Laid back

In North America, there are really only four major geological areas, and I’ve lived in all four (yes, there’s a lot of diversity below that level, but bear with me).  There’s the mountains of the western side of the continent, and while I’ve not lived in the actual mountains, I’ve spent most of my adult life on the western shore, in cities on the Pacific rim, San Francisco and Seattle.  I grew up in Maine, which is very close in its geology and its weather and its culture to the vast Canadian shield region of the north, granite and basalt two billion years old peaking through the biomass that covers it, swamp lakes and bogs and mosquitoes and winter winds shooting down from the Arctic. There’s the eastern mountains and their low, rolling moraine hills, spreading out to include New York, and while I’ve spent less time there it’s mostly by design that I’ve avoided it.  And then there are the plains, sweeping down from the western mountains and south of the low divide between the rivers that run north and the rivers that run south to the Gulf of Mexico, the climate shifting from deep cold and mild summers in the Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba prairies, to the deep cold and scorching summers of the high plains of Montana and the Dakotas, to the mild winters and soul-sucking heat of Texas and Oklahoma and northern Mexico.  

I’m going back to the prairies.  I got off the plane on Wednesday in the fading light of a summer sunset, 35C in the shade, and the air and the landscape and the shape of the sky reminding me of the time I did this in Edmonton nine years ago, also stepping off a commuter jet onto the tarmac of the Alberta prairies, no features to block the view in any direction, the late day horizon melting in a haze of light brown where the color of the dusty windy sky could only with difficulty be distinguished from the raw brown of the late summer fields stretching endlessly in every direction.

Texas is big, goes the cliché, but having been to Alberta I thought I understood what that bigness meant; I was wrong.  Americans and Canadians are at their most distinct when you observe what they do to the prairie landscape.  Albertans retain enough of the sense of European compactness that their cities – sprawling as they are – still feel like they are being restrained, in a kind of civil and polite way.  The cities of the Canadian prairie west still feel therefore feel naturally human – the humanity that coexists on the surface of the earth with the rest of what exists on the surface of the earth.  The planet still has a voice there, which is odd given most people’s idea of Alberta these days centers on the oil sands up north.  But I’ve been to Fort McMurray before the fires, and flown over the sands as they stretch in all directions.  There is still a sense that it is compact, that what is being mined and steam-ventilated out of the ground is being done in a precise way.

Not so in Texas: the highways are wide and grey, merging into frontage roads every half mile or so in a twist of overpasses and on-ramps, advertisting signs rise hundreds of feet in the air, dotting the horizon in every direction.  Gravel pits and concrete factories and fracking sites are thrown across the ground, randomly scattered between suburban gated communities, shopping malls, car dealerships, adult novelty stores, strip joints, chain restaurants, gas stations.  Not many parks but the lot sizes for everything are huge and, at least away from the frontage roads, people plant trees wherever they can to get a bit of shade from the yellow-white intensity of the southwest sun.

There is no restraint here.  It feels more like a kind of desperation against the sheer size of the plains.  The landscape is at once shattered, barren, and teeming with the detritus of American human activity.  It made me think of the compact tiny villages of central France and Scotland, oddly enough.  Human beings, when settling a new wilderness, tend towards two extremes in facing the void.  One extreme involves huddling ever closer together, increasing their density to ward off the fears of isolation, and you end up with the western European village: houses built with shared walls around a tiny common space, with walls that both contain humanity and keep the wild at bay.  The other involves pushing out a thin film of humanity over the widest possible area, conquering the wilderness by denying it space to breathe, ensuring no spot exists which has not been thoroughly imprinted with the axe, or the concrete truck, or commercial activity, or even human death itself in the form of landfills and cemeteries.  Texas is the logical extreme of that latter vision of anthropomorphizing the surface of the world.  One vision holds humanity back, fearful for losing one’s humanity in a wilderness which is at once mysterious and very deadly.  The other is a kind of manic declaration of war against that wilderness: we make ourselves the killer.  But they are both still motivated by fear.

It is an ugly landscape, the constants being dust and the washed out greens of trees that have gotten used to growing without water, and the pale concrete of endlessly gridded roads, too wide everywhere, crumbling and adding to the dust everywhere.  But I’m here, and I will be here, and since anywhere can be home, I’ll do the best I can.  There are good tacos here.  And while it’s always hard, I’ll find people like me in Texas, and it will be good.

In the first interview, I was asked what I missed most about America when I was England.  I pondered a bit, realizing I didn’t really miss anything that much, and said I missed baseball on the radio.  That got a puzzled look

The highways had digital roadsigns that warned of various hazards and construction and the like.  One sign said “Wrong way driver reported ahead – be alert”.  That seemed ominous, but I turned a few miles later onto another highway and the signs just repeated warnings about not texting while driving.  Oddly, that made me even more vigilant: it would be easier to spot a car driving against traffic on a ten lane limited access highway than it would be to spot the car with a distracted driver that’s going to veer suddenly across your lane.

The interviews were held at the Talent Acquisiton Center.  I’m not sure how I feel about being Acquired, or being thought of only as Talent.  But given the broader context of the company, it made sense.  The coffee was of the Keurig cup variety.  Water was available in the form of those small half-bottle sizes.

The security was unnecessary and airport like, although much friendlier.  One guard asked what I was there for, and when I said a job interview, he wished me good luck and hoped he’d get to work with me someday.  But still, three ID checks and single-person secured revolving doors with bullet proof glass seemed excessive.

That night, after a lovely dinner in a corner of town which is trying to be urban and walkable and post-modern but hasn’t gotten to scale yet and as such is just very pretty and out of place, I drove the twenty miles of under construction highway back to my hotel.  It was early, I was a bit over energized, and I walked across the parking lot moonscape to a dive bar a quarter of a mile away.  I sat down and ordered my drink – rye on the rocks – and the guy next to me immediately starting chatting to me, first singing

Rye whisky, rye whisky, rye whisky I cried

If I don’t get rye whisky I think I may die

I joined him for the second line, he introduced himself, and I had a friend for the next two hours.  The jukebox was online, and he had an app that let him select songs – his first choice was “Man in the Mirror” by Michael Jackson.  I gave him a funny look and told him everything after Thriller by Michael Jackson was crap, and if we’re really being honest, Thriller was sort of shitty too.  He laughed and said no way, and asked other people what they thought.  A couple next to me agreed and the guy, who was black, said he really didn’t like Michael Jackson much at all, even the early stuff.  I objected to that, and his date pointed out that “ABC – 123” has to be one of the best pop tunes of all times.  The bartender – a pretty woman, rather short, with a dark network of webby tattoos snaking up into her t-shirt and spilling out again onto her midriff below and neck above – agreed with me and added that while she liked Thriller the album, “Thriller” the song was just weird, especially the video thing where Michael becomes a zombie – what was the point of that?  After more conversation in this vein the guy who had teed up the song felt crestfallen, clearly surprised that the room was largely of the opinion that “Man in the Mirror” was a lousy request.  His next tune was “Sk8r Boi” by Avril Levigne, and we agreed that he had made up for his initial poor selection.

The guy on the other side of me was incredibly friendly and chatty, but he had one of those modern beards that has no connection to his sideburns – the beard was about six inches long down his neck, thick and curly, but it started just at the lower line of his chin, and he was clean-shaven above that line.  I was glad it was dark; everything about that beard bothered me, and if there had been better light, I would have been too distracted by it to pay attention to what the guy was saying.  He was intelligent and friendly and kind and we talked baseball.

I asked the other guy to request “Crimson Tide” by Steely Dan.  It came on a few songs later and the bartender loved it, but she didn’t know who sang it.  The next track was Snoop Dog with “Gin and Juice” and the whole bar erupted into group song.

With my mind on my money and my money on my mind

I decided that I could make San Antonio work.  If I could make it work in London, I could make it work here – if nothing else, there are bars like this with people like this, and that will at least keep things entertaining.  I started worrying more about the dog and how he would feel about midday walks in 40C sun with no breeze.  But he can make it work too.  He’s getting older and lying on a hardwood floor with air conditioning is becoming his idea of a good summer day.

The interviews the next day went well, and as I went along, my answer for the only real question anyone had – “why are you here?” – got more honed, a part of me wondering if I was learning to sculpt the message better to make people like me, or whether I was actually learning what I really wanted to say and I was getting closer to truth every time I was forced to repeat my answer in a different context about nine times in two days.

But on the last interview I decided no, I actually believe what I’m saying.  I want a mission, and I want to serve people who otherwise would get run over by the terrifying potentiality of modernity on the one hand and the pressure to conform on the other.  I didn’t use those exact words – that sort of moral philosophy is a bit much for a two-day set of interviews for a mid-senior financial executive role – but the last person I talked to listened to the spaces between the words and understood.  He said I was an unusual person, but that the usual people burn out at his company at a senior level.  The pay isn’t good enough, and the place isn’t a place where people who need to be stars thrive.  You thrive, he said, by realizing you are a part of something greater, and that being at the company gives you a chance to be a part of, and influence, and even transform, that something greater – but it’s never about you, it’s about the something greater.  The mission is everything, we are serving our members, our job is to serve.  That’s me, I said, and moreover, it’s exactly what I want.  I don’t have any ambitions specifically left for my career, but I desperately want to serve, and to use my talents and experiences to enable that mission to be something even greater.  Then I desperately want to hire you, he said.  Well, more or less – he was professional enough to couch it in “of course, I don’t want to show my hand” and “I’ll need to get feedback from everyone else.”  But I’m getting the job.

It’s not the whole story – neither my description (obviously; this is a personal essay, not a transcription of nine hours of interviews) nor the characterization I gave.  Yes, I want to serve, but I also want to be a part of change.  I said at one point that if I was working for something worthwhile, I’d be happy to wash dishes if that was the best way I could contribute.  And while that’s true – if the mission is critical enough and literally that’s the best I can do – I know I can contribute in much bigger ways, in the ways that can transform people and organizations and even to help clarify and hone the mission itself, and thus I want to be a part of a place that not only has a mission, but sees the value I bring, and wants that value in the person of me – not in a mindless cog sort of way, but in a personalized way.  Not as Talent to be Acquired at all, but as Peter Freilinger, to get to know and to help me even as I help them.

More than that, though, is the fact that there is no single “mission” that is so compelling I would turn all of myself to that – well, except for love, but that’s another essay.  I’ve been a part of a number of “missions” that, really, have had nothing to do with me – but intellectually I could understand and endorse them, and ultimately, the love of a group of people for that ideal made them sympathetic to me as well.  But importantly, it made those people sympathetic; their mission was what it was, and ultimately was only important in defining them.  They have their mission, which validates them and brings them meaning; I find my meaning in them.  And oddly, I also sympathize with the singular individuals I know – the ones who reject conformance to any external mission or group, who need their independence in its absolute entirety – in no small way because of the same thing.  Their love for their own independence inspires something akin to sympathy, to a desire to help, if nothing else to help in carving out the space they would need to have that independence.

In that sense, I almost feel incapable of being in either camp.  I’m too skeptical and curious to ever be satisfied with one mission, one purpose, being the sine qua non of living.  Being wholly individual – uniquely talented, quirky, with an independent streak and a need to sense the freedom to live as myself – is essential to me.  But yet that is not enough either.  I need to explore the sense of connection I feel to the world around me, to other people but also to the earth and everything else in it.  And I want to explore those connections with people who are of every shade of the spectrum between collectivist, communitarian worldviews and radically charged independence.

A number of people in the last few days have described me as an “inside outsider” and that makes sense to me in this context: I’m in search of balance, and part of my sense of purpose is to explore the extremes and help them understand the middle way.  I engage and become an “insider,” but not in the sense of endorsing and buying into a worldview in its entirety.  I’m doing so from the perspective of trying to explore.  This holds both for those people and environments which are tightly bound in purpose and in identity, and for those people and environments who are radically open, who reject connection and seek to explore their individual world without constraints or compromise.  Whether it’s because of the experience of my own life or because of the change in the world around us, though, those extremes seem to me to be intensifying, and the notion of a dialogue between them – or even a dialogue with a sympathetic and curious outsider – seems to be fading quickly.

So we don’t live in a world of balance, and maybe because I want to engage the world on its terms (I’m prepared, in other words, to accept the world as I find it, and I’m not railing to define it on my own terms), I seem attracted to both people and places that trend towards the extremes.  But as an outsider, I forget about the safety and the certainty that living at either extreme provides, and I forget that while maintaining balance may be a kind of ideal, it is extremely hard to do over the long run.  And if I’m writing the sales pitch for the way of balance, I have to admit that superficially, it’s not great.  It’s painfully lonely – balance is always defined individually; even another person with the same mindset will be balancing from a different perspective – and it involves facing your own blindness and inadequacies square on.  Even though it enables me to feel more and more confident that I’m not ignoring or missing anything, that sense doesn’t hold me in its arms and tell me that I’m loved, or that I’m good, or that I’m on the right track.  Most people – and understandably so, at every point on the continuum of their desires for the world – just want be in a world in which they feel accepted, comfortable, safe, and happy.  I want happiness, too, but I want it to come only with the kind of honesty and responsibility that takes lifetimes to own up to.

Trying to do that is, really, repellent to most people – not so much in the way that they would say “you are repellent to me”, but definitely in the way that says “what you’re trying to do is difficult and implicitly rejects the consistency and power of my worldview, and having you around just reminds me of something that I can’t do or won’t do or see no point in doing.”  There’s usually a point, moreover, where other people feel a sense of betrayal.  By seeking the balance – by implicitly saying that any extreme isn’t enough – I end up looking like I’m a traitor to the cause.  When I’ve tried to indicate that there isn’t any other cause I’m supporting – that indeed, I’m trying to see the strings across all potential causes – the charge comes back in the same form: admitting that individuality isn’t enough, or conversely, that collective identity is also not enough, I’ve renounced that version of the true faith and thus require a form of exile (or for the most collectivist of my friends, I require additional proselytizing).  I’ve been lucky to find a distantly assembled collection of friends who are in the same boat, but happiness remains elusive.

It’ll take three or four days to drive to Texas.  Not quite yet, mind you – I’ve got a summer in Maine ahead of me, so probably a couple of months before I head southwest.  Plus the A/C in my car is on the fritz.  No way I’m driving to Texas without working air con.  It’ll go into the shop on Thursday.

I drove back to the subscale cool neighborhood after the interviews ended.  There’s a good small bookstore there and I bought two books for the plane back to Maine.  I went to the leasing office and toured an apartment – perfect for the dog and I, yes, I could live here.  I put my name on a list for September and October availability.  I had a beer and watched families play in a small splash park in the central square, and then headed to the airport.

Back in Maine, yesterday I went on a guided walk with the dog.  It was humid and hot for Maine – although almost pleasant compared with Texas.  The dog is showing signs of age, the late June weather a bit much for him even though his eyes were bright and he looked at me sadly when the walk was over.  Several people I knew from other walks were also there, and the conversation flowed lightly for a couple of hours.  In my mind I was thinking, I’ll be moving again soon.  Or have I just been moving all the time?  Am I just movement?