Our theme for the month of October is “haunt.”

“Am I the stranger?

Am I the stranger?

Are we all one beating heart?”

–  America Online, The Midnight

There is a tragic horror in trying to come home to a place you discover no longer exists.

Somewhere about forty miles south of Phoenix on a 107-degree night, my tiny Mazda sedan pulls off the shoulder of the road and comes to a stop in a cloud of dust. I glance at the car radio clock—it’s 1:44am. I climb out of the car and walk onto the shoulder of the vacant two-lane highway, the pitch-black night punctuated only by the brief amber pulses of hazard lights from the car. Above me, stars stretch across the black desert night from horizon to horizon, creating enough of an angelic glow to render the mountain ranges on either horizon in black against the night sky. I laid on the roof of the car.

What a beautiful place to discover you’re agonizingly alone.

I moved to Phoenix in 2019 with a clear answer to the question laden on most twenty-somethings’ minds: “where do I go from here?” The answer was simple at the time: I was going to graduate school. With all that I owned strapped to the roof of a 2006 Mazda 3, I drove the creaking sedan out of Appleton, Wisconsin and set off with my father for a thirty-two-hour drive to Phoenix, Arizona. It was what I had set out to do for so long, as I began my education to become an urban planner. My world screamed to me the (alleged) words of Horace Greeley in 1833, said to a young man in Washington D.C. who would later become a senator of the newly-formed state of Iowa:

“Go west, young man.”

As the miles rolled on, I felt as a captain does leaving a familiar port, the lights of safe harbor slowly disappearing, one by one, into the inky night as the ship heads into the vast unknown of the open water. I had never lived more than thirty miles from Lake Michigan. I had never lived anywhere but the Upper Midwest, which I loved and cherished as home. All I had known and loved was disappearing into the night, my world now illuminated by the distant glow of opportunity and the excitement of constructing a new life in the desert.

I found out quickly that the distant glow was but a mirage in the desert. I knew no one in Phoenix. Virtually nothing felt remotely familiar to me, even down to the temperature of the trees and the color of…everything in Phoenix (it’s all brown).  The answers I had relied upon to get around the safe world of West Michigan and the Dutch Reformed circles of Calvin caved in quickly under the pressure of navigating a complete unfamiliar place. Months passed (and a global pandemic began its reign of terror on the world), and I found myself increasingly lost in a new place that had allured me with much yet suddenly had so little to offer in the end.

Many know the “go west, young man” quote, yet few know what was uttered in response to that famous 1833 quote:

“That,” I said, “is very frank advice, but it is medicine easier given than taken. It is a wide country, but I do not know just where to go.”

And soon enough I found myself as a lonely stranger wandering to the shoulder of a state highway somewhere south of Casa Grande, Arizona, staring into the silence of that starry night out in the widest of countries, resolving to chart a course toward the only place I knew the path back to:

Home. “Where do I go from here?,” I’d ask. “Home,” I’d say.

I fought my way along a long journey home. I followed a rhapsodic path across the desert, leading me to both the depths of depression and suicidal thinking, and to the peaks of conquering my own demons. To an engagement to the love of my life, and to the discovery of the subsequent loss of my life. To travel across 74,000 miles in just two years, and to the common feeling of being trapped within my own apartment in the sprawling and inhospitable city of Phoenix. But I eventually found my way home, four years later, settling back in Chicago, Illinois as a city I was intimately familiar with and was at the heart of the region I had once called home.

But to my horror, I came home to the Midwest to discover that home no longer existed. Friends had moved, and moved on, with their lives. Places that served as the settings of the best moments of my former life were gone, closed up or replaced entirely for good. The rich community I had known before moving across the country could never be recovered, and I now found myself clawing my way through a massive city to find community again. I was invisible in a world that I once had felt intimately intertwined with.

All the while, there was little to bind me to my old life in Phoenix, and even less to build off of in a new life back in an old and familiar place. My graduate degree was complete, and there was no more schooling to accomplish and orient me to a sense of purpose. My engagement ended, and that relationship which had created a new safe harbor for me in the world was lost. I had few friendships remaining from that time, and even fewer that I would consider strong enough to orient me to my place in the world around me.

There was nowhere to look back to—that previous life I had lived on the other side of the country was gone—but there was no home to adopt and take up again upon my return. The pernicious, if not dreadful, question once again came to me: “Where do I go from here?” I was haunted by the thought of a home that was all around me yet so distant from me, and I found myself alone and unsure of where to go in a place that should have been the most familiar of places to me.

It’s a haunting thing to become largely invisible in a place you once felt seen and understood in, caught in the hollow remnant of the place you called home with only mere echoes of your previous life left to ring between its walls. It’s disorienting. It’s hard some days to understand who you are, lost in a world you thought you knew while the person you once were suddenly feeling irretrievably far from you.

But there are days where I understand how this place leaves me with only one direction remaining—to embark on a journey many have had to take in rebuilding within a damaged or destroyed home. To create something new in amongst the broken details and decaying relics of an old home, like taking a haunted house and crafting it slowly into something that can be lived in again, so different from the abandoned home that came before it yet full of beauty sprouting into the space once completely saturated with the image of what was lost.

Maybe this process of rebuilding within what was lost can begin to finally offer an answer to that question which has chased me and haunted me for so long: “where do I go from here?”

For those that came home from journeys beyond Calvin but find themselves lost in translation, haunted by what was home but can never be again as it was, I pray we can join together to find joy in carving a new path forward.

Noah Schumerth

Noah Schumerth graduated from Calvin University in 2019 with a major in geography and minors in architecture and urban studies. He currently lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and works as the village planner in Homewood, Illinois. He enjoys reading science fiction, writing essays, cycling, and exploring Chicago by train.