Not Optimal, Not Perfect—Just Home Enough.

HEEERE… AND THERE’S JOHNNY.

A Dispatch from the Rootless Metropolitan.

Can one truly adopt a homeland? Can we choose where we’re “from” with pride, even if we were born elsewhere? (Do any of the current hipster residents of Williamsburg or Red Hook openly admit to hailing from Staten Island? Doubtful.)

And yet—of course we can choose. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia arrived from the Asian subcontinent. The so-called Native American tribes migrated from Siberia, down the Pacific Coast. The White peoples of Europe trace their roots to Anatolia and the Eurasian steppe—beyond that, no one’s quite sure. These are simply the points at which we first pick up the scent. Everyone comes from somewhere else.

I remember once, driving through Franconia in Germany, looking out over the lush, well-ordered fields. For a fleeting moment I thought: The Germans were lucky to be from such a place. But that thought—sentimental and stupid—passed. The Germans didn’t luck into the land. They chose it, settled it, shaped it, held it. They made it theirs.

This isn’t an argument for globalist utopia, nor an accidental brief for open borders. Just an acknowledgment that even the most deep-rooted localism must make peace with the migratory past. Every land now considered sacred ground was once seized by someone who decided to stay. Homeland is not inherited—it is inhabited. Claimed. Defended. Loved. Over time, and with effort.

🎶 Some days we fall, some days we fly

In the end, we all must die

Our rotten flesh and broken bones

Will feed the ground that we call home 🎶 [3]

And so: I wish to lodge a modest claim of my own. I want to be a Staten Islander.

Yes, yes—I know. Staten Island is no one’s idea of glamorous. It’s the borough New Yorkers try to forget, the place where civic pride goes to overdose. (And sadly, many do. The island is riddled with pain—some of it pharmaceutical.) But perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps if Staten Islanders could see their home the way I sometimes do, they could stand the pain, rather than medicate it.

Why Staten Island? Because it contains the material remains of my childhood. Not Happy Meal toys—those came later. I’m talking about the small cardboard boxes our toys came in, the wind-up robots and dime-store dinosaurs, the plastic soldiers and the Spaulding rubber ball remnants, all of it—the joyful detritus of mid-century youth—now embedded somewhere beneath the layered sediment of the Island’s landfills.

In older times, people bonded with place through the bones of their ancestors in the churchyard. Today, our totems are more disposable—but no less sacred to memory. In the absence of relics, we cling to refuse. We touch history not through genealogy but through garbage. These days, it’s not blood in the soil that holds us—it’s plastic.

🎶Now I’ve run naked in the wild

Seen the beauty of a newborn child

Like the alchemists of old

I’ve tried to spin my straw to gold🎶 [3]

It’s not that I’d rather claim a landfill than a legacy—it’s that the landfill is part of the legacy. My love for Staten Island isn’t rooted in prestige or purity. It’s rooted in sediment—what was left behind and what still lingers. The past doesn’t vanish; it composts.

George R.R. Martin once stared out from Bayonne, New Jersey, toward Staten Island and saw not a borough, but a beacon. As he told Rolling Stone:

“For many years I stared out of our living-room window at the lights of Staten Island. To me, those lights—were like Shangri-La, and Singapore, and Shanghai—I read books, and I dreamed of Mars—just as I dreamed of Staten Island.” [1]

Staten Island: as fantastical as Mars.

And he wasn’t alone. Henry David Thoreau—whose nature musings were rooted not just in Walden Pond, but in real time spent on Staten Island—once wrote:

“When walking in the interior there—I have suddenly, through a gap, a cleft, or a ‘clove road’ as the Dutch settlers called it, caught sight of a ship under full sail, over a field of corn, twenty or thirty miles at sea.”[2]

Did either man see Staten Island clearly? Or was it merely a launchpad for their imaginations—terra semi-firma, a silhouette of possibility?

As I looked out recently over Raritan Bay, past the gentle chop and industrial haze, toward the low rise of Staten Island across the water, I realized what it was: a heuristic.

Not optimal. Not perfect. But sufficient for the task at hand.

The technical definition of a heuristic is:

“An approach to problem-solving or discovery that employs a practical method—not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.”

Isn’t that what a homeland is? Not a utopia. Not a pedigree. Just enough.

🎶 A new sprout grows from a fallen tree
This song will go on after me
So lift your heart and dry your eyes
It’s another day to live and die
It’s another day to live and die 🎶 [3]

We all need a place to leap from, or to gaze across at, to imagine more. Staten Island may not be where I was born, but it’s where I buried enough of myself to want to belong.

—THE ROOTLESS METROPOLITAN

Travel & Leisure Correspondent, Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists

FOOTNOTES

[1]: George R.R. Martin, Rolling Stone interview by Mikal Gilmore, published April 23, 2014. Martin reflects on his childhood in Bayonne, New Jersey, and his mythic view of Staten Island.

[2]: Henry David Thoreau, Journal, October 9, 1843, written during his brief stay on Staten Island while living with the Emerson family. The passage has appeared in numerous nature writing anthologies.

[3] “Another Day” is a song co-written by Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott, and appears on Tim O’Brien’s solo album Traveler, released in 2003