Essay

Please read the article and requirements.

4 pages long

Staying Put
Scott ruSSell SanderS

Scott Russell Sanders is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University.
He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggen- heim Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Arts, and in 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. He is a pro- lific writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are Divine
Animal: A Novel (2014), and a collection of eco-science fiction stories titled Dancing in
Dreamtime (2016).

As a boy in Ohio, I knew a farm family, the Millers, who not only saw but suffered from three
tornadoes. The father, mother, and two sons were pulling into their driveway after church when
the first tornado hoisted up their mobile home, spun it around, and carried it off. With the
insurance money, they built a small frame house on the same spot. Several years later, a second
tornado peeled off the roof, splintered the garage, and rustled two cows. The younger of the sons,
who was in my class at school, told me that he had watched from the barn as the twister passed
through, “And it never even mussed up my hair.” The Millers rebuilt again, raising a new garage
on the old foundation and adding another story to the house. That upper floor was reduced to
kindling by a third tornado, which also pulled out half the apple trees and slurped water from the
stock pond. Soon after that, I left Ohio, snatched away by college as forcefully as by any cyclone.
Last thing I heard, the family was preparing to rebuild yet again.

Why did the Millers refuse to move? I knew them well enough to say they were neither
stupid nor crazy. After the garage disappeared, the father hung a sign from the mailbox that read:
Tornado Alley. He figured the local terrain would coax future whirlwinds in their direction. Then
why not move? Plain stubbornness was a factor: These were peo- ple who, once settled, might
have remained at the foot of a volcano or on the bank of a flood-prone river or beside an
earthquake fault. They had relatives nearby, helpful neighbors, jobs and stores and schools within
a short drive, and those were all good reasons to stay. But the main reason they stayed, I believe,
was that the Millers had invested so much of their lives in the land, planting orchards and
gardens, spread- ing manure on the fields, digging ponds, building sheds, seeding pas- tures. This
farm was not just so many acres of dirt, easily exchanged for an equal amount elsewhere; it was a
particular place, intimately known, worked on, dreamed over, cherished.

Psychologists tell us that we answer trouble with one of two impulses, either fight or flight. I
believe that the Millers exhibited a third instinct, that of staying put. When the pain of leaving
behind what we know outweighs the pain of embracing it, or when the power we face is
overwhelming and neither fight nor flight will save us, there may be salvation in sitting still. And if
salvation is impossible, then at least, before perishing, we may gain a clearer vision of where we
are. By sitting still, I do not mean the paralysis of dread, like that of a rab- bit frozen beneath the
dive of a hawk. I mean something like reverence, a respectful waiting, a deep attentiveness to
forces much greater than our own. If indulged only for a moment, this reverent impulse may
amount to little; but if sustained for months and years, as by the Millers on their farm, it may
yield marvels. The Millers knew better than to fight a tornado, and they chose not to flee. Their
commitment may have been foolhardy, but it was also grand. I suspect that most human
achievements worth admiring are the result of such commitment, such devotion.

These tornado memories dramatize a choice we are faced with constantly: whether to go or

stay, whether to move to a situation that is safer, richer, easier, more attractive, or to stick with
what we have and make what we can of it. If the shine goes off our marriage, our house, our car,
do we trade it for a new one? If the fertility leaches out of our soil, the creativity out of our job,
the money out of our pockets, do we start over somewhere else? There are voices enough, both
inner and outer, urging us to deal with difficulties by pulling up stakes and heading for new
territory. I know them well, for they have been calling to me all my days. Claims for the virtues of
moving on are familiar and seductive to Americans, this nation founded by immigrants and
shaped by restless seekers. I wish to raise here a con- trary voice, to say a few words on behalf of
staying put, of learning the ground, of going deeper.

Exile usually suggests banishment, a forced departure from one’s homeland. Famines and
tyrants and wars do indeed force entire popula- tions to flee; but most people who move,
especially within the industri- alized world, do so by choice. Novelist Salman Rushdie chose to
leave his native India for England. In his book of essays Imaginary Homelands, he celebrates “the
migrant sensibility”: “The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types
of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much
as in material things” (Rushdie 124). I quarrel with Rushdie because he articulates as eloquently
as anyone the orthodoxy that I wish to counter: Rushdie’s belief that movement is inherently
good, staying put is bad; that uprooting brings tolerance, while rootedness breeds intolerance;
that imaginary homelands are preferable to geographical ones; that to be modern, enlightened,
fully of our time is to be displaced. Whole- sale dis-placement may be inevitable; but we should
not suppose that it occurs without disastrous consequences for the earth and for ourselves.
People who root themselves in places are likelier to know and care for those places than are
people who root themselves in ideas. When we cease to be migrants and become inhabitants,
we might begin to pay enough heed and respect to where we are. By settling in, we have a
chance of making a durable home for ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our descendants.

To become intimate with your home region, to know the territory as well as you can, to
understand your life as woven into the local life does not prevent you from recognizing and
honoring the diversity of other places, cultures, and ways. On the contrary, how can you value
other places if you do not have one of your own? If you are not yourself placed, then you wander
the world like a sightseer, a collector of sensa- tions, with no gauge for measuring what you see.
Local knowledge is the grounding for global knowledge.

Writing Topic

According to Sanders, what are the benefits of “staying put”? Do

you agree with his viewpoint? To support your position, be sure to

use specific evidence taken from your own experiences,

observations, or readings