home-away-from-home

I’m really not sure what “home” means.

By the time I left for college, I had lived in five states. My dad was in the Air Force. But the one place that felt like “home” was in a state where I had never lived: Williston, North Dakota, where we would travel each summer to visit grandparents and spend time on an open patch of land my parents bought before I was born. And since I left for college, I have moved a half-dozen times more. I have lived in three countries on two continents, and I’m never more conscious of “home” than when I’m leaving one to set up another.

I’ve set up this site to ask what “home” means, especially for people who live in North Dakota now, at the tail end of an oil boom in the Bakken region that caused so many people to pick up and move, either in search of work or to escape the chaos of living in a boomtown. North Dakotans (or at least the ones I know) are used to scoffing at people who dismiss the state as “fly-over country.” They don’t usually think of their state as particularly global, a title they’re happy to leave to the big cities on the coasts.

But the oil boom, which really took off in about 2008, changed that, as suddenly the world converged on their state. Suddenly, about 3 out of 5 people were from somewhere else. Newcomers struggled to find places to live (and were often quite resourceful in making places for themselves), while longtime residents struggled to keep the places they had. Many longtime residents felt that their home — not just their house, but the link between their way of life and the place where they lived — was threatened, although many went out of their way nonetheless to show hospitality to the new people in their midst.

So what does “home” mean out on the oil patch? For many, I think, “home” looks something like the picture at the top of this post. It’s an ad for a man-camp north of Highway 2 about 100 miles east of Williston. “The road to home … away from home.” In one image, it captures the paradoxes of home in a boomtown — home is a place we’re traveling to, a place to rest, but even when we’re there, we’re still not, well, home.

So what does “home” mean to you? What has your experience been of “home” in a boomtown? I hope you’ll share your story. I want to invite people to share pictures and words about what home means to them, and I’ll post them here. There’s no right or wrong — home means what it means, bad and good, ugly and beautiful. If you’d like to submit a post, please email me at conway dot kyle at gmail dot com. I’d love to hear from you.