"Scientists indicate that salmon and other types of fish are naturally predisposed to the journey upstream. According to an article in USA Today, scientists state that home odors are embedded in the minds of certain fish. Home odors are smells that are unique to each body of water. When the fish reach maturity and wish to spawn, or reproduce, they are instinctively drawn back to the place of their birth by the home odors."
Is that why I want to return to Northlandia? Well, I'm not sure. I can't smell Illinois from here. All I smell is recycled water, dog farts and exhaust fumes from Roosevelt Boulevard. And while every one of my immediate and less immediate family members reside within 15 minutes, the tug of Northlandia is sometimes so strong that only a bowl of ice cream can assuage it.
My go-to comment whenever this comes up in conversations is that my family is here, but my fun and friends are someplace else. Perhaps one could replace fun with heart. And like that damn stupid salmon, my thoughts drift northward to a gentle breeze running its fingers through the endless rows of corn. To freshly fallen snow that that brings that lovely muted hush. To roads sparsely travelled by others, where you can drive for miles without meeting another soul. Where you can truly immerse yourself with yourself.
By the way, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winning author who was exiled from his home in Russia, commented on living in America "by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music." There probably isn't much any other place can do to replace what is in our heart. Dumb salmon could easily have a nice peaceful life if they just accepted that pond they are living in. But, no. They have to trek hundreds of miles, upstream mind you, against the onslaught of starvation, unknowing dangers, and those damn bears just to get back to where they were hatched. Solzhenitsyn wouldn't have been happy if he were in Samoa, surrounded by beautiful dancing nubile naked native naifs with a Bloody Mary in one hand, an ice cold beer in the other, all while smoking a Maduro Mild.
I came across a word that pretty much covers it. Saudade (so-dada) in the dictionary means: a feeling of longing, melancholy or nostalgia. It is Portuguese and defines something you had but don't have anymore. Exile by self or by someone else is still exile. Only in that separation can one know saudade. As I venture up Northward again, like the dumb salmon, and Solzhenitsyn who returned to his Mother Russia, I will no longer suffer from saudade.
Oh, but those beautiful dancing Samoan ladies. I could suffer with them.
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