Let us all be from somewhere.

I will never get coffee from the Grand Rapids-based coffee shop that took over a local coffee shop on Eighth Street in Holland. If I wanted their coffee, I would go to Grand Rapids, which I do not do with great frequency. Grand Rapids is a fine town if you need an Apple Store or a theater that shows niche movies or a very specialized medical procedure, but we can handle coffee just fine on our own.

The coffee shop is the latest in the trend of Grand Rapids things that are encroaching on Holland. A bar from Grand Rapids opened on Eighth Street a few years ago. The Spectrum Health system seems to be getting ever nearer as if to offer an alternative to our own independent Holland Hospital, which is perfectly good so far as I am concerned.

I would never want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but a person really could start to think that Grand Rapids was planning a takeover. It was never enough for them that Holland has to be in the same media market and hear their weather and their traffic reports every morning. They will settle for nothing less than total domination — one great West Michigan megalopolis of identical coffee shops and behemoth health systems.

Holland may be one-sixth of the size of Grand Rapids, but we are our own thing. We are fiercely independent and proud of it. The Holland Sentinel continues to publish and deliver daily, years after the Grand Rapids Press was gobbled up by a large media corporation. Our hospital is Holland Hospital, which answers to no great conglomerate. Our reliable electricity, delicious tap water, miraculous heated sidewalks, and gigabit broadband are delivered by the Holland Board of Public Works, which all the people of Holland have all owned together since 1893. It is all ours and ours alone.

Holland is a special place because it is a real place. It has its own culture and community. It is different from other places. People from Holland are not from “near Grand Rapids” or “northwest of Kalamazoo.” We are from Holland.

The Grand Rapidsification of Holland concerns me not because I have anything against Grand Rapids, but because I value being from a place that is different from other places. We have our own collection of people and cultures and institutions. We have a civic spirit and a shared local identity. This is what makes us who we are. Being from a unique place makes me who I am.

To be truly from a place — to feel a total level of investment in it — is an incredible gift, and it is increasingly rare for people my age. Much of this is because development in the United States in the last fifty years has favored the construction of absolutely placeless places in which walking is impossible, people have no real reason or occasion to know those around them, and the environment is indistinguishable from any other. We have managed, through chain restaurants and Amazon, to build a nation of places that are, to borrow a phrase from one of this week’s Distractions, “not worth caring about.”

I had a professor in college who insisted that the word “community” has become entirely meaningless. It is not a statement with which I agree entirely, but I see where she was coming from. Local high school football mascots decorating a wall at an Applebee’s do not a community make. That the electronics section of Target is on a different side in one particular exurb is not the kind of distinction around which somebody can build a local identity.

What, then, makes a place that is worth caring about — a place with a real sense of identity and community? It is not an easy answer, but things like sidewalks and parks come to mind as places where people can organically see others and feel a part of something bigger. Civic institutions, too, like community pools and, yes, local coffee shops make a big difference.

Even the minutia of daily life creates a sense of place. Visitors to Holland are greeted at any entry point to the city with a sign laying out the rules for overnight parking on the street. At the right time of year, the smell of pickles or manure will blanket a part of town if the wind is just so. The train from Chicago comes through at the same time each evening with its distinctive whistle. There are windmill cookies near the grocery checkout. No other place has this exact combination that weaves a sort of local fabric.

For many Americans, placeless places are the only affordable places to live, which perhaps explains why nearly a quarter of people my age do not know any of their neighbors. It is hard to have a community identity and feel truly from somewhere when that is the case.

Holland (and Grand Rapids) both have the happy distinction in my mind of being real places (though some of the outlying suburbs are another matter entirely). Most nights, I do not lie awake in fear that the people of Grand Rapids have some great plan to gobble up Holland and transform it into Grand Rapids West. I am grateful, though, to be from a place that feels special enough to be worth defending from the coffee carpetbaggers. Then again, I do not even drink coffee.

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Distractions

Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.

“The Ghastly Tragedy of the Suburbs,” a TED talk by James Howard Kunstler.

I cannot think of eighteen minutes that have been more influential to my thought and ceaseless rage in the last decade than this talk.

“If there is one great catastrophe about the places we’ve built — the human environments we’ve made for ourselves in the last fifty years — it is that it has deprived us of the ability to live in a hopeful present.”

“A Primer” by Bob Hicok. Originally published in the New Yorker.

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go

to be in Michigan. The right hand of America

waving from maps or the left

pressing into clay a mold to take home

from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan

forty-three years. The state bird

is a chained factory gate. The state flower

is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical

though it is merely cold and deep as truth.

A Midwesterner can use the word "truth,"

can sincerely use the word "sincere."

In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.

When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio. 

There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life

goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,

which we're not getting along with

on account of the Towers as I pass.

Then Ohio goes corn corn corn

billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget

how to be from Michigan when you're from Michigan.

It's like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.

The Upper Peninsula is a spare state

in case Michigan goes flat. I live now

in Virginia, which has no backup plan

but is named the same as my mother,

I live in my mother again, which is creepy

but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,

suddenly there's a pouch like marsupials

are needed. The state joy is spring. 

"Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball"

is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,

when February hasn't ended. February

is thirteen months long in Michigan.

We are a people who by February

want to kill the sky for being so gray

and angry at us. "What did we do?"

is the state motto. There's a day in May

when we're all tumblers, gymnastics

is everywhere, and daffodils are asked

by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes

with a daffodil, you know where he's from.

In this way I have given you a primer.

Let us all be from somewhere

Let us tell each other everything we can.