(Un)Settling America a Thesis Presented to the Faculty of The
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(Un)Settling America A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Phillip A. Russell May 2018 © 2018 Phillip A. Russell . All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled (Un)Settling America by PHILLIP A. RUSSELL has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Eric LeMay Associate Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT RUSSELL, PHILLIP A, M.A., May 2018, English (Un)Settling America Director of Thesis: Eric LeMay My thesis titled, (Un)Settling America, is a series of essays that documents a road trip I embarked on during the summer of 2015 to produce a podcast about death, belief, and metaphysical topics. The essays within this collection explore my personal ruminations about home, identity, place, and travel through the use of personal anecdotes, research, and travelogues. The temporality of the collection is told primarily through a linear structure, but it does deviate from time to time as the road trip unfolds on the page. 4 DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my parents, Cyrisse and Wendell Russell, who instilled a yearning in me to explore the world and ask questions. To Ben, Evan, and Shira, without them this journey would never have been possible, and to all the people who shared with me an intimate look into their lives. 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to thank Eric LeMay and Dinty W. Moore for fostering an environment in workshop that allowed me to produce these essays, and my peers for taking up so much of their time reading and responding to my work. These essays wouldn’t be what they are without all of you. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ...........................................................................................................................3 Dedication .......................................................................................................................4 Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................5 List of Figures .................................................................................................................7 Introduction .....................................................................................................................9 Starting and Stopping, Moments from a Summer Road Trip .......................................... 21 The Only Black Man in Medina, North Dakota .............................................................. 24 On Things Left Behind .................................................................................................. 38 Crossing Over ................................................................................................................ 51 A Place for the Dead ...................................................................................................... 63 Three Days Before They Remember the Storm .............................................................. 79 True in the Way It Needs to Be ...................................................................................... 99 Work Cited .................................................................................................................. 113 7 LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Travel Map .......................................................................................................8 8 Figure 1. Travel Map 9 Introduction “Eventually, of course, one does stop being an exile. But even a ‘reformed exile’ will continue to practice the one thing exiles do almost as a matter of instinct: compulsive restrospection…When exiles see one place they’re also seeing—or looking for—another behind it.” –Andre Aciman, “Permanent Transience” I. When people ask me, “where are you from?” I never quite know what to say. In fact, my answer changes all of the time. I was born in Reston, Virginia, where I lived for three years before moving to Troy, Michigan. I lived in Troy, Michigan for five years before moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I lived the longest (off and on) for fourteen years. Sometimes, I say that I’m from Virginia and other times Michigan. Maybe this fractured answer comes from being raised by New Yorkers who have a burning desire to be unassociated from the Midwest, despite spending so much time there. The question sends me through a spiral of emotions that all center around home, place, and my relationship to both. What does home mean? Is home where your family lives? Is it where you’ve made a life for yourself? Is it, quite simply, where you return each night? I’ve never quite felt at home in any of the places I’ve lived throughout my life. I’m used to traveling, to leaving one place for another, to transporting boxes to new spaces and keeping them sealed. This is not to say that I do not feel connected to place, quite the contrary, I have visceral feelings when visiting Forest Hills, an area in Grand Rapids where lived the longest and seeing how much has changed from the last time I visited. 10 When I graduated from Michigan State University, like most students, I was thrust into the world head first with one question on my mind: what now? My family had left the state and returned to New York when I’d transferred to the university. I had no job prospects in mind, and I didn’t want to return to Grand Rapids. I felt that if I came back I would be failing, returning to a chapter of my life that I’d already read. I took a risk instead. Three friends and I crowdfunded a podcast, called The LoonCast, that would take us around the country where we’d interview professors, locals, and eccentrics, about topics centering around death, belief, and the metaphysical. While I had every intention of fostering this podcast into something I was proud of, I also viewed the trip as an excuse to travel the country and figure out what was next for me, figure out where I wanted to live and make a life for myself. I was searching for a home I hadn’t yet found. We traveled through twenty-eight states over the course of a month and produced six of our twelve episodes while on the road. I learned a lot about collaboration while working on the show, but one of our main critiques from the folks that knew us was that our personalities didn’t seem to show through in the content. Upon returning from the trip, I realized that there was a lot about that month on the road I hadn’t come to terms with yet. Sure, I’d made a number of episodes exploring large questions like, “why do humans have an inclination to tell stories?” and “what happens after death?” But I hadn’t taken the time to reflect on what the whole experience meant for me, what I got out of galivanting around the country for a month exploring parts of the United States I’d never dreamed of visiting. This collection of essays is an attempt to reconcile with the experiences from that blip in time, to elucidate where 11 exactly I fit in the contemporary conversations revolving around traveling, identity, and place within the landscape of America, especially as a young black man. People go on road trips for all sorts of reasons: to see a landmark, monument, or city; to visit a specific person, to lay a loved one to rest, to pick up or drop off an object; to find a place to settle down, somewhere that you feel comfortable, a home. What all of us must accept when departing on these adventures is our status as visitors, foreigners, and witnesses. That the person we left as will not return with us, even if it takes years to figure that out. Many road trip narratives are centered around a trip that changes the traveler fundamentally, an experience that shows them some greater truth they were unaware of before. Into the Wild shows us, Christopher McCandless, a young and pretentious intellectual man who, after graduation, burns his money and travels the world to find something real. But his noble pursuit ultimately kills him shortly after his realization that life is better spent among people, as opposed to away from them. If anything, my time on the road did not reveal a major life-altering revelation, but instead, fortified a belief I’d had all long: the world is complicated, the more I see of it and the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know anything. I came back from the trip with no greater understanding of myself than when I’d left, in fact, I was angry that I hadn’t changed in some way. Works like Into the Wild had lied to me! I thought. But upon working within the confines of those four weeks I spent abroad to write these essays I realized that I had changed, that while I had returned from the trip, the person that I had become through those experiences was still hanging in the shadows. Writing these essays was a way for me to beckon that person out of the darkness and into the light. 12 The inception of the project came about after I’d written the first draft of “The Only Black Man in Medina, North Dakota,” an essay that appears within my thesis. I realized while writing that essay I hadn’t grappled with the personal experiences I’d faced on the road, that the production of the podcast had masked a lot of the confusion and inner turmoil I had from the whole ordeal. This essay became a blueprint by which I structured many of the essays within my thesis. While the essays all explore different ideas on a literal level, the framework by which I constructed them largely revealed itself to be fairly uniform. Within this particular