Author Tom Montgomery Fate has lived most of his life in Illinois, but when he's asked where home is, he says Iowa.
Small-town Iowa is where Fate was raised, where he was formed, and it is in many ways is his anchor. Since those simpler days, Fate writes, "My idea of home has evolved. Now it's less a physical location than a kind of belonging."
"The Long Way Home" is a series of eloquent essays about Fate's search "for a spiritual home … for a kind of belonging that I can carry with me."
Fate grew up in Maquoketa, roughly equidistant between Davenport and Dubuque. It seems an idyllic upbringing, the kind featured in TV commercials, perhaps: rolling hills of farmland, red-tailed hawks making lazy circles in the sky and of course, come summer, the county fair.
His father is the minister of the town's Congregational church, in many ways an unyielding man of principle, subject to regular bouts of "impatience and dark storms of depression." Fate Sr. once preached "a sermon in Ames, Iowa, against Barry Goldwater and the war in Vietnam that would prompt such a backlash he would have to leave that church."
Yet when young Tom refused confirmation, his father eventually gave in to him. Tom's arguments, based on his father's teachings, were convincing. They laughed over the irony. "Maybe you were the only one listening."
Was it this experience that sent him off on his search? Or perhaps it was time spent on a sweat lodge on a Lakota Indian Reservation, where a medicine man told him of one of the tribe's core beliefs, that "home is both physical and spiritual."
In either case — or perhaps both — Fate learned "that I had to leave Iowa to understand all that home could mean."
