Migrant Nation

It’s a melting pot, right, America?  People came here from all over, people are coming still, and within two generations the Mexican-Americans are speaking Spanglish and the Korean-Americans are eating cheeseburgers with their kimchi and the Hungarian-Americans are marrying Ethiopian-Americans.  This nation is supposed to be one of risk-takers, pioneers, people comfortable with change.  Assimilation is a way of embracing change.  Travel is a way of embracing change, too, and one of the elements that makes assimilation happen.  One thing that struck me over and over as I traveled was how few of the people I met had held still much.

It wasn’t just the Alaskan massage therapist who’d done her training in Honolulu.  Even the cucumber technician in rural Georgia had detoured through semi-cosmopolitan Athens, GA, and near-New York North Jersey before coming home.  There was a man on the plane from Anchorage who’d grown up in Alaska – and he looked like many, many generations of his ancestors had done so, too – and joined the State Department.  They posted him all over the world in a 30-plus year career, and now he was headed to Vietnam again to see how it had changed since the 1980s.  The diner where I stopped on Route 66 in Seligman, Arizona, is owned and run and much of the food cooked by a German woman, over 70 and on her feet in this and other restaurants for much of the last 50 years.

There’s a Mid-westerner who lived most of her adult live in the mid-Atlantic and is now in the Southwest who’s involved with an effort to persuade landowners to remove long-disused fences.  The fences, put up when the Southwest still had water enough to support ranching, are no longer necessary for livestock.  (With extreme measures, there’s plenty of water for people and golf courses, but it’s too expensive for beef.)  They linger nonetheless, disrupting wildlife migration patterns.  The roads we use to travel everywhere we want to be, or away from where we don’t want to be, disrupt those patterns, too.  When I posted a photo of pronghorns on this blog, two friends – one in Virginia, one in Texas – wrote with concerns about how severely curtailed migration has affected those animals particularly.

There’s a West Texan who hated Utah but is happy in the middle of Pennsylvania.  She’s white; attends a majority-black church; sometimes forgets there’s a difference.  There’s a mixed-race Pittsburgher who loves New Orleans, likes urban California, couldn’t stand suburban Kansas but is okay in downtown Kansas City.  There’s a couple of Canadians who found themselves in K.C., loving it.  There’s a native New Englander who spends part of the year in New England, part in Florida, and a little-bitty part in Hawai’i, plus trips abroad.  There’s an English couple who created a tea house in St. Louis, a quintessentially American city whose city hall is designed to look like the Maison de Ville in Paris, France.  There’s a Chinese-Vietnamese-American from California who loved the east coast but is enjoying the Midwest.

We should not fence each other in.  Emily Dickinson notwithstanding, we should be able to move around, geographically and metaphorically.  It helps keep us strong.