It all depends on what you mean by home.
—ROBERT FROST,
THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN
IN THE LONG WALK HOME, when Alec Hudson scatters his ex-wife Gwynne’s ashes at the summit of Cadair Idris, he shouts “Croeso!” into the wind. It’s the Welsh word for welcome. He is welcoming Gwynne’s spirit home.
Gwynne was born in California. She’d lived in New York City and Washington, D.C. She died in Boston. Yet when it came time to choose where she would spend eternity, her ultimate resting place, she chose a mountain above a valley in Wales where once she had felt utterly at home.
The idea of “home” has intrigued me for years. What do we mean when we say we feel “at home” somewhere? What is it about a particular place that makes us feel we belong there and not somewhere else? Why do some places just seem right?
The word home is one of the most frequently used words in every language known to man. Yet defining it is a bit like trying to grasp a greased pig; it’s remarkably slippery. Among other things, the word—in English at least—manages to suggest both a physical place and a condition of being. Is home where you live or where you came from? Is it the place that houses your belongings, or is it the place where you belong? Is it a place at all, or is it a state of mind?
The poet T. S. Eliot once said home is “where one starts from.” The place where I started from, the place where I was born and spent the first eighteen years of my life, is called Yonkers. It is a large city in New York State that shares a border with, and is virtually indistinguishable from, the Bronx, New York City’s northernmost borough. For simplicity’s sake and because Yonkers, frankly, leaves a lot to be desired, I usually say I’m from New York. But it never felt like home.
If you look up the word home in the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find four densely printed, three-column pages for the noun form of the word alone. But one definition seems to me to get to the very heart—literally, to the emotional core—of what we mean by home:
A place, region, or state to which one properly belongs, in which one’s affections centre, or where one finds refuge, rest, or satisfaction.
The sleeper here is that phrase, “to which one properly belongs.” How would we know the place we belonged if we stumbled upon it? What would it look like?
Almost forty years ago, I stumbled upon the place where I knew, deep in my bones, I belonged. It was England. Now, I’m not the sort of person who believes in past lives, and most of my ancestry is German and Irish. And still, I knew I’d come home. I knew the people I’d never met before and understood their quick-witted sense of humor, knew the landscape as intimately as if I had always lived there, knew the flat English ale I’d never tasted before and loved it, knew how to drive on “the wrong side” of the road without having to learn it. And so much more. Over the years, I’d been content simply to accept these feelings. But then, just a few years ago, it began haunting me. Maybe this is simply part of the process of aging, this needing to know where you belong and why.
So late one spring, a couple of years ago, I shouldered a backpack and spent three-and-a-half months walking some 1,400 miles through most of southern England. I had this idea—no, I had this certainty—that if I slowed down to walking speed and paid very close attention as I loped along, I would be able to identify and understand what it was about this world that spoke to me.
Along the way, I had one or two little epiphanies. You know how magazine articles and self-help books, not to mention Zen masters, tell you that the secret to happiness is to “live in the present”? Well, I don’t know about you, but this has always been mystifying to me. But about a week into my walk I realized that “the present” had always seemed to me to be the briefest moment between grief about the past and anxiety about the future. But when you have no fixed itinerary, and no place you have to be at the end of the day, you live—from the instant you open your eyes in the morning to that blissful second when you close them at night—in the shimmering present. You see, hear, smell, savor every single experience as it happens: the fragrance of wildflowers as you pass, the music of a blackbird in a hedge in the morning, the helpless joy of lambs leaping in meadows, the mystery of a footpath curving through a dark wood, the sweetness of fresh water when you are thirsty, the satisfaction of a pub lunch when you are hungry, the warmth of welcome from people you encounter along the way—and people are always warm to walkers.
And as I walked, I began to recognize other things that made me feel “at home” in this particular place, in a way I never have been in the country of my birth. I noticed that in the market towns and villages through which I passed buildings were never more than three stories high, so the scale isn’t dehumanizing, the way it is in most American cities. And shops and houses tend to be clustered together companionably, with breathing spaces provided by small squares, greens, and plazas. They also have what I like to call “public living rooms.” In England, it’s the venerable institution of the pub. But coffee shops and sidewalk cafés have the same function elsewhere: they’re places where people gather to chat or simply watch the world go by. And the places that appealed to me, that made me feel I could fit in, were composed of buildings constructed of local materials—stone, wood, earth. It’s as if they’d grown organically from the ground, rather than having been imposed on it.
Places like these seem to have been designed with people—not traffic management—in mind. That was an essential part of feeling at home, and something completely missing in so many American neighborhoods, subdivisions, and entire communities, which feel cold and strangely “placeless.”
I was transformed by my walk through southern England, and it won’t surprise you to know that, to a very great extent, Alec Hudson’s sense of the rightness, of the power of place in the lush, green Welsh valley in North Wales that cradles Fiona’s farm, comes from my own experience.
Alec feels that power in the town of Dolgellau, in the valley, and in his love for Fiona. But Alec also understands that he does not yet belong. The earth will need to make a few more cycles around the sun before Alec, like Gwynne, can “come home.”
And, in time, it does.