Going home again, kind of — Book tour stop #9: Wichita, February 20 & 22

While driving through Texas a couple weeks back, I heard a country radio song called “You’re Always Seventeen in Your Hometown.” The meaning of the song, I’m sure, pertains to how people in your hometown see you when you come back to visit. But whenever I go back to my hometown of Wichita, I begin to feel seventeen years old without other people’s help. That is, I fall into this strange pattern of activities that appealed to me when I was seventeen years old: watching videos all night; sleeping late; purposely eating frozen pizza; drinking too much beer with my buddies; thinking about girls. Granted, there is little novelty in these activities anymore, but I can’t seem to avoid them when I’m back home.

I think part of the problem is that I stay at my parents’ house when I’m in Wichita, and there’s no room for me there. My old room is an office, my old bed is too small, and there’s no space in the closets and drawers to unload the contents of my backpack. Hence, I think this lazy ritual of video watching and frozen-pizza eating is kind of a subconscious charade I go through as I try to make the place feel like home again.

I recall something that Bill Jenkins posted on the very first installment of this book tour diary. “Struggling with the idea and definition of home,” he wrote, “is the flip side of the idea and definition of Travel. To some extent, all of us confront this question sometime during college, when we either find that our room at home is now a den/office or that the room with our high school pictures and childhood memories no longer seems germane to our life. From then on, it is a feeling out process.” Indeed it is. And, as Diana Moxon noted on that same post, “eventually home becomes a fuzzy, untethered concept, not bound in bricks and mortar but in a sense of ‘now’.”

The thing is, I invariably have a better sense of ‘now’ when I’m traveling around than when I’m in Wichita. I also have a better sense of Wichita when I’m not there, as many people who’ve traveled overseas with me will know. Furthermore, I think that having a stronger sense for your hometown when you aren’t actually in your hometown is part of an ongoing part of the “sense of home” ritual. For instance, when I was on assignment for Conde Nast Traveler in Laos a couple years ago, one of the photographers was a Frenchman who told me that his professional hero was the renowned Life photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. Upon hearing this, I got all excited, since Eugene Smith graduated from Wichita North High School exactly 58 years before I did. The more I gushed about Eugene Smith’s Kansas roots, however, the more the French photographer got confused — since it was obvious that I never knew Smith or his family personally, nor did I aspire to photojournalism. As a big-city Parisian, he couldn’t understand how Eugene Smith had been important to my Midwest industrial-town sense of self. The thing is, the legendary Wichita-bred photojournalist had not just been a matter of regional pride for me growing up; Eugene Smith had been proof that I could be connected to a larger world of excellence.

I don’t think this is a just a Midwestern provincial phenomenon, either. Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights) has expressed a similar feeling about growing up in the San Fernando Valley of southern California. “For many years, I was ashamed of this fact,” he said in a New York Times interview, “thinking that if I was not from the big city of New York I had nothing to say. I have never been in a war, like John Ford. I am not from France, like François Truffaut. I’m not even from Chicago, like David Mamet. When you are young and impressionable, it is important to have some resemblance to those you admire.” For me as a Wichitan, people like Eugene Smith afforded me this resemblance, and inspired me to go on to bigger things in the world beyond Wichita. If you hail from a big cosmopolitan city, it can be hard to understand how important this type of inspiration can be. And, just as the likes of Eugene Smith were important in getting me to think beyond Wichita when I was young, they now seem to be a part of how I define home now that I am no longer in Wichita. In this way, home is a mix of old inspirations as well as place-memories, family, friends, or the present moment.

But this is supposed to be a book tour diary, not the treatise on the meaning of home. I had two Vagabonding book events in Wichita — one at the east-side Borders, and one at Backwoods in Old Town. Both drew around 50 people — which seemed like a low number, since 75% percent of the attendees were people I somehow had personal connections with. Once you weeded out friends, parents of old high school classmates, and my old driver’s-ed teacher, only a handful of people had actually come for the sole purpose of talking about travel (which, considering my readings got good press coverage in Wichita, was kind of disappointing to my sense of vagabonding evangelism).

Nevertheless, it was a fine little reunion. The people in the audience laughed at my high school mullet picture — not just because it’s funny looking, but because they wore mullets back in the eighties as well. Travel advice was dispensed, Middle Eastern politics was discussed, and good memories were recalled. Home or not, it was good to be there.

After I’d wrapped up in Wichita, I was left with only one remaining book event — a rather self-indulgent engagement in New York.