On Becoming an Iowan (Again)

IT'S A STRANGE FEELING when the orbit of your life circles back to the place where you started. All that time on the other side of the sun and yet now you've ended up back at the spot where you began.

This feeling first hit me was when my family and I stoppped over the Christmas holiday to meet some friends and potential colleagues near the city where my wife will soon begin work as an assistant professor of theology. Amid the usual smalltalk, it dawned on me that when conversing with this group I could -- must, in fact -- get more specific about the geographic location of my home town. For the past decade and a half, I've developed a stock answer of "if you cut Iowa in half, my hometown is near the center of the eastern half," when anyone asked about where I was from. It sounds like a silly description in retrospect, but for so many years it seemed to work just fine. Other than that, my best method of description was "an hour and a half east of Des Moines," which would at least elicit nods despite my interlocutor not actually knowing where Des Moines is. Sometimes I'd name-drop Cedar Rapids, the closest city to my hometown. I could see a lightbulb flare up, but it was usually just because the person had heard of the city during coverage of the Iowa Caucuses. Of course, hearing of it and being able to find it on a map are two different things.

Now I found myself in a situation where I could identify my home town by its county, where there was even a chance people had heard of my high school. I could talk, and for once my conversation partners' "uh-huhs" weren't just polite nods, but actual evidence of recognition.

...

I haven't lived in Iowa since I graduated high school in 2001. It's not exactly my home state, either. I was born in Indiana and moved to Oklahoma as an infant. I lived in rural Enid, Oklahoma until I was six; we moved halfway through first grade. I hadn't wanted to leave Oklahoma. I kicked and screamed and vowed that when I was 18, I would return to the Sooner State whether my parents liked it or not. When I finally did turn 18, I did just that.

During college at the University of Tulsa, I met my wife, who claims Tulsa as home. When I graduated a year-and-a-half before she did, I took my first full-time newspaper job in the state. Thus, when we moved to New Jersey from Oklahoma in 2007, I had spent precisely half my life in Iowa, and half my life in Oklahoma.

...

New Jersey was a culture shock. It's so different. So densely populated. There's the jughandles, the traffic, the unique "I'm not being rude, it just sounds like it" form of courtesy, which we took to calling Jersey Nice. Yet, I was also always proud to live here. It's so much more diverse than where I was raised. Its arts and cultural offerings are world-class and abundant. I'd get to go to New York and Philadelphia for newspaper assignments. It wasn't "flyover country" -- it was the heart of the Acela Corridor.

There's a fundamental question students face when they reach the age of 18: Do I stay or do I go? Not everyone has that option, of course. But I did. The question isn't just about whether to go to a near or far college; it's more fundamental that that. It's about whether your life will take place near where it always has, or somewhere that could be drastically different.

I'm probably overstating the case a bit. Obviously, plenty of people go to college near their hometowns but then take jobs in other states or other countries. And plenty of people go to college and take their first job in their home states, but then move far afield for work. Yet, as an 18-year-old, graduating from high school felt like an inflection point. It felt like if I wanted to get out and explore the world -- or the region, at least -- I had better go to college out of state.

And so I did. I went to the most comfortable out-of-state state, where I got a degree, got married, and started my career. And then we lived in New Jersey. And then we lived for a year in Germany. And then we went back for another stint in New Jersey while my wife finished graduate school. And that brought us to another inflection point.

We could have ended up anywhere in the U.S., or the world, for that matter. But we ended up back in Iowa, albeit four-and-a-half hours from where I grew up. For the first time in a long time, I could go to my high school's homecoming if I wanted to. I kind of do want to.

...

Anyway, long story long, that's where I'm at. I'm heading back to Iowa, to the familiar, to the place that feels like home. But I'm not the same person I was. It's not so much that I've become someone out of step with Iowan sensibilities. It's more like, the particular Iowans with whom I share a worldview will have changed. The coffee shop where I once might have felt uncomfortable now feels comfortable. The political meetings that once filled me with zealous excitement now might scare me a little. When I move back to Iowa in a couple of weeks, I'll be a different kind of Iowan.

This blog will document my transition back to Iowa. It will serve as a journal and also something of a travelogue. I hope to use my journalistic muscles to occasionally report on news and happenings in Iowa and in my new hometown of Orange City. I hope it will be interesting, to those in Iowa and out, those lifelong Hawkeyes and those who can't tell Iowa from Ohio or Idaho.