Where We are From
Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places.
—John Brinkerhoff Jackson, landscape historian.
McCAMMON, IDAHO, IS 1.4 SQUARE MILES, a dot so mere on the map that it’s easily missed beneath the bold font declaring the location of Bannock County’s other, far more prominent town, Pocatello. I’d certainly never heard of McCammon before, and I’m fairly well acquainted with Idaho, at least its bottom-most parts.
If I were to draw an east-west running line from Boise to Idaho Falls, I could shade in nearly everything south of it, having driven on so many of the roads and through so many of the towns—never of my own accord, and never in my own vehicle or on my own dime. The genial cartoon skunk on the Burley gas station sign was my personal welcome to Idaho as a kid on the way to visit grandparents. The skunk was the landmark that announced our arrival, always after dark: We were here, again, in wide, open spaces, accompanied by hours that seemed to stretch out as long as the roads.
It was Idaho that held several nutty uncles and talkative aunts, one tolerant grandma, and one tale-telling grandpa. It’s where my suburban self was introduced to the cracker-barrel concept of meandering on foot down country roads mid-summer to my grandpa’s store, then balancing on knotty wooden fence posts with cousins. It was where I was expected to consume dishes that brought Jell-O together with whipped topping, marshmallows, and fruit from a can, and all manner of casseroles; where I and my brothers and cousins were scolded for fashioning a slide from a hill of wheat kernels in an unattended and unlocked barn. All of this happened in Idaho towns: Melba or Nampa, Pocatello or Twin Falls. But unless I’ve spotted the name in passing on a sign from the freeway, blurred in an overlooked moment of here-to-there, I hadn’t before heard of the town McCammon.
“All your relatives are buried at McCammon,” Grandma told me suddenly. We’d been entertaining ourselves conducting road-trip chitchat, she in the passenger seat next to me, my mom, college-student sister, and my seven-year-old daughter in the back—four generations in the enclosed space of an SUV, a smack of simultaneous cliché and poetry. Nothing of consequence had been said, really; at least nothing else I remember. The important thing was that Grandma and I were sitting next to each other, that we would have this memory of time spent, compounded with all the others that occurred years apart.
“They’re all here,” Grandma went on about the buried relatives, “the Romriells and the Hughes . . .” She trailed off, mentioning cousins who know this already, cousins who care about ancestors, who know names and birthplaces, information about marriages and children. And places of burial. There we were, driving past the bulk of them, resting in their plots in some town I’d only just learned of, had never even thought to want to know the name of. She wasn’t accusing me of anything or saying that my simple ignorance was some crime against my ancestors, however distant. But I felt a brusque sting from somewhere, from a time before mine.
My last drive to Idaho had been more than three years prior for a family reunion on my mom’s side (the same group of travelers, minus one grandma, plus a youngest sister). We first stopped in the town of Melba (my dad’s hometown, and noted by Rand McNally in the same-sized font as McCammon) to visit my paternal grandparents, relying on Mom’s not-infallible memory for directions. The landscape from my point of view was one narrow road and field after another. We guessed at what crops grew in which fields as we drove—slowly—over worn pavement or dust, and I was indifferent, secretly proud not to know what vegetables look like in their unharvested, still-formative stages. As we drove I felt a characteristic, near-physical yearning for block after block of concrete and steel, for the embrace of man’s skyward architecture and construction. For jostling and elbows, for honking and bustling. For people on their way. For me, to be surrounded by these things beckons warm, fuzzy feelings of comfort and safety; to have land and crops and open roads arrayed before me and for my personal space to be an extension of otherwise unbroken space (rather than a courtesy afforded me by societal convention) makes the world all of a sudden rather too big, too generous in a way that is not welcome. It is seeing too much at once, and realizing that not among the bounty of possibilities is there a single hint to the road best taken.
If you’re from Melba, you would know. You would know whose field is whose, and what crops grow where, and you would be familiar with shortcuts and landmarks. But as much as I’ve been to Melba, I don’t possess that knowledge, and I don’t go after it. I like cities. I like turning a corner and finding something I didn’t know was there, instead of turning a corner and not being surprised, because that particular vantage point had been there all along.
***
We can be happy where we are. Here. Now.
—Ezra Taft Benson
I’m a product of the so-called “Mormon Corridor,” but one whose residence does not hold her heart. I live 800 or so miles south of McCammon, Idaho, in Phoenix, Arizona, having arrived here via Salt Lake City. Sandwiched between our eleven years here was a blissful two-year detour in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where we lived for my husband’s work and where we would have liked to have stayed, but governments don’t just let you plunk down a family and call it home. When the contract was up, so was our stint as French Canadians.
The thing about Montreal is that it has layers: winter layers of snow over ice over ages-old rock; cultural layers of people in high-rise apartment buildings, people from across the river or from places like the Seychelles and the Philippines; structural layers of centuries-old architecture alongside the more modern; human transport layers of the underground metro and network of corridors below street level. One could dig forever and still strike something new.
Contrast that with Phoenix, which as the nation’s fifth-largest city, is en route to becoming the most sprawling splat of a metropolitan area. It’s in the desert, and is almost the hottest place that civilized people have ever arrogantly set up house—houses equipped with energy-sucking, ever-running air conditioning. Where many proud Phoenicians see the lack of dense, green vegetation as a welcome showcase for the dips and curves of the earth’s surface, I see barrenness. I see dirt. I see the endless blue skies as an unyielding container, not to mention that I’m bound to my car, because Phoenix is suburban as it gets, a city developed for development’s sake.
Because we’re at odds with this place in which we live, my husband and I are on a constant hunt for our “perfect” place—thumbing our noses all the while biting our tongues, trying to stick to those “I’ll go where you want me to go” guns. So we reminisce about the two years we fancied our little resident Northeast family of four explorers, when we hit the highways in desperate awe of the fullness and number of trees, impressed by the places which grew up organically, instead of in the compressed years of a real estate boom.
Because we’ve long since dashed any small western towns from being on “our list,” seeing how they don’t strike our particular aesthetic chord or march to our speedy tempo, McCammon never stood a chance of being important to me. If ever I am in Idaho it is to do my duty, to maintain familial relationships, to honor my parents. There’s nothing wrong with the state itself; the problem is all mine, and I’m willing to own up to it. It’s just that there is too much that is exposed and unobstructed; there are too many rural routes that, to an outsider, look unnervingly the same.
But I’m not entirely an outsider. I’ve never resided there personally, but I can trace the most recent generations of my family back to Idaho. It’s where my father was raised, where his parents grew up, and where their parents grew up. My mom grew up in Washington and California, but she calls Idaho home because it’s where all her extended family lives and because she spent so much time there as a child that she feels a comforting familiarity with the place. And after forty-odd years in central California, my maternal grandmother is back in Idaho because it’s where she grew up and where most of her family remains. Once her husband passed away she figured she might as well join them to live out her days at “home.”
It’s on this day trip, this two-and-a-half-hour-plus drive from my parents’ house in Salt Lake City to Grandma’s new place in Blackfoot, Idaho—just beyond McCammon—that I realize how much of me is in Idaho. That there are places like McCammon that comprise chunks of my personal history. Idaho is in my blood. This secret nose-wrinkling feeling I’ve harbored for years about Idaho was suddenly not a matter of pride, but a source of inner conflict. I thought about the five of us there on the road, how our lives are not only the sum of what we believe and what we do with our days, but where we are from. And it occurred to me that where we are from isn’t just of necessity those localities on a map where we’ve physically existed, but where those who have gone before us have been, where they were from. I’d always believed in a connection to one’s ancestors, however vague, but until now, I’d been more entertained by plotting my own future. I didn’t expect the drive to Blackfoot to actually be pretty, but it was. Once we’d wound the ascent to higher elevations, we were immediately rewarded with serene scenes of winter, of gentle mountains shrouded in gentler snow. “This is the most dangerous part of the drive,” Grandma said, partly in warning, partly just to share information. “There are a lot of accidents on this stretch of the road.” My fingers automatically gripped the steering wheel at the same time the relief came for a misguided forecast: no snow after all, even for the first week in January.
For once in my life, I wanted to be making this drive. I wanted to spend time with my grandma, to do this nice thing for her of driving her home and seeing her new place. She was getting older, an inevitability I hadn’t witnessed in person over the last several years, so it was sudden in its visual manifestation: her slower movements, her thinner hair, her slight figure just only thickened. As we drove, our intermittent conversations weren’t lengthy but still we revealed small scraps of our makeup, just as much as was appropriate or expected. But when she hit me with that bit about my ancestors being buried at McCammon, I felt the ping. I felt both cheated and ashamed at my ignorance of that chipped fragment of information, that truth that had something to do with my very existence. There is significance in McCammon, a place that holds stories of family members who lived before me, before my mom, before her mom, my grandma.
Effectively chastised—if only by myself—I google McCammon once I’m back home in Phoenix. Its flimsy profile comes up on a website called ePodunk.com. It tells me that McCammon is in Bannock County, that it holds a scant 805 residents, less than half my high school population. The median house value is $79,500 and only 16.9 percent of the population holds a bachelor’s degree. Its land area amasses a mere 1.4 square miles. That’s strangely proportionate to the space I’d been inclined to give McCammon in my consciousness.
Bald numbers, however, do not add up to ancestral narratives, to the underpinning names and faces, body types, inherited diseases, favorite cookie recipes. My heart, a child’s heart, is supposed to be turning to these, my fathers, even if they don’t need to be found, even if all their saving ordinances have been performed by faithful great aunts and uncles, grandparents and distant cousins. They may not need to be found, but perhaps I need to find them, to know that they breathed and worked and soothed babies in coughing fits, that they struggled and fought and cheered. That they sought.
I have never looked for “my place” in the places I have been, or the places in my family’s history. Yet I wonder if McCammon and other towns of my ancestry might somehow hold a clue about my ultimate place, the place where I can not only live my modern life, but where I can also feel at peace. At the same time, I realize that while it certainly matters what my forerunners did with their days, why they chose Bannock County, Idaho, and how that played out in their individual and collective stories, knowing those things isn’t necessarily going to offer any ideas about what I need to feel settled in a place. Or about how I might recognize my place when I finally arrive.
Perhaps the important thing, then, is that I know it’s not only about me. It’s not just about whatever-sized dot I happen to occupy on the map. There are generations upon generations of places. There is a far grander scale.
Trisha Coffman writes for print and web publications and lives in Phoenix with her husband and two daughters. She doesn't think she will ever call Phoenix "home," but she has been pleased to notice that the plants do indeed change, however subtly, with the seasons. If she ever does have the opportunity to move, she will definitely miss the hiking.
