Every October I Skype with a class of graduate students from Western Carolina University. My book Rediscovering Dewey is required reading for their course, and the instructor welcomes the chance for his students to have a conversation with the author. Before our meeting, the prof sends me a few prompts on subjects that the students would like to talk about.
This year some of students must have taken the time to look at my website, because they asked questions not only about the book, but also about some of my blog entries. They’d read my short personal essays about the Mississippi River and wanted to know what I thought contributed to a strong sense of place.
I am glad that I received the prompts in advance, because I’d never thought about sense of place in exactly that way. For as much as I value sense of place, for as much as I wallow in its presence whenever I feel it, I’ve never tried to break it down into its component parts. In some ways it seems better to leave it whole, just as I would never kill and dissect a frog to better understand amphibian ecology.
Rather than deconstructing my relationship with the Upper Mississippi River, I mentally ran down the list of the places where I’ve lived the longest and grouped them in terms of feeling at home. I realized that I feel closely connected to Green Bay (my hometown), Madison (my undergraduate years and my first time away from home), the redwoods of La Honda (my strongest immersion in nature), and La Crosse (my home on the Mississippi River and the birthplace of my daughter). I feel far less connected to Wausau (my home until I was seven years old), Boston (a rough patch in my life), Iowa (not sure why I never connected with Ames), and Taipei (where I always felt like a well-cared-for guest).
Two places defied categorization. The first was San Francisco. Even after living in “the City” for two years, I never got past it being some kind of fantasyland. Ed, one of my very best friends, has never lived anywhere other than the Bay Area. He and I should compare notes on this subject.
The other un-categorizable place was Minneapolis. It is an anomaly in that I’ve lived there three different times, and each time felt different. My first stay was 1974, and I didn’t last a year. I’d transferred from the University of Wisconsin to the University of Minnesota, then dropped out of college altogether to become a cookie maker for Pillsbury. When it was time to go back to school, I immediately returned to Madison.
In 1979, I moved back to Minneapolis for a masters degree, then five years later returned one more time for my Ph.D. Each residency became progressively better, to the point that when I left for the last time in 1986, part of me wanted to stay. Without doing too much analysis, I realized that the difference might have been that I’d made a home not of the entire city, but of Dinkytown, the small neighborhood adjacent the East Bank campus of the University. For most of the time I lived in the Twin Cities, I did not own a car, but my various Dinkytown apartments were all within walking distance to my favorite restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and live music venues.
Also one border of Dinkytown is the bank of the Upper Mississippi River. In terms of the River, I’ve come full circle.
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