Homing

Issue 38 • Fall 2018 • Nonfiction

2nd Place Nonfiction
2018 Summer Contest

“Homing” is about finding home through missing it. It’s about pigeons and floods and coal country and monogamy, but it’s also an eloquent, sensitive exploration of what it means to find beauty in places that other people don’t notice, and what it means to find yourself belonging to a place, or not belonging enough. More than anything, it’s alive to the complexities of how so many experiences can feel several different ways at once.
– Leslie Jamison

The peace is partly in being free of the suspicion that pursued me most of my life, no
matter where I was, that there was perhaps another place I should be, or would be happier in.

—Wendell Berry

The Flood 

Noah was the first man to use a bird to deliver a message. His ark reached the steeple of Mount Ararat, a dormant volcano in far eastern Turkey, in the first six months of the global flood. It was crowded. Hanging from the rafters, swinging through the rough sea, were cauldrons of bats and passels of possums. Skittering into corners were glares of cats and caravans of camels and clusters of arachnids. Lounging across the floor like frat boys were sleuths of bears, gangs of buffalo, and a congregation of apes. Lions paraded themselves along the catwalk of the ship. Pods of whales and swarms of eels hunkered in saltwater pools in the hull, while a bevy of otters and a bale of turtles sat half-sunk in small streams of freshwater worn into cordwood. 

Noah did not sleep. He was constantly caretaking. He fed each animal group every day, he cleaned up their shit, he broke up fights between predator and prey, he cradled those who were homesick, most often the two-toed sloths and the ravens. He waited, his boat periodically banging along the side of the iceberg-like mountain, for three months before he noticed the earth begin to change. He opened his hands like the spine of a book and a dove flew out. It returned to him a week later like a boomerang. In its beak it carried the silvery sprig of an olive tree. The seas that flooded the earth had seeped back to the underwater portals from where they came. According to the Bible, the land was ready for Noah to restore the planet. After a year aboard a floating zoo, Noah eagerly returned home. 

His animals, whom he had mothered for the longest year of his life, slowly shook off the dust from their hackles and feathers, their fins and their scales. They licked the parts that were dirty, scraped their claws along rocks to sharpen them, stretched their wings in their caves like an updraft of hope. They blinked as Noah opened their doors, pulled back the curtains, unlocked the skylights and let the sun pour into their pens. Their knees buckled as they stood and their hooves felt tender. But one by one they all began to walk and then paddle and then gallop towards the open door of the ark. The giraffes and the dolphins nearly crushed Noah in their eagerness. The sloths and the ravens gave Noah a nod but every other animal began their migration home without a backward glance. Noah felt heavy. He sank down to his knees and they were quickly swallowed by muck. He ran his hands through his white beard and felt it matted, smelling a bit like piss. He watched them go, and he felt relieved and suddenly bereft. 

His family, his wife and his sons and their wives, crowded in the doorway behind him, scarcely believing the foothill of mud and wildflowers that stretched out before them. They were hesitant. What if they forgot how to put one foot in front of the other? What if they forgot how to plow, how to milk, how to grind, how to set aflame, how to procreate, how to saw, how to construct, how to collect water and let it pour over their hair? 

Below them Noah was crying. He could barely see the herd of animals in front of him through the blur of his own flood. He would miss the ark like a spreading cancer. He’d live out his days getting drunk and cursing his progeny. He couldn’t remember where he’d come from, only that something was missing. 

The Cave 

When I was twenty-one, I followed a man into Mammoth Cave. We walked down steps carved out of limestone. The summer air lowered with each stair like we were descending into a cooler. The railing next to me was wet, and the condensation glided under my hand. My palm smelled like iron. The sky overhead was bright blue like the man’s turquoise t-shirt. The dense rock in front of us was the color of milky tea, the same color as his hands. The mouth of the cave was wide and its roof hung over like a sitting porch. The man reached the iron gate along a slick path of worn rock. He took out a key, unlocked the iron bars, and slid open the door, motioning for me to go in first. 

I passed through the door, about the size of a kitchen window, like I was re-entering a womb. It was cool, dark, and quiet. I felt so detached from my body, I could have been floating. Somewhere, I heard the gate shut behind me, somewhere, the sound of crickets along the wall. My hand brushed the rumpled side of a stalagmite. It rose from the ground like a column, its smooth curves a potion of mud, minerals, sinter, pitch, and the urine of wood rats skittering across cave floors. I was underground and entrenched. But I felt, suddenly, like the world in front of me was limitless. 

Mammoth Cave is the largest known cave system on Earth. It unspools for over 405 miles of known passageways. It’s twice as long as the second longest cave system in the world, a series of underwater caverns in Mexico. While explorers have mapped this length, the subterranean systems are still vastly unknown with each new tunnel leading to another new tunnel. According to explorers, there is “no end in sight.” 

The caves below Kentucky began forming over ten million years ago. In an assembly during third grade, a park ranger came into my gymnasium at Alvaton Elementary School, a small county brick building surrounded by rural neighborhoods, ponds, narrow two lane roads, and farmland. His shiny leather boots squeaked across the shiny yellow floor. He clicked through a slideshow of caves and he told us about the karst system: how water had spent a millenia seeping through limestone rock until it formed openings underground. We knew these as sinkholes. They were strewn across the landscape like horse chestnuts. Everyone’s backyard had a sinkhole. None were roped off. Kids could just tell by the slope of the ground, the shortness of a tree. The park ranger showed us photos of cave crickets, eyeless cave shrimp, bats. 

The Dove 

The messenger bird referred to as a dove in the Bible could also be the common pigeon, known as the rock dove. The pigeon is an empire builder. The pigeon directed Noah and his progeny to a new world. For Genghis Khan, the pigeon founded the largest geographic dynasty ever known, the Mongol Empire, by flying between communication posts. For the ancient Romans, the pigeon aided Julius Caesar in capturing Gaul, or what is now modern-day France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Switzerland along with corners of Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. The same pigeons were used by Prussians to end the Franco-American war after the Siege of Paris, the same war that allowed for the rise of the German Empire. During World War I, Germans used them as photographers, strapping cameras to the pigeon’s bellies for aerial reconnaissance. The French used them to carry casualty records, coded plans, and messages of victory or defeat. Anyone who impeded the journey of their flying cavalry was sentenced to death. The U.S. Army even used them. One valiant American pigeon was shot on his journey but flew home to his coop, delivering his message before dying of his wounds. 

Carrier pigeons excelled as territorial messengers because of their strong homing instinct. Homing, or the impulse and ability to return home after traveling over a vast distance, over a long time, or over unfamiliar territory, is not exclusive to pigeons. Domestic pets are said to have this strong instinct. In the 1993 movie Homeward Bound a trio of animals — the wise golden retriever, the slapstick bulldog puppy, and the independent feline — flee a California ranch for their family in San Francisco. They navigate dense forests, run through golden plains, climb mountains, and cross strong, tumbling rivers. The whole region is foreign to them, but eventually they make it home. 

Seabirds are said to follow the sun and the smells of open water back to their nests. The wandering albatross, a bird with a wingspan of up to eleven feet, with white feathers and a yellow bill that fades to grey at its beak, can return to remote islands after flying thousands of miles away. They can return to the very nest where they parted from their mates months before. Dung beetles use the milky way. Mole rats, the familiar curves of underground burrows. Sea turtles, landmarks like coral and groves of plankton and ocean currents. Salmon use olfaction, or smell, to find their way back to the rivers where they spawned to spend one earnest season swimming upstream to procreate. Lobsters use the magnetic orientation of the earth. 

Although people have theories, the way animals find home is still a bit of a mystery. We don’t know exactly how they return to mates or nests or landmarks or regions or rocks or tunnels or perches or coops. Only that they do, and that in lonely walks at dusk through foreign cities, in sun-dappled afternoons staring out coffeeshop windows, in the quiet shatterings of hospital rooms and public buses and airplanes and college campuses and refugee camps and shelters and apartment complexes, we wish we could too. 

The Cave, Part Two 

In Mammoth Cave, the man and I sat on a rock wall next to a beaten path. We could hear visitors walking through tunnels that would eventually lead to ours. We turned off our headlamps and felt ourselves disappear in the darkness. I heard him shuffle and it sounded very far away. 

“Where are you?” I asked. 

In six months, the man in the cave would move to a Pacific Island while I moved to the West Coast. We were ill-fated. Once, in bed, he turned to me crying and said he was worried he was only with me so he wouldn’t have to feel alone. I soothed him. At the time, I thought he was my home. If only he could follow the sun or the milky way or the tunnels or the ocean currents back to me. I am twenty-seven now, and in the six years since we parted ways, I’ve seen him once. He was across the street. We waved. 

But then, in the cave, he leaned forward. He put his hands on my knees and kissed me. I smelled chai and musty clothes. 

“There you are,” I said. 

The Kentucky River 

I drove to Wendell Berry’s home from a road that twisted with the curves of the Kentucky River. It was narrow and dark and the driveway up to the white paneling of his farmhouse was steep. While my new boyfriend, Colin, fiddled with the keys, I got out of the passenger side and stood with one foot near my seat and one on the concrete. I saw the river, the small writing house that overlooked it, the steep Kentucky hill that blossomed with purple clover and daisies. Berry walked around the corner from his back porch. He wore a long green coat, tall muck boots, and a hat. He said something about being out with the goats. He invited us inside. 

We spent two hours drinking glasses of water at his kitchen table. Berry quoted from Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic,” he talked about joining the NRA to shoot Amazon drones off his doorstep, he mentioned strongly worded letters he’d written to the Sierra Club, and he listened patiently while we told him about Montana ranches and landscapes and loneliness. Colin, only one year after moving with me to Montana, talked about missing home. He wanted to return to Kentucky soon. He missed it like a constant ache, like a broken toe that won’t heal or a knuckle that is always bruised. Small but consistent. I nodded in agreement. 

Berry told us that he admired his wife Tanya for being brave enough to leave California’s Mill Valley and retreat to Kentucky and sheep and tobacco and horses with him. It was a conscious choice for Berry to live and work in his home state. Berry told us about his grandson who wanted to stay home and farm while Berry encouraged him to move out of state, or at least out of the county, to explore. He said, “I hope my grandson moves away before coming home. There’s something in the desire to come home that can only manifest after you leave.” 

A year later, it’s manifested. We leave the West. We move home. 

Home Run 

Through elementary, middle, and high school I treaded water through the public school system in Warren County, Kentucky. At the same time, I ran. From my house to the stop sign three miles away, I passed half a dozen barns, three donkeys, small herds of cows, tiger lillies, a smattering of yappy dogs, two ponds, woodlands, and a trampoline. I loved it because the road was shady with oaks and maples, the charcoal pavement smooth and free of yellow lines. My runs most often ended at a dilapidated barn and an open field of wheat that stretched across the small hills of Southcentral Kentucky to the waning bar of sunlight. Sometimes I stopped to pick up turtles and carry them back to grass. Other times because the light was dappling in a way against the dark green that was beautiful. I sometimes ran that route with my eyes closed. I never stumbled. I never got lost. My eyes always flickered open at the right moment: a crack, a tree root, a stop sign. Then I started again. 

I didn’t run again with the same joy until I moved, at twenty-two, to the coast of northern California. I lived in a small town, called Fort Bragg, limping along through tourism after a Redwood logging boom and bust. There I ran the forested trail from my red house on Highway 21 to the woods and the No Trespassing sign a mile later. I ran along the headlands after work. I didn’t get very far. It was sandy, I was out of running shape, and there were so many things to look at. I was also very sad; I had just broken up with the man in the cave. On the weekends I found a trail between two peninsulas of private property. The first half was a boardwalk between stands of eucalyptus trees that pushed skyward in soft peeling trunks. The second half was sand and dirt and brambles and a narrow trail that led to the edge of a cliff covered in a coastal succulent called icefrost. It was sacred. Of the five times I’ve returned since I moved away, I’ve found my way to this secret trail on each visit. 

The same year, I spent the summer in Berkley. I wandered through entire afternoons following the trail of gardens that outline the East Bay. Honeysuckle sweetened the sidewalks; passion flower vines twirled out of chain link fences; blackberry bushes blossomed before they bore fruit; lemon trees hung heavy with their oval suns; rosemary and lavender grew wild within the easements; manzanita held onto the hills in polished reds; gardens blossomed into succulents, poppies, agave, sunflowers, roses, protea and tulips. I once hiked six miles through the city in sandals just to visit the Botanical Garden. And then I walked six miles home. My feet had blisters but I could see the ocean while I smelled eucalyptus and walked. I was so happy the memory sometimes surprises me. I’ve never gone back. 

My favorite runs happened in Montana when I was twenty-five. I went early, when the sun was turning the skyline red and then lavender and then gold. The cars were just headlights and I ran from my front porch up a hill to a ditch of fast moving water, and then further up to the base of the Rims, a tall line of sandstone that surrounded the industrial city of oil refineries and train tracks and the fat snake of the Yellowstone River. From up there the city spiraled like a blanket being aired out, at the moment when it’s still floating and hilled in the air. I ran in the cold and the heat and up and down and it was often quiet, and I learned to run thirteen miles and sometimes even a little more. 

Running, for me, has always felt like a way of belonging to a place. I memorize the land below me — sand to dirt to brambles to concrete to rock to grass and back again; the feeling of sage or eucalyptus or pine cones beneath my sneakers feels familiar and comforting. When I run with my eyes closed the sun paints my eyelids yellow and I feel as much a part of the universe as any time. Running is like my old Sunday church service; in many ways, it has become my religion. 

Since moving back to Kentucky I’ve kept up these long runs. I can leave my house and put a dozen miles beneath the padding of my shoes before I hit my doorstep again. I haven’t gotten lost but I also haven’t found anywhere to run without cars and sidewalks and stores and dead ends. It feels like there’s something on my ankle weighing me down, some sort of message like, try again, like I haven’t found my home yet. I’m here but I’m not yet roosting. 

Cercis Canadensis 

The Eastern Redbud tree is native to the eastern seaboard. Its reach spreads from Ontario, Canada, where I was born, all the way to northern Florida. It blooms in the first three weeks of spring. Each year their buds still feel like a gift. Their blossoms litter the streets, the highways, flake down the walls of limestone, curl across lakes. Their petals are coral, periwinkle, lavender, and bright magenta. They twist through the woodlands of the Appalachian foothills like a ribbon. In the mountains it’s known as the possum and venison. 

The leaves of the Eastern Redbud are eaten by caterpillars, some of which will eventually become the Lo Moth. The Lo Moth has plumy antennae and velvety yellow wings. On their hindwings is a bluish eyespot meant to ward off predators; it’s looking right at you. The moth only lives a little over a week. During that time it may attach itself to lemon-colored vinyl siding or a yellow tulip poplar or goldenrod. It may flutter into lamp posts and front porch lights. It may not live long, but it will stay in the same county where it was born. I have lived in at least twenty different counties. I am constantly forming a new chrysalis, pushing myself back out, pulling myself back in. 

Laurel County, Kentucky is in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It is green and rolling like a child’s drawing of farmland. My in-laws live here, on the same 54 acres where Colin grew up. When I visit, I take a daily walk, or two, to the outskirts of a field on the other side of the utility line from their house. The old hayfield is just under seven acres and a neighbor mows it a few times a year. It’s full of blackberries and milkweed, the bright orange of asclepias, and soft rugs of clover. There is a hill that divides the land, sloping up with an island of evergreens in the middle that was the start of a Christmas tree farm when Colin was little. The top of the hill flattens out in two perfect acres before it meets Blakely Road. 

At dawn, I sit with my in-laws on their back deck, and we throw rubber frisbees and old golf balls down the hill for the dogs to chase. The ritual comes after coffee. It is sandwiched around a walk in the woods that grow into a crest at the bottom of the same hill. Depending on the day, I wear the green rain boots I keep in their basement to splash in Horse Creek. Other times, I bring a book to identify wildflowers like trilliums, purple aster, white phlox, or crownbeard. Learning this land feels important to me. It seems easiest to begin in the brightest spots, the patch of coneflower, the surprise of a mayapple bloom beneath a wet, broad leaf, the feathering of aster along the edge of a field. I have a dog who is two, who I brought back from Montana. She has the markings of a cattle dog but the appetite of a labrador and the attitude of a pitbull. She is fast, hungry, and a bit ferocious. She runs through the fields with her sleek black body of a seal splayed out and torpedo-like. She’s not uncertain at all. She loves it here. 

A year after we moved back to Kentucky, my father-in-law bought a John Deere mower with an implement for the plow because he thought I might use it one day to grow flowers. I had spent the past few years working sporadically on farms, for florists. When I published my first story online, he uncorked a bottle of Beaujolais. I’d never seen him with anything but a juice glass full of Bota Box Merlot. Is that what love is? Is that how you stumble back home? Here’s the tractor, here’s the wine, here’s the walk through the woods, the sled down the hill, the stack of lumber for the wood stove, the frisbee for your dog. Here’s the coffee in the morning, the sunset at night. Welcome home. 

The Eastern Rosebud is tied to a place. So is the Lo Moth and so is my partner. I’d like to believe I can be too. 

Belief 

Why do I want so badly to feel the same homing instinct for Kentucky? That feeling, in its own way, feels like the religion of my childhood. I desperately want to believe I can stay. I doubt I know how. 

Perhaps I want to feel rooted in Kentucky because I am an idealist. Environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams wrote an essay called “The Wild Card” that argued the most radical thing a person could do was stay home and create community. Especially, she argued, in places that are unassuming. In places not yet protected. I hoped if more people cared about Kentucky, and the South generally, it could become a special place like Yosemite or Moab or Glacier or the Rockies; the western landscape I love and miss. Its mountains might not be cut off for coal. It streams might not be filled with toxic sediments. The health of its people might matter. It might have a national voice. 

Or perhaps it’s because of my partnership with Colin. I respect long-term commitments. I want a memory keeper to share a life with. Because of this, I desire very much to feel settled in Kentucky. Colin’s parents are here. His community is here. Our dog is here, next to me, chewing a bone and listening to the rain on our roof. They may never leave again. When I worked as a tour guide for a travel company that took me across the country for weeks at a time, Colin told me I couldn’t have it both ways. I couldn’t have my home and my life of continual motion. But both ways is the only way I want it. 

In the end, I made a compromise. I could commit to a temporary stint. I could hope it would lead to longevity. I moved home to go to graduate school for two years. I flattered myself that I was following a long line of Kentucky literary greats who left the state only to return to the heartland years later, wiser about their heritage and more jaded about the cities outside it. But I almost didn’t. I wanted to go to California to study with one of my favorite writers whose essays are about wandering, adventure, and grinding into independence. One afternoon, on our porch in Montana, I went over the pros and cons with Colin. “Aren’t Frank X Walker and Erik Reece teaching there?” he said. “And didn’t Gurney Norman and Wendell Berry graduate from the University of Kentucky? I mean, if it were me, it’s a no brainer.” 

I decided later that night to go to Kentucky. After we’d moved, Colin mentioned offhandedly that he’d never read Walker or Reece. 

It was a lie. 

It was my decision. 

It was both. 

Exploration 

John Muir is one of the most famous naturalists and protectors of wild lands in America. But he is not from here. He was born in Scotland. His earliest memories began when he was three. He took walks. He wandered the coastline and the countryside. While he was young, his grandfather held his hand. As he grew older, he started avoiding his father’s strict religious teachings for walks out of doors. After his family immigrated to America when Muir was 11, he returned to Scotland only once in his life, when he was 55. But he always carried a book of poems by Robert Burns in his backpack. He never lost his accent. 

Muir was said to have a “restless spirit.” After his family moved to Wisconsin, Muir attended college at age 22 but never graduated because his eclectic mix of chemistry, botany, and geology courses never amounted to a degree. When the Civil War started he moved to Canada to avoid the draft, hiking much of the Niagara Escarpment and Georgian Bay until he ran out of money. He worked at various factories constructing rakes and wagon wheels until, at the cusp of thirty years old, he went temporarily blind in one eye from a workplace accident, and upon retrieving his sight, decided to devote his life to the natural world around him. He took off on a 1,000-mile walk from Kentucky to Florida. From Florida, he sailed to Cuba, then New York City, and then California. After reaching San Francisco, Muir traveled to Yosemite, where he fell in love with Giant Sequoias, waterfalls, granite cliffs, and wildflowers. He built a cabin for himself on Yosemite Creek. 

Although northern California became Muir’s home, he did not stop leaving. He traveled to Alaska at least four times and canoed up the Stikine River in British Columbia, recording over 300 glaciers. When his health began to fail him, he climbed Mount Rainier in Washington as treatment. Before airplanes, he visited Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, and Australia. He visited most of the western parklands of the United States. 

In much of Muir’s writing on nature, he refers to nature as home. He once told a visitor at his ranch in Martinez, California: “This is a good place to be housed in during stormy weather, … to write in, and to raise children in, but it is not my home. Up there,” he pointed towards the Sierra Nevada, “is my home.” 

Karst 

There is a reason John Muir never moved back East after he discovered Yosemite. Kentucky doesn’t look like the West. It is round where I prefer peaks, green where I want grey granite and gold cottonwoods, landlocked where I want the edge of salty blue ocean. But there is also a hayfield on my in-laws property that looks like dawn no matter what time of day. There is a creek near the county jail where bushes and brambles tower into a tunnel. There is a dammed lake surrounded by sandstone that, in some bays, on quiet days, still feels wild. Under my feet, there are caverns of uncharted territory. 

James Baker Hall, a Kentucky writer, was once asked: “Why are there so many great poets from Kentucky?” 

“It’s in the caves,” Hall said. “It’s all underground.” 

Eventually, Mammoth Cave will begin to erode. The sinkholes will sink in, water from the Green River and Nolin River will wear away at its sides, as will rainfall and wind and the freeze and thaw. Thousands of years from now, it will be a canyon. Mammoth Canyon, perhaps. I will be long gone by then, but I imagine it could look like Moab or the Grand Canyon or the wild terrain of Wyoming or the low hills and deep gorges of Oregon. I wish I could see it now. I wish I could love it now. 

The man who took me into Mammoth Cave led me into a large cavern the size of my elementary school gymnasium. He showed me a rock to sit on, and then he turned off his flashlight and walked away into total darkness. It was silent. I could hear my ears humming. I imagined the faintest breaths of life in a place so big, so black, so empty, so unexplored. I imagined the heartbeats of cave crickets, the splash of blind fish, the quiet overlapping of the wings of a bat as they hung off the ceiling somewhere. But really, there was nothing. Suddenly, the smallest light, so yellow it was almost pink, shone in a corner. It grew wider and brighter as the man walked from behind a house-sized boulder into muffled sound near the center of the room. 

It was a magic trick. 

It was sunrise. 

It was both. 

We don’t have a history of using carrier pigeons in Kentucky. But we do have a history with canaries. Before miners had the technology to measure the amount of noxious gases in a cave, they would bring canaries down in bell-shaped aviaries, their yellow wings fluorescent against the charcoal walls of the mine. They sent messages: if they chirped, everyone was safe. If they stopped chirping, the miners should get out of the shaft, quick. We have a lot of coal in Kentucky. It is the crushed bones of Noah’s brethren, the decomposed bodies of the plants that regrew after the flood waters slithered away. The Appalachian Mountains used to be as high as the Rockies. Their limestone towers were peaked and valleyed. It’s the same geography I miss. The canary still chirps: you’re here you’re here you’re here. It’s all eroded. It’s all underground. You’re home. 

I try to listen. 

Issue 53 • Spring 2026

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry