Some bought a suburban house and garden and started families, planted vegetable gardens, built a chook run and are living happily ever after. Others bought a rural smallholding. A couple set up education centres on their smallholding and offer courses in the homesteading life. I read their social media posts and blogs extolling the virtues of the fixed life, the life anchored in place. Once, I aspired to that too but it never happened. I admire their lives. I could have done it but I didn’t. We all live our lives differently.
WHEN I THINK of putting down roots I think of a friend I have known for decades. In what seems a long time ago she took up with another mutual friend and put down roots that extended to a nice semi-detached house in Sydney’s Inner West, a good job cooking at a French restaurant, establishing social roots among a network of friends, and children.
Then they parted but she stayed on in the house. For awhile that is, because there came the time to sever her roots, pack up and take off for years of working overseas, to a place where she had no roots at all and formed none that lasted. Returning home, her rootlessness eventually took her to a small regional city where she once again set up livelihood, home and an extensive social network. Life repeats, but at other times in other places.
From roots to rootlessness and back to roots, she is now firmly ensconced in place. I mention her because I think her path is one followed by many. A pattern repeated.
THE ROOTED-IN-PLACE LIFE was the vague, ill-defined vision of my partner and I a long time ago. Ours was a poorly thought out notion of setting down roots that took us to a different state where in a desultory sort of way we started to look for rural land. We wanted only a small patch not too far from the city, not a big farm as neither of us were farmers and nor did we want to be. We looked but we never bought. Then we went our own ways. After wandering a long way from where we were, she put down roots in a small city while I followed the rootless life up and down the coast.
That was different to the woman I encountered by her van one day. She would disappear for months at a time. She already had roots and an apartment in a Sydney coastside suburb, but her’s was a hybrid life that alternated between apartment and van, between stability and mobility, between rootedness-in-place and the rootlessness of the road. It is a few years since I last saw her. Maybe she has quit her rootendness-in-place and set off for somewhere better, somewhere, perhaps, where she can grow new roots.
After setting out on our own rootless road trip I met others, both men and women, who were living the free life. Would they one day settle again? No, said one woman. She had sold her house, bought a camper trailer and a vehicle to pull it, and enjoyed the parapetetic life as she followed the warm season north to south and back again. No way would she return to the settled life. We met others for whom the road is their home and their van or camper trailer their house. They are not homeless. They are houseless and most like it that way.
That brings me to the point about how we understand modern nomadism. For nomads, the concept of home is their vehicle, their van or camper trailer or caravan. They are not geographically-bound to any particular location. Their home moves from one location to another. Home is not a fixed address. It is a moveable thing.
THE ECONOMY destroys the roots we set down. With its lure of better jobs, better career and a better environment elsewhere it grabs people and sucks them out of where they are and drops them in distant cities. Many welcome this, for the cities are the loci of opportunity.
But… that cliche about hills being greener on the other side—do those who move to other places for a new job or for some other imagined attraction really find them to be all that greener when they have been there awhile? If the pandemic did one thing it was to encourage a fair number of people to uproot their city lives in search of a better life rooted in some rural centre. How will they fare? Will the city with all of its opportunity pull them back?Decades ago I saw this with my own generation as young people quit the cities for favoured locales in the country. Some are still where they moved to. They set down roots and built a home and a life. But, I watched as others returned to the cities they earlier quit. Some went back because they could find no opportunities in the town where they hoped to put down roots. Include my partner and I in that after our sojourn in a north coast town.
Ours is a footloose civilisation. I’m not saying that most of us move frequently. We know that is not true, not for most of us, anyway. But it is for a sizeable number of people.
After wandering again we are now rooted-in-place. Even here, though, in convenient walking distance of an estuary and a surfing beach, my roots are occasionally shaken by the siren song of the highway and the call of other places. I still feel their subtle pull. Sure, we will visit those places but we will return to where we now are, for after all our wanderings, after all of our living in other places, we have set down roots in the sandy coastal soil of this small town.
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