As I mark seven years back in Duluth, my mind is not back on my move home in 2016, but instead on an earlier return, the one some ten years ago that set me on my current path. It would be very easy to write off those two years right after college as misspent youth, and indeed I would not rank it as a time I lived a life I much wanted. I was underemployed, with no budget to feed my wanderlust or appetites, and for a time had no grand plan for what would come next. I churned out large quantities of fiction no one would ever read and hated most of it; I am now thankful I had enough discretion to spare the world these pained missives. My social circles, such as they were, primarily featured high school friends who happened to be around, many of whom have since drifted out of my orbit. My college friends barreled forward with life, but enough of them were in grad school or two-year public service programs that they had yet to accrue much financial advantage that would have put them on a visibly different trajectory. It was not an exciting time. My journey only looked rebellious if I told myself it was.

Which is exactly what I did. Those were heady days in my struggle to make sense of my world. For the first time in my life I had stepped off the meritocratic hamster wheel I’d inhabited in my school years, and I began to poke holes in the system, tread in more contrarian circles. In my early political writing at city council and school board meetings I fixated on the vocal minorities and appreciated the points they made, even if I often thought they made them poorly. My intellectual ferment, thanks to a few Georgetown influences, took on a few small-c conservative flavors as I gained more appreciation for limits and rootedness, two radical words in an era of overwhelming open-endedness that had, momentarily, paralyzed me. In my floundering writings, I wrote stories that reflected that sensibility, and through much disgust at my own words started to find my voice. As I have aged, I’ve drifted away from some of that strain of thought: at the end of the day that restless striver is closer to my core being than some staid, crochety agrarian soul. But that quest is now grounded in deeper core convictions, and with that foundation I can never spend too long drifting in the breeze.

I felt my own past deeply upon my return. Never was this truer than on meandering nighttime walks through Lakeside, when I went block by block pulling out some memory of a friend’s old house here, a passing adventure there, some acquaintance of my parents just beyond, my history spelled out in silent streets. They were once the world to me, but now they were shrinking, dwarfed by other adventures, those intricate details my mind has always had a talent for retaining made less and less relevant to my immediate needs.

And yet my life had broken decisively from that past in key ways, and as a result, my appreciation never romanticized my hometown or consigned it to some realm of paradise lost. I knew there was no going back to the way things had been, and I found new life in Duluth. At the time my mother, back herself after a brief stint away, settled into an apartment on Park Point, a first floor one-bedroom on the lakefront side two blocks past the Lift Bridge. Life on the Point had its drawbacks—the bridgings, the nonstop wind, the steady stream of people strolling through the backyard to borrow the ostensibly private gate down to the lakefront—but if I was to have a quarter-life crisis it may as well have come on a beach, a quick stroll from Canal Park institutions from which an apartment-sitting twentysomething could stumble home at the end of a long night. (Rest in peace, Sports Garden.) There was just enough forward motion to feed that latent ambition, enough for me to marry it all in my mind and create a path for myself that intertwined with that of a city.

Duluth at the time felt born anew after a long, inglorious Rust Belt phase; Duluthians tentatively poked their heads outward, skeptical this city could have nice things. Lincoln Park had new energy for the first time in decades, and there was new investment downtown. The housing market was reasonable. There was a visible, public win over the Last Place on Earth, a triumph of order and sobriety over a manufactured, life-ruining agent of chaos. City politics was a realm of relative consensus carried by all those good vibes; while some of the councilors had obvious broader political allegiances, they were often immaterial to the issues at hand, and not their lens for viewing all things. (The school board was another story, perhaps a canary in the coal mine for broader societal divisions to come.) Outside the national spotlight—and with occasional laudatory bursts in it—Duluth was going about making itself a better place.

The view from ten years later is a bit more complicated. The investment goes on, sometimes at rapid paces in certain places. Duluth’s housing market is spiraling upward while downtown hollows out, and I feel certain malaises intensely. I step around bodies sprawled in the skywalk on my way into the office. Out in Irving Park, a strung-out man screams racial epithets at his dog. A client who works in addiction treatment tells me the normal origin story for an addict has gone from “beers among high school friends in the woods” to “meth with mom at age ten.” Local politics, as a recent shocker of a mayoral primary shows, are unsettled, roiling with certain fierce currents but not cohering into anything like the consensus of a decade ago.

I could here try to put a neat bow on this essay by relating some personal frustrations with my time back in Duluth, sweep it up in some grand tale of youthful idealism lost. Such literary flourishes, however, would sacrifice truth for art. Yes, there have been challenges here and there in my seven years back, unexpected burdens and hockey trouble and underlying concerns about my project proven accurate, but nothing to challenge the foundational premises of the Duluth that made me want to build a life here. I went back knowing what those Ithakas are for, and am pleased by how well that younger self knew I was making certain sacrifices. (Too many of us, I think, are far too uncharitable to our younger selves.) I work a good job and I have a good house and any sources of great frustration seem fixable.

I can’t say that Duluth is worse off, either. Rising real estate can also mean rising wealth, at least for those of us fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor. Any memory of the Last Place on Earth days, with lines for unregulated synthetic drugs that cause overdoses by the dozen wrapped around the block, does rather dim the nostalgia for some earlier downtown Duluth. The truth is that Duluth has always had some rust on the underside, the spots where the salt eats away after a long, cold winter. They are all the more glaring in a Duluth where Park Point has teardowns and the east side has nonstop renovations and people speak of gentrification on the west side. The paths diverge, and people in my line of work have a lot to do. But this city retains its allure, and whatever ails me, I am only ever one quick jaunt along the shoreline away from a good mood.

There is certainly some intellectual malaise baked into my project: since I moved back in 2016, things have generally gone to shit for localists. Donald Trump’s election radicalized everyone and made every issue national, much to our collective detriment. Local media, already floundering, is now on life support, replaced by people yelling into online voids or a simple absence of coverage. Covid pounded away at opportunities for community gathering, all while compounding a housing crisis, lowering trust, and making it ever easier to drift into rootlessness. It strained schools, one of the deepest bedrocks of community, to a breaking point. Deaths of despair surged, with more lonely people making terrible decisions, often aided by ever more powerful drugs, and in general we seem to be drifting into the medication of problems instead of considering them with any semblance of reason.

And yet none of this makes me doubt that the solutions to the problems are all right here. They are not secrets, simply harder and harder for people to grasp. There are of course the technical corrections: community schools, community policing, a switch in our housing regime that lets us build things; good local reporting, and politicians who focus on the things in front of them instead of the talking points that trickle down from national movements. My work is not my life, and other areas of focus have also emerged relative to any political project over the past several years. (I’ll save that story for an upcoming post.) But more than ever I believe in this agenda, and am need of allies who will also try to enact it instead of nodding along and smiling at what they read but doing little else to get away from staring at screens. It isn’t easy work, but it is a clear enough road that I found, back on those meanders down Duluth’s trails in my early twenties.

The intensity of the feeling I felt in that era is something some people claim fades with time. I have not found this to be true. Maybe they are all fooling themselves and misremembering the long periods of monotony at that age; maybe I am just wired differently, or frozen in an arrested state that will someday pass. But I’m skeptical it ever will.

This past July, at a bachelor party for a grad school friend, two college runners undertook a passionate four AM dialogue on whether they could ever reclaim that shared team bond they once had. The lament was heartfelt, and the frathouse vibe may indeed fade some as we age into creakier bodies and somewhat better judgment. But losing the depth of that commitment, even when resurrected for just one weekend? Not one ounce. The gravitational pull of that homing instinct does not wane. I owe the strength of that pull to the intensity of feeling in those early twenties years, back when I learned where I was from.