Suburban creation myths

Maggie says:
In North Carolina for the holidays since Thursday, and it feels like I've been here forever. Home is funny that way. It immediately becomes what it always has been, so visits home feel not like a respite from my everyday life, but like the place I've been headed back toward all along, without even knowing it.

Home means family, friends, warmth, and routines. Yet in the suburbs of Raleigh, NC, home has also come to mean traffic, shopping malls, and sprawl, all of which are at their worst during the holidays. Check out these figures: in 1990, my parents' little town of Apex, NC had 5,476 residents. By 2000, it had grown to 20,212 residents - an increase of 269%! But it hasn't stopped there. A town population estimate from 2004 figured the towns' residents to be 27,509 - another 36% increase in just four years. This place is growing, alright. But growing smartly? Not exactly...

It's funny how the suburban experience unites people. Us children of suburbs know each other right away. We know the symbolism of the cul-de-sac, the bored Saturdays at the mall, the trapped nature of life as a suburban teenager without a car. Cars come to represent freedom to suburban kids - freedom to meet new people, see new places, get the hell out of suburbia. As a teenager, as soon as I had access to wheels, I'd be flying down the highway to someplace else as fast as I could. Without a plan for the night, but feeling like the whole world was in front of me, I went to where people and unexpected encounters were. In my case, that meant to Raleigh, either Hillsborough Street to sit in a dingy coffeeshop called Cup 'O Joe or a cool neighborhood called Five Points, where I'd hang out in a coffeeshop called The Third Place after seeing independent movies at the Rialto. Or I'd head to Chapel Hill and camp out in a booth at Pepper's Pizza and imagine how glamorous college life would be. Excitement was the unexpected, the different. And that just wasn't happening in Apex. Not then, and not really now, either.

So much about finding yourself as you grow up is figuring out how you're different, which is next to impossible in placeless locales like the suburbs, where the shops can also be found in Kansas, the restaurants the same as in Arizona, and people are moving in as fast as they can from all over the country. In the quest for growth-growth-growth, so many towns in NC and everywhere else lost sight of what was important: a true sense of place, a uniqueness that makes that place like no place else.

I had a conversation with one of my oldest friends yesterday. Saleem is in town from Japan, where he's been teaching English. Before Japan, he lived in New York. Like me, he's a local expatriate, the type that fellow high school graduates mention at parties and wonder where we are and what in the world we're doing these days. We're seen as aimless, unexpected, full of strange choices. Saleem mentioned that this trip home is the first that really feels to him like he's been gone a long time. The distance, the time, makes everything here seem absolutely absurd to him. "I wonder," Saleem said, "how did this place create me? How do I possibly come from here?"

It's a fair question. To those of us full of quirks and personality and individuality and independence, it's strange to think that the same suburbs bred us and the people who never leave town, who are perfectly happy shopping at Wal-Mart, never traveling, and never doing anything new. The way the suburbs trap so many people is the same way they expel the others: conform and be forever satisfied here, be different and never be satisfied here. Of course, the most haunting notion is this: if those of us who could bring something different to these places never come back to help change them, aren't we part of the problem, too?

As Apex revitalizes its downtown (I had my first ever unexpected encounter with a friend outside the local shops downtown over Thanksgiving), I'd like to think it's reevaluating itself as a unique destination, a place for locals to be proud of, a whole place instead of just a convenient commuting stop. But I'm almost afraid to feel optimistic. Sprawl is such a pervasive force, so deadening to everything I cherish about place, that this is one time I may just take the cynical route and assume the worst. As much as it pains me to be cynical, time has tricked me into believing that nothing truly great can come out of places like this anymore. And that makes me sad.

I'll end this with a line from one of my all-time favorite teen flicks, a movie that shored up my stance that I had to get out and get out as fast as I could when I did live here. The movie is Pump up the Volume. Mark Hunter (aka Hard Harry), love of many a smart teenage girl's fantasy life, sums up suburban angst so perfectly: "Doesn't this blend of blindness and blandness make you wanna do something crazy?!"