More than a quarter century ago my wife and I left the University of Texas where we were Freshmen and set out for the Northwest to find natural beauty, progressive community, independence and rugged individualism. We set out to find the rest of our lives. We chose Moscow Idaho because it was somewhat more remote. Our adventure was a beautiful failure.

The plan had been to work for a year before we started school so that we could get instate tuition. But in Idaho we found an economy that had busted. The lumber mills that made up the biggest part of the economy had shut down. As a young carpenter from Texas I was competing for work with people who had connection in the area that was generations deep. I worked full time just scrounging small jobs that provided less than 20 hours of work a week. I was happy for a long, miserable, cold winter because not everyone was willing to shovel snow off of roofs and crawl under houses to thaw pipes when they frozen, but I was.

To make matters worse we had been wrong about finding progressive community. Idaho turned out to be isolated, provincial and it lacked diversity. We had not so much escaped the red neck mentality of Texas as we had traded it for the backwoods mentality of Idaho.

In a dark and bleak winter of despair what is one to do but read dark and bleak Russian novels. I read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol and Turgenev by the light of the fire that we used to heat our house. The Russians, after of being tied to the same land, found new opportunity when the industrial revolution came to their western cities such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Having left the land and its people these adventurers found great opportunity, adventure and isolation. The connection to their land and their past had been more profound than they had anticipated. But they could not go back because the land would no longer support them in their new knowledge of the world and material wealth.

Fortunately for my wife and I, no matter how analogous our plight was to these displaced Russians, right down to the name of the city that we were in, there were no such barriers to us returning home. It was snowing as we pulled out of Moscow Idaho in early March. Three days later as we crossed Texas the blue bonnets were in full bloom and we knew that we were home.

Few things are more profound than a strong sense of place. It is something that we hold inside our being where memories, like synaptic connections, build context in our lives. It is also very external, where the transcendence of shared context builds community from mere proximity.

Places that are blessed with a strong sense of place have authenticity.