Newport 1: The East Coast Post

S and I went to Newport (I was going to call it Millionaire Beach Town to preserve my fiction of placelessness, but then I couldn't have links, and I figure most of my readers know me and know where I am, and the rest have either figured out where I am or don't care, so I'm going with actuality). We toured a mansion and ate at a nice restaurant and stayed in a hotel and walked on the beach.

Newport crystallized some things I've been thinking about and thinking about blogging about since we moved. I haven't managed to blog about them, I think because they're complicated and kind of obnoxious, but I also haven't managed to stop thinking about them. So I thought maybe I'd try blogging about them in the context of Newport.

I'm going to try and write three posts: the east coast post, the money post, and the house post, though I'm not sure they will come out in that order. They are also deeply entwined, so I don't know if I'll be able to keep them separate. And before I even start, I should say that it's extremely likely that this whole thing will come off as simply a privileged whine, which it is, so consider yourself warned.

***

For the last few years, I feel like there's been a constant stream of articles and stories about people leaving the coasts for the heartland: the midwest, the southwest, anywhere you can get a job and afford a house and live happily ever after.

I'll be the first to say that jobs and houses are great things. In Red State we had both, or should I say all three, because we had two good jobs and one nice house which equalled a lovely suburban life. All those things that those people in those articles move to the heartland for. Great. Fine. Groovy. I hope it works out for them.

This post is not going to go all culture and politics and lattes on you, because, frankly, you can find culture and politics and lattes in the heartland. We saw Mark Morris and Wilco and John Doe solo. We went to anti-war rallies and worked on the Kerry campaign with lots of like-minded folk (though not enough). There were corporate lattes all over the place and independent lattes just a short walk from our house.

But it didn't work for us. Why? Well, that's a long story, and a lot of it comes down to work, and I don't go there (much).

But in a fundamental way--and I didn't realize how fundamental it was until we left--it didn't work for us because it wasn't home. On one level, this is about family and friends. We had wonderful friends in Red State Capital City: friends to have seders with, and friends to celebrate with, and friends to sit around and bitch with: all kinds of friends. But our family was all in one place, 600 miles away, and nearby were my grade school friends, my high school friends, my college roommate, my post-college roommate, K and D. We were always packing up and coming back: for holidays, for bat mitzvahs, for weddings, for vacations. We could never fully root ourselves there, because everyone else was here.

OK, I'm having trouble with a segue. What I want to talk about (and maybe I did blog about this? certainly I started to blog about it, but I seem to recall deleting, as I've deleted lots of attempts to blog about this nexus of issues) is the landscape. I'm tempted to get all metaphorical and talk about the social landscape, because that's a piece of it too: almost everywhere I went in Red State, I was pretending, pretending to be a normal person in Red State (not at your house, J, and not at your house, D, but pretty much everywhere else), whereas in Blue State, I'm just me.

Really, though, I mean the literal landscape. The houses, the freeways, the beach, the ponds, the mountains, the lakes. In East Coast Big City I still drive a lot, but I drive through neighborhoods and along rivers and even the freeways go over neighborhoods and across rivers. When I get to the country, which often I do, I'm driving through woods and over hills. Almost every time I run, I run by a river or a pond, and this is in the middle of Town, which is not exactly a metropolis, but is certainly on the urban side. A few weeks after we moved, we went to the beach, the beach I went to as a kid, and I could breathe.

Basically (literally and metaphorically) it comes down to fields. I hated those damn fields. And if you love fields, because they are the landscape of your childhood or because you have grown to appreciate their bleak midwinter beauty and their summer expanse of green, more power to you, and I truly mean that. But they weren't for us. So we came home.

And I thought about all this on the beach in Newport, where I could breathe.