Running to Safety
You absolutely can run away from your problems. . . sometimes.
Most of us have been told “you can’t run away from your problems” and that is mostly, partially, kind of true when you are the cause of your problems. I bet you couldn’t convince WWII German refugees that running away wasn’t a reasonable option, though. I know a few young Americans who found refuge in the EU, Canada, Central America, and even Mexico during the Bush II years and the first Trump train wreck. None of them have even hinted that they’d made a mistake or that running away hadn’t been part of their personal problems solution. Since the 2024 election, tens of thousands of Americans have fled the USA and I suspect most have no plans to ever return. I sincerely hope they never regret their decision.
I grew up in a “shithole” part of the country, western Kansas, and the worst decision I think I ever made was to pass through my hometown on the way from Dallas, Texas to Washington state in my early 20s. Thanks to my own lack of car maintenance knowledge and a substantial amount of bad luck, I ended up stuck back in Dodge, doing a crappy job for an even worse employer, for slightly less than a year, and that derailed my life for a solid decade. The lesson I took away from that experience was “don’t stop running until you’re safe.”
For the next 30 years, a half-dozen years in one place was about as long as I was comfortable staying put. I know I had some personal problems that didn’t get addressed, and probably never will be, but changing jobs and moving was always a positive thing for me. For a variety of pretty good reasons, we ended up staying in the Minneapolis/St Paul, MN area for 18 years, the longest Ms. Day and I have lived anywhere in our lives. However, I changed and added jobs, and even my core occupation, several times during that period, including three one-man businesses of my own. I spent more than ¾ of those years taking a chunk of summer off for solo motorcycle “adventures.” When we left the Cities for my first post-retirement trip in 2013, I was ready to stay on the road indefinitely. Thanks to VW’s incompetence, that plan was derailed but we sold our St. Paul house and moved to a smaller town and home in late 2014. Thanks to the Trump social and economic disasters, that was probably my worst move of the last dozen.
We’ve been where we are now for a little more than 10 years and I have been itching to move for at least five years. Our current home was a foreclosed, abused and abandoned dump when we bought it and it’s pretty livable today. It has new-practically-everything, from a basement and lower garage that don’t flood after every mild rain and a full bathroom with a whirlpool to a roof that cost more than my first two houses and 21st Century windows throughout. We’ve practically rebuilt this house. Other than the usual constant maintenance, there is nothing left to do here and I’m bored. I could finish off the workshop-half of the basement into a living space, but . . . why? We already have more living space than we need and if I turned the basement into an apartment, who would be living there?
It’s not the house that I’m bored with, it’s the community and our lack of connection here. I think we’re too weird for rural southern Minnesota and we’re not going to change and either is this very conservative, even backwards, 170-year-old village. I think we landed here when the town was going through a mild burst of activity, post-Great-Recession, but that has mostly filtered away in the last few years. When the two nuclear power plants close in the next decade, Red Wing will lose most of the growth the city enjoyed during its one and only population bubble in the 1970s. Commuting to the Cities for work is an impractical 100-mile-round-trip that almost no one can afford and, as the pandemic work-from-home moment ends, Red Wing is quickly becoming a “old town” mostly full of old, uneducated, retired, timid rural people who have spent their whole lives here. “Repressive” is a polite word for the economic and social environment. This is very much the America that Trumper’s want back when they babble “Make American Great Again” and it is dependent, low-tech, low education, and non-sustainable.
As the United States of America comes unglued, Minnesota is not a bad place to be, but rural Minnesota is just as bigoted, dependent, uneducated and foolish, and fragile as rural America is everywhere. For more than 160 years, the Department of Agriculture had one directive, “keep rural America from going extinct.” Rural Americans voted, twice, for an administration determined to eliminate that government function and sell off American farmland and food production to the highest bidder (probably China). We’re not talking about bright people here. If it were just me, I’d be selling almost everything we own and starting over on the West Coast, as close to the Canadian border as I can get. It’s not just me and the rest of my family are not anywhere nearly as nervous about the downward spiral the country has begun.
Maybe I’m just needing a change. Maybe, this time, a move won’t be an improvement. Maybe I should just settle down and wait to die? I feel like I’m stagnating anytime I’ve been somewhere long enough to get bored with it. I tend to get bored at about three years. “Home” is not a thing for me. I use the word occasionally, but it doesn’t have the same meaning for me that it does for many, or most, people. It just means the structure I’m currently living in, not a place I’m anchored to or have strong feelings for. I’ve called my social status “mid-tech transient” for 50-some years, with strong emphasis on the “transient” part of that description. I think I like the adventure of being unsettled and the anonymity of being new to a place and unanchored to a social system.