(I leave in eight days for Asia, where I will be for six weeks—Seoul, Qingdao, Taipei, Taitung, Okinawa, and hopefully Yangon if I can swing it. I’ve been sidelined by bad weather and dental problems, so this essay comes from a guy in a snowed-in McDonald’s with Novocaine mouth.)
One of the subtexts of my Duluth piece was that place still matters to Americans, despite our image as a nomadic people, moving at the drop of a hat for our careers.
I don’t just mean that place matters in a literal sense—in that the majority of Americans still live within fifty miles of where they were born because they like where they are—but in a deeper sense: where you live, the people, the nature, and the culture rise to a transcendent meaningfulness.
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