I met Kimi Faxon Hemingway in February 2003 when I flew down to Wilmington, North Carolina, a town I had never heard of, to interview for a professorship at the university. On my first full day in that city, I had lunch with Kimi and Heather Wilson, who was also an MFA student in the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington. Out of that lunch grew what became Ecotone—with the department’s blessing, I became the magazine’s founding editor-in-chief, and Kimi and Heather its founding editors.
It turned out that the idea of place was integral to both Kimi’s and my work, and that our ideas about place—the notion that our stories about it are anything but settled—were very much in sync. And why not? Our lives had followed remarkably similar patterns of migration, including a love of our native New England, romantic interludes in the West, and, finally (perhaps finally), trying to make sense of our unexpected new homes in the South.
For the magazine’s twentieth anniversary, we decided to weave our migratory lives together, with my part of the braid in the odd-numbered sections below and Kimi’s in the even ones. —DG
1.
It is late September and the last of the swallows have gathered in the dunes by the hundreds, readying for the flight south. I am walking down the beach that I first walked close to sixty years ago, toward a looming bluff, a landform for which I have more fondness than any other. I have now lived in Colorado and Carolina longer than I lived here on Cape Cod, but this is my first nature and I am pulled back to it.
As I walk I listen to the gruff mantra of the waves, rushing in before retreating in a rumbling fashion over the small rocks. Sanderlings on the shore in front of me take off when I walk toward them, the little birds skimming out over the water in a loose formation, landing ahead of me, then taking off again when I continue up the beach. At last they give up and, sensibly, decide to land behind me.
I have walked here as a child, a self-absorbed teenager, a troubled twenty-something who had escaped Boston, and a newly married man in his late thirties.
This is the rockiest point I know of on the shore of Cape Cod Bay, the dirt bank rising fifty feet above me and the rocks. Near the top, the clay is pockmarked with the homes of bank swallows, their burrowed holes abandoned now and lined with grass that has yellowed since they carefully placed it there last spring as cushioning for their eggs. At the very top, on the ledge above the bank, a small forest of scrub oaks, pitch pines, rugosa rose, beach plum, and creeping juniper grows, the trees nearest the edge sending their roots down through the dirt, grasping at the open air. Once I tried to figure out how many times I’d walked out here and came up with a number in the thousands. I have walked here as a child, a self-absorbed teenager, a troubled twenty-something who had escaped Boston, and a newly married man in his late thirties, certain that my bride and I would settle on Cape Cod. I’ve returned as a visitor many times since, and if I live another year, I’ll bookend the walks I took as a five-year-old with one as a senior citizen.
I feel more at home here than any place on earth.
Yet this is not my home.
2.
My first memory goes like this:
Days after my brother’s birth, I drive with my grandfather and my mother’s twin sister to Logan Airport. Like my grandparents, my aunt has come from New York to meet the newest family member, my baby brother. Now, after the drop-off, my grandfather and I make our way back to my family’s house forty miles north of Boston. I am nearly three years old. The neon lights of Route 1 blaze the slick road. Suddenly, we are lost, my grandfather clearly confused, but trying hard to conceal it, trying not to scare me. He clucks his tongue, leans toward me, touching my hair, Boston’s halo hovering over his head through the car window.
We circle the airport as my grandfather attempts to navigate road maps and street signs. He combs his fingers through his gray hair repeatedly and tries to remember how to get home, not his home in New York, or the one before that, which was Germany, but my home where my newborn brother and my young parents are waiting for us.
He squeezes the wheel tight with his long hesitant fingers and murmurs, first in German, his mother tongue, then in the language of his adopted country. “Oh, Kimilein, how do we get home?”
I lift up in the seat, burying my feet under me, and point, left at the stop sign and straight through, stay on Route 1, right toward Salem, through the city and outer boroughs of Boston, until an hour has passed and finally we are winding into the salt-stained air of Marblehead, the slanted old houses, to my family’s home on South Street.
For most of my life, I have cited this as one of my earliest memories, and yet, I know it can’t be true.
For most of my life, I have cited this as one of my earliest memories, and yet, I know it can’t be true. The memory—or the story told and retold to me over the decades since—sticks. Perhaps because as the granddaughter of German Jewish refugees keenly aware of their displacement, nostalgic for their lives in Hamburg, or Bavaria, or the Northern Frisian Islands, my grandfather wanted—needed—to tell the story about his grandchild making her way through the dark, about her ability to locate, regardless of conditions or geography. Later, I, too, wanted an origin story of my own. A home I could find with my eyes closed.
3.
Twenty days after my walk to the bluff on Cape Cod I am staring up at another looming hill. This one, however, is not fifty feet above sea level, but 11,752. I am thrilled to be back in the West, where I spent most of my thirties and where I met my wife, but I have no claim to Mount Timpanogos, in Utah’s Wasatch Range, near Provo Canyon. While I have walked to the bluff since I was a child, today is my first time climbing the mountain the locals call Timp. Also, I know my attempt is doomed from the start. It’s too late in the day, my back is aching, and there’s a whole lot of snow up there.
Still, I trudge upward. Soon I reach the first waterfall, a two-pronged affair that shoots down mossy rock that must never dry, staying wet and spongy even when the falls itself dries up. At the second falls I make note that it might be good for a dip on the way down. I enter a pine forest, the trail matted with needles, and to my surprise see that there are bees working the narrowleaf willow—bees at eight thousand feet! Then the world turns gold as I walk through an aspen tunnel, yellow leaves strewn on the trail. It’s like walking an aisle to the altar. As usual in these later months of the year in the West, there are few birds, but then I hear my first song in a while. It is that great exotic creature, the American robin.
When I emerge from the small forest, I have a better sense of where I am heading. It isn’t immediately clear how I will get from where I am to where I want to be, up above where snow has turned fall to winter practically overnight. If altitude is latitude, then I am heading north, no matter what a compass might claim. A minute ago I was facing a hillside of gold, aspens everywhere, but now I am facing ice. I stop, take a gulp of water, and stare. The mountain looms above me, a great white giant, marked with the dark green slashes of Douglas firs. What my father used to say about me is true of Timpanogos today. It has its head in the clouds.
As I climb I don’t know the stories and legends attached to the mountain; only later will I learn something of its reputation and how it is regarded by the people of Provo and Utah in general. For starters, Timpanogos, named for the Timpanogos People, is the superstar of the Wasatch range, the most beloved hill in the state. But, as I’ll learn, its rise hinged on a mistake. And a whole lot of PR. Ask someone about their beloved Timp and they may well tell you the story of an Indigenous girl diving off the mountain to her death. Then they may point to the way the mountain itself resembles the form of a “sleeping Indian princess” if you look at it just right. “Indians,” they may say, “once lived in these mountains.”
What they won’t tell you, because they don’t know, is that this particular Native American legend was the invention of a Mormon athletic director at BYU sometime in the early 1920s. Eugene Roberts was a go-getter, a proponent of the “muscular Christianity” of the time, who decided that the town of Provo needed its own Mount Rainier, a landmark that would elevate his town into myth and uniqueness.
In On Zion’s Mount, Jared Farmer notes that there was a kind of “double displacement” at work here.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Roberts was organizing mass hikes up Timpanogos that could include as many as seven thousand people, all in single file if the pictures are true, winding their way up the trail. The hikes were preceded by a celebration—Timpanogos Day—that included bonfires, pageants, and Mormons dressing up as the very people they had dispossessed when they claimed the so-called Happy Valley. In On Zion’s Mount, Jared Farmer notes that there was a kind of “double displacement” at work here, since the Ute people that had called the area home were people of the lowlands, not the mountains, but in legend they were conveniently airlifted from town to the hills. He adds that “the senses of place that make present-day Americans feel at home would not exist without past displacements.”
But I don’t know any of this while I hike up the mountain.
I am thrilled as I stare up at the face of Timpanogos. My story of the mountain feels new to me, because it is.
I have no idea of the strata of story that different groups of people have been overlaying on the mountain for centuries. Stories with a purpose.
And that purpose?
To make the place home.
4.
When I lived in Utah, we often went to the local reservoir on warm summer days, approximating beach time by the muddy shoreline, the hum of speedboats charging through placid waters, the mountains hovering around us like sentinels. As much as I loved the mountains, I ached for salt water and marshes, sea spray, nesting birds, shingled houses, and the thorny script of the rose bushes of my childhood.
I never thought of the Jordanelle Reservoir as beautiful when I lived there, in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, and passed by it two times a day, on my way to work and then on my return home to the Heber Valley. It felt false, as reservoirs often do, a human-made thing plopped down in the middle of a place where a big body of water shouldn’t be. What I didn’t know then was that the water I swam in covered a Japanese internment camp.
The water was murky and cold with snow runoff. As I treaded water, my feet touched the tops of trees and waterlogged barn roofs. I’d lived in this area of northern Utah for nearly a decade, but it was only during my final year there that I learned the true story of Jordanelle. My neighbor, Jack, whose family homesteaded in northern Utah in the 1860s, told me that the county flooded the valley without clearing trees or houses. Now, the skeletons of scrub oak, juniper, and ramshackle barracks drift underwater, ghosts of a memory no one speaks of anymore. On summer days, speedboats churn through these waters. In winter, ice fishermen endure the cold in makeshift huts and drop their lines down.
They propped planks together to make shacks where they slept, the men in one, the women and children in the other.
Jack told me the Japanese American detainees grew vegetables. In February 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, authorizing the forced removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to remote areas in states like Utah, California, and Nevada. For a few short months afterward, California’s military authorities encouraged relocation, largely because they lacked the resources to deport people. Nearly five thousand people voluntarily relocated in what I imagine was an agonizing choice, not unlike the one my grandparents had made a few years before in escaping Nazi Germany. Among those who were able to relocate was a savvy produce dealer from Oakland, California, named Fred Isamu Wada. Before Wada and his family rode a rickety bus with other detainees to the mountain highlands in the shadow of Mount Timpanogos and the Wasatch Range, he struck a deal with the mayor of Keetley, a farming community near my old house, to lease land in exchange for farm labor. Wada and a group of twenty other prisoners set to building beds for plants. They propped planks together to make shacks where they slept, the men in one, the women and children in the other.
The Japanese American farmers were detained in Keetley for three years. Some stayed longer, raised children and grandchildren, and grew more vegetables in a valley that was inhospitable for agriculture. In 1945, after the war ended, they took down the American flag that wagged in the dry wind over a hand-painted sign by the highway. The sign read: FOOD FOR FREEDOM.
After I left Utah, the reservoir came to me in dreams and in my waking hours. I was missing the Western landscape so desperately, so deeply, that every place I visited in my new home seemed a pale simulacrum of the place I’d left.
Jordanelle reminded me of buried things. What were the other stories, I wondered, floating just beneath the surface?
The little settlement at Keetley became nothing more than the name of a junction, and now it sloshes under the reservoir.
We are all swimming over memory.
5.
I once told myself a story of the one true home. My life has told me another story.
I wrote a book about loving Cape Cod while in Colorado and another about loving Colorado while on the Cape. In a later book, after having returned to Cape Cod, newly married and newly enamored with my old place, I suggested that I would stay on Cape Cod “forever.” Forever turned out to be six years. The book that declared my love for the place was what led to my exile from it—to a new job at UNC Wilmington. I found myself living in North Carolina, where, like many of us, I existed in a state of geographic uncertainty.
My daughter suffers no such confusion. She moved to the South when she was three months old and has no problem calling this place home. The house where she grew up, the first that we ever owned, backs up onto a tidal marsh. When my nephew first saw where we lived, he said it reminded him of the Cape, and I have shingled a part of the back of the house with the white cedar characteristic of our former home. The creek that runs by our back yard, my creek now, is known locally as Hewletts, but to the greater American public it has another name. To them it is better known as Dawson’s Creek, home of Dawson Leery, the protagonist of the long-running TV show about teenage romance. If I paddle farther down the creek I will pass the house Dawson lived in, the house that the actor who played Dawson, the late James Van Der Beek, eventually bought, and it is that house that supplies me with my second irony. Though the TV show was shot here, in my town and on my creek in Carolina, the show’s geographic fiction was that it took place on Cape Cod.
Admittedly, mine has been a minor exile. In Wilmington there is evidence of much greater unsettlings, ones that render my own small.
Admittedly, mine has been a minor exile. In Wilmington there is evidence of much greater unsettlings, ones that render my own small. Over my twenty-two years in this town, I have learned it was once a very different place. For almost a hundred years the town denied the story of how, in 1898, white supremacists overturned an election in what is considered the only coup in American history, and murdered and exiled many of its Black citizens. Over the last decade I have watched the citizenry, myself included, go through a process of revision, creating a new draft of its old story. The park where my daughter ran cross-country, once named after a white supremacist, is now named after a common species of tree.
I have also witnessed the beginnings of an even greater future displacement. To lift off from the Wilmington airport is to see that the place is more water than air. The town we now call home is a hurricane magnet, parts of it barely above sea level. It juts out into the ocean as if presenting itself for sacrifice. Abandoning our home to its own devices has become a common practice as we flee inland to avoid the frequent climate-enhanced storms. These storms create an immediate panic and a long-term uncertainty. How to commit when what you commit to might soon be gone?
The ground is shifting. We claim our places, but our stories change. As we live, we revise. The story I once told myself was how to find my one true home. The story I now tell is how to be in uncertainty.
It is not a happier story but I think it is a truer one.
6.
After nearly ten years, I fled Utah for coastal North Carolina, as far as it seemed a person could go, both geographically and psychically, and still be in the same nation. Leaving was one of the most excruciating choices I’d ever made. I knew it was the right decision, but like all choices, it wasn’t without its losses.
I arrived to the tangle of kudzu and the crippling wet heat of August and stepped out of the car that had driven me here from nearly 2,500 miles away. My landlord, Rhonda, was a woman in her fifties with tight alabaster skin and coiffed beauty-queen hair. I sweated profusely while Rhonda and I spoke beneath an ancient oak tree, Spanish moss hanging overhead. I was embarrassed by the perspiration dripping from my brow. Humidity was not something I had experienced since leaving the East Coast years before, and I had not missed it.
Rhonda welcomed me, lamented the long journey, and explained that painters had finally finished the final coat on my apartment the day before, how sorry she was for the mess outside. The house, named for two of its most famous owners—Woodbury and Hoggard—was an Italianate style building constructed in 1854, and was now undergoing major renovations. When Rhonda purchased the house two years before, the place had been in shambles. She promised it would be lovely when the work was completed, just beautiful, she cooed.
Before the restoration neared completion, I’d cross plywood planks to access my apartment from the communal hallways. I peered into exposed walls where cockroaches scrambled, keeping me up most nights as I tried desperately to insert myself into this foreign place, tried so hard not to forget the life I had left—the sweet smell of sage after rainstorms, red desert dust on my calves when I hiked, the hoarse yell of bull elk and moose. But the walls held stories I wanted to know, and I’d peek inside again to see snarls of old wires gnawed by rats, left hanging loosely throughout the house.
But when he arrived in Wilmington, he fell in love with the place and the people.
Among the stories I learned that first year had to do with the house’s first inhabitant, Daniel Phineas Woodbury. He’d come to Wilmington from the north, from Vermont and New Hampshire, to work for the Army Corps of Engineers. Before settling in this coastal town, he’d crisscrossed the world, helping to build the Cumberland Road in Ohio, overseeing the construction of Fort Kearney and Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail, Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. But when he arrived in Wilmington, he fell in love with the place and the people. He took long breaths of sea air and the syrup of people’s speech and decided to stay and put down roots, buy property in a clearing at the highest elevation in town, and marry a local woman. But after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, he found himself in a difficult situation. The Confederacy wanted him to join their forces, but he was a loyal Union man, so he petitioned Jefferson Davis, with whom he’d attended West Point, to pardon him to fight for the North.
I did not know it before I moved to Wilmington but later learned that I am a distant descendent of Daniel Phineas Woodbury. The house’s historic plaque bearing his name recalled the slick coat of arms in my childhood home in Massachusetts. My father’s twin sister, the keeper of our family history, dug through documents and found Woodbury’s name penned at the top of a handwritten genealogy. He and his ancestors claim ties to pilgrims and witch persecutors, doctors and American presidents, people who built their dreams on the rocky terrain of what they called New England.
By August 1864, though, less than a year before the war ended, Woodbury landed in Key West as commander of the Union’s Department of the Gulf, after laying pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg. It was there where he died of yellow fever, shrouded in mosquito netting and malarial dreams, imagining, perhaps, the map of his days. I wonder if he dreamed of Wilmington, if he could have imagined a woman bringing her homesickness and her hope to this house nearly one hundred forty years later, a woman with the same bloodlines, born from the same New Hampshire hills.
This new knowledge secured something within me. If my ancestor, raised in the northeast as I had been, who had traveled the world, built bridges, and forts, made maps, could call this place home, then maybe I could do the same.
Two years later I found myself driving along the Outer Banks with the man who would become my husband. The road trip was part of my Southern education, he liked to say. We drove the thread of remaining asphalt on Route 11 from Hatteras to Nags Head singing along to Patty Griffin. Like her, I was growing weary of “useless desires.” It had been two years since I’d moved to the South, after nearly a decade in the Wasatch Mountains, and now I was in Chip’s car, in his world, our relationship thrilling in the way of new, shiny things. Everywhere I looked, a revelation appeared, mostly in the form of migrating birds. Even after two years, though, I was still missing mountains and red rock and recovering from a heartbreak that wasn’t new but was persistent. The revelations didn’t come without some bargaining. I looked out the window, hoping to learn—and love—a new place. The ache dulled but stayed on.
The last time I visited Utah, two years after I left for good, the stars hung low over the Wasatch, and the dry air cooled my face as I rolled down the window. I realize now that I have kept that moment with me since I left more than twenty years ago, allowed it to be a wedge I have carved between me and North Carolina. I still wake dreaming of the scent of sagebrush after rainstorms and mountains in twilight. I’d like to tunnel through the humid air back to the past, to the open space of Utah, bare-boned landscapes, dry, windswept, and pulled tight.
I tip my head back and remember the Western stars. Venus hung over the blue mountains beyond, and the foothills and city lights spilled into the Great Salt Lake. I listened to a friend’s guitar, restless and twanging in the cool summer air. It’s okay to miss this, I told myself. It’s not going to kill you to miss this.
Utah still abrades my dreams, hides in scrapbooks and browning paper journals, photographs, feathers, bits of sage smushed into the seams.
How do you learn to love a place?
I have now lived in this North Carolina town for longer than I have lived anywhere. And even though I can tell you when the sweet azalea is about to bloom in late spring, and when in fall to expect flocks of ibis migrating south, and the week in April when foxes return to the same hollows in my neighborhood to give birth, I still often feel like I’ve woken up in a new country. Some of my deepest losses and most difficult moments have happened in this coastal town, and some of the most beautiful and transformative—the births of my three children, meeting my husband, learning and finding solace in the tidal creeks and barrier islands, the egrets and belted kingfishers, the great horned owls calling to their mates in the dark night. I have petitioned to save land threatened by suburban development and have met some of the dearest friends of my life here. I have made a life. I have found a home.
Maybe, really, it’s about learning to pay attention, how to fight for the land you love. Maybe if you know one place well, you learn to know, and love, any place.
Douglas Cutting, a fellow writer I met during my first year in Wilmington, who grew up along the salt marshes of eastern North Carolina, and who writes so beautifully about them, once said to me, “Someday you’ll write about this place.” All my essays that first year in North Carolina were about Utah, and about leaving, and longing. I told him I wouldn’t.
Turns out he was right
