Foreign affairs

Moving back to Maine with my son has been entertaining on multiple levels. For example: he is not nearly as outdoorsy as I was when I was a kid, and that proves to be the source of endless mutual frustration. He would much prefer staying in his room, reading or playing a video game or playing with his Legos, to ever going outside, no matter how lovely the day. I admit I was pretty bookish and Lego-ish as a kid too (I just barely pre-dated decent video games), but I also liked hanging out in the backyard, or on the beach, or in the woods – but no, he does not. So on any sunny day, we’ll have a good 20 minutes of argument about getting him outdoors. I find those 20 minutes to be supremely enjoyable, as he uses his eight year old rhetorical skills to try to convince me that fresh air is horrible and cold and awful, and that the real point of being a young man is to play “Roller Coaster Tycoon” or read Diary of a Wimpy Kid or watch cooking shows on the Food Network. He never wins – although in his mind I’m sure he never loses, either – but he never fails to make me smile – although usually for fatherly purposes I have to keep the smile internal.

On another level, though, it’s made me realise that, despite being born in Maine, I have not fathered a Mainer. He is a foreigner here. Maine is famously insular among the US states – my parents have friends that pointedly remind them they were not born here, even though they’ve lived here for nearly fifty years at this point, whereas in Washington state, no one really cares, and at the far extreme, in places like California and Florida, it’s almost impossible to find anyone who was born locally, and those that were tend to be slightly nuts (particularly in Florida: read anything by Carl Hiassen, all of whose books are more or less true stories). I was born here, though, and I thought on some level that would transmit to my son – but it hasn’t. He’s from Seattle, and he reminds his friends of that fact, to their occasional annoyance, and in a very real way, he doesn’t have any of the characteristic senses and feelings of his new friends here at school and in the neighbourhood.

I’ll admit that it has taken me awhile to get comfortable with this – that my son is learning to be an exile – but it’s also made me realise that I’m also a foreigner. Not in the same way my son is, mind you: he wears it on his sleeve, while my sleeve is pretty obviously from LL Bean, and the mud-splattered, dirty Subaru in the driveway lets everyone know I’m not from away. I look the part, and I can even speak the part – I know the inside jokes, I know the backroad short cuts, I can talk local politics and I even know the tortured genealogy of the weird intermixed lobstering families in town. Heck – I’m on the Zoning Board of Appeals. But within moments of meeting me, any Mainer worth his or her salt realizes I’m not “of” Maine, and in fact, I probably never was. Watching my son consciously choose to not be from here has also cemented my understanding that even though I’m from here, I’m still a foreigner, too.

My son’s best friend here is an interesting creature. His parents are so Maine it hurts: his mom is from an ancient lobstering and farming family that came to town three hundred years ago, their last name still one of the most common in every class of the school. Nearly every member of the family lives within a mile of my house, which is to say within a mile of the small fishing port in town, and they all lobster or drag fish or clam for some or all of their income. His dad’s family, on the other hand, came more recently, probably sometime in the late 19th century, but long enough ago that they’ve merged into the zeitgeist fully; his family lives in a kind of rural multigenerational lower middle class compound, on land probably bought when they first came off the boat, and which they subdivide whenever a family member can’t afford to buy their own place. They’re all tradesmen, but historically they would have been lumberman or worked in the mills – inland folk, in other words. Their son loves to snowmobile, loves to go lobstering with his grandfather, loves playing in the woods, and also loves video games – reading not so much, but we’re working on that.

His parents, though, are divorced, and he splits his time between his mom’s place on the beach, and his dad’s place about twenty miles inland. In Maine terms, they live in separate countries, and the boy clearly is struggling with managing the divide. It’s a lot for a kid to deal with – every week he moves from one country (rural inland Maine) to another (old line coastal Maine). It’s the rough equivalent of shuttling from, say, Boston to rural New Hampshire, or for you Londoners, from Hampshire Heath to Yorkshire, every week, but see it from the eyes of a ten year old: he has to navigate that cultural divide every week – he has to cross a border every time he goes from mum’s house to dad’s house. Both parents truly love the boy, so there isn’t a deficit of affection – although how it’s expressed is different on one side of the Maine Turnpike to the other – but there is a difference in outlook and culture. One looks to the woods and feels the earth; the other looks to the sea and feels the wind. My son’s friend is learning to love both, and in that he is becoming foreign to each.

My son, on the other hand, is having a different kind of foreign living experience. He’s lived in three distinct places – London, until he was about three; then Seattle, until last year; and now Scarborough, which is looking like it will be yet another multiyear swing. He doesn’t move between countries every week, like his friend; rather, he moves from one country, stays awhile, and then moves to the next. I honestly don’t know which is harder, although looking at his friend, I think at their age it is probably easier to do long term residencies than to be forced to cross the border every five or six days. But even my son is showing signs of learning to love Maine as well as Seattle, and in so doing, he’s becoming less and less Seattle and more and more foreign in each of the lands in which he has ventured for a time.

I’m quite pleased about that, although I also see enough of the beauty of the local to understand that they’ll also miss out on certain joys. When you get to grow up in one place, with one fixed identity, you have the potential of a kind of security that the foreigner never experiences. The local knows exactly what their community is and has the luxury of never having to question their rights to its legacy or its future. The foreigner has to buy in, and has to absorb from the position of knowing other possibilities; the local need not have any “other” knowledge. They can travel, but that’s a choice; they can also stay put and know that their steeping in the traditions and histories and multi-dimensional geographies of their place are true – because they are not asked to examine other potentials. The foreigner cannot fall back on their knowledge of the other because it is of the other, and thus may not apply to the new place – and even when they go back to where they might have once come from, they will then be tainted by the knowledge of another potential frame of reference.

I can see the challenge that poses for two young men in Scarborough, Maine, though. As children, we understandably are looking for a solid and robust frame of reference, endorsed by our parents and their parents and reflected in the physical environment and social economy that surrounds us. Such a frame provides the basis of meaning to a child; these kids don’t have it. My son constantly compares Seattle to Scarborough, and more dimly to London, and finds all of them wanting in their way. His friend compares Pine Point to Hollis, sees that both are different and skew to one another – not nearly so much as my son, but children are perceptive, and if I can paint the difference he can do so with far greater contrast – and he is recognising that he is becoming a foreigner in both places because of that developing discernment.

Many would mourn the two boys’ experience, but I don’t. I think they are lucky to be able to build into their core being – the kernels of their internal understanding of the world – the idea that there are more than one way of living, that humanity is not defined by a single frame. Both already are developing preferences which will allow them to discover a physical place where they will feel comfortable – my guess is my son ends up in a city, and his friend will end up in somewhere more rural – but in each place, they will not perfectly fit into the fabric of people who expect a single understanding of what it is to live there. They will have as part of their core view of the world a sense that many, many views are possible – indeed, many different views can live within one mind and one soul – and that the goal is not to close down and accept only one way of living, but rather to gather community through a shared sense of being foreign, of being other – of collecting various frames – and rejoicing in that.

My neighbours are taking a different approach. She is from New Jersey, and he is from rural Maine – somewhere up north. I’ve spoken with them on and off, they’ve had us over for pizza a couple of times, and they don’t like my dog, and I had to ask them to relocate their beehives so that we didn’t get so many bees in our yard, so it’s a shaky relationship, but both have indicated that they are not from here, and they also tend to stand off from the rest of the neighbours. They do so in a variety of ways and the pandemic has made it easy – their children are not allowed to play with other kids on the street, for example, and, blaming it on their free-range chickens and their (goddamn) beehives, they are strict about keeping dogs and people off their lawn. I get the sense that they probably felt foreign in the places they came from (beehives in suburban tri-state area? backyard pizza oven in Penobscot County? neither likely to inspire fellowship with the natives) but instead of learning to see multiple viewpoints, the couple seem to have found one another, and have decided to create their own country on Jasper Street – they have decided to declare their own independent republic in the midst of another country – and leave all other foreign lands behind.

I suppose that’s one approach, and indeed, they are probably closer to the default in the early 21st century, with our identity politics, MAGA caps, Brexit, and social bubbles. But my sense is that my son, and his friend, and me – we happy few here in Blue Point, walking the dog to the marsh, eating hot dogs but also poulet holstein with a vinegarette salad, playing Life and Legos and Uno and watching as little television as I can manage – are the real future. Yes, we’re all white (well, mostly – my son is half Taiwanese but no one around here picks up on it), and we’re all male, but all three of us, at our core, are foreigners. Which means we can be as at ease in Maine as we are in London, or Paris, or Accra, or New Delhi – which is to say, not entirely at ease, because we know our frame of reference is neither unique, nor is it privileged, nor is it even reliably correct. So we’ll ask questions, and hopefully we will listen. The locals – everywhere – rarely do.

And since, as Flannery O’Connor once said, the eternal speaks to us in a soft voice, barely audible in the wind, maybe we’ll be ready to hear whatever that voice is trying to tell us. As foreigners in all places, we’ll be translating no matter what.