Small Town Time Traveler
St. Johns, Michigan is the county seat in middle Michigan’s Clinton County. Grades 4 to 12 during the 1970s were pleasant and friendly from a kid’s point of view. Then 15 years passed during the time of college, work, marriage and children, and yet more college before returning here to benefit from the social coherence of an active community life and central focus that comes from a vital school system topped by a single high school for all area residents. The years 1995 to 2016 have been pleasant and friendly from a grown-up’s perspective.
Now moving house 65 miles away to Michigan’s 2nd biggest urban center, Grand Rapids, the prospect of leaving behind the many layers of memories and the lives of those woven into the fabric of the places and times of St. Johns is a distressing sight, indeed. On a recent return to collect another car full of household accumulation, it occurred to me that “going home” to a place where I’ve passed ⅓ of my lifetime affords a kind-of time travel.
To a stranger’s eye, perhaps this is just another Michigan small town with a tree-lined grid of north-south, east-west streets and sidewalks, and its original downtown, Main Street, still alive, despite the siren call of the strip malls and big box stores at the outskirts. But with the benefit of longer memories scattered across these streets and seasonal events, the whole cultural landscape is alive with a hum of past occurrences, present involvements, and future imaginings of what could be, should be, or what one would perhaps want to see emerging in coming weeks or months. In other words, the roots of one’s involvement and the passage of time allows reverie, know-how (who to go to when solving a problem or hatching an idea), and visualization of acceptable or even desirable futures as one cohort of young people is graduated from the town high school like clockwork, year after year.
Time travel, in this small town scene, is a pleasant and friendly way to deepen and widen one’s connection to a place, people, and moment of history’s flow. One essay from decades ago point out the curious grammatical feature of the Southwest American Indian language of the Hopi people in which things (and people) were named or referred to by what they ultimately would develop into: “boy” in this linguistic world is then “man to become” and a particular seed by the same logic would be called “sunflower to become,” for example. By baking in this “yet to be” dimension into everyday forms of talking, the speakers see their world as a series of developing people, animals and plants; not as a static set of features or frozen backdrop to one’s personal life story. In a similar way, the middle-age vantage on small town lives in St. Johns, Michigan allows wider and deeper vision to include what was, is, and yet may come to be.
The flip-side of the bigger perspective of traveling in time is to be stuck on the surface features, frozen in the present moment of first impressions (as when landing in a foreign country or even an unfamiliar part of one’s own town), or ‘just passing through’ mentality of high altitude “fly-over country” that one does not know up-close. These fleeting, outside perceptions are meagre crumbs by comparison to the rich banquet of longer-term involvements and daily routines in a place and time of one’s peers in the town and the responsibilities that come from those sustained, shared commitments. And so a traveler from another town nearby or indeed from a distant country, or out-of-town relatives or friends , or visiting officials of state and federal government agencies all are left to skim along the surfaces, rather than to glimpse the teeming life below the wave tops they ride on.
At a professional level, too, long-term fieldwork in a foreign language and society requires time to gather layered memories and relationships necessary for a fuller, deeper vision of the present and future of a place, as well as being a precondition that is foundational to building rapport capable of supporting complicated or sensitive conversations and inquiries. Many ethnographers know this by their training or direct experience. But among all the social sciences and commentators, the anthropological ones are few and generally not very vocal in public debates or arenas.
So time travel is far from being science fiction or some future age of marvels. And anyway “the future is already here, we just don’t know it,” as William Gibson wrote. At least on the stage of a small town during a generation or two, time travel is available right now.
