Denver City, Texas, is my hometown. Its population is just about 4,500. The landscape is not conventionally beautiful: the trees are rarely taller than you, the only water is located a few hundred feet beneath the ground and—at times—everything is brown, even the sky. It is neither a lie nor an exaggeration to say that it is located in the middle of nowhere. Austin, Dallas, El Paso, and Houston are all 400 miles away. It is unlikely that my hometown would exist if not for the millions of dollars buried thousands of feet below the surface. It is an oil field town.

After drilling began in the area, my hometown was added as an afterthought. Subdivisions fit snugly between the checkerboard pattern of oil wells. From the street, my house and my neighborhood appear normal—they could be located anywhere in the Southwest. Directly behind my house, just 200 feet from my back porch, is a pump jack—the most iconic symbol of the oil industry. 

It was not until I arrived at Bowdoin almost two years ago that I was able to reflect and appreciate the experience of growing up in Denver City and to understand the reasons why my family lived there. My feelings about home are greatly influenced by my father and his own experiences. His family moved four times while he was in school, so he promised himself that we would not move until my two younger sisters and I graduated from the same high school. His decision and his resolve puzzled me. Because he does not work in the oil industry, I was unable to see what he saw in the town. He put aside building his career so that my sisters and I would have a strong connection to a place. 

I enjoy returning home to a tight-knit community made up of people that I have known for the greater part of the past 15 years. We say that it takes a village to raise a child, and I know that the people in my community helped make me who I am. While growing up, I would often fantasize about what my life would be like had I grown up in a major city. I am now thankful that I did not. The relationships and friendships I built overshadow all shortcomings of the city, the landscape and the inconvenience of living an hour away from civilization. It is the kind of place that I want my kids to grow up in. 

Following the opening of the exhibit “Here, Having Been There” curated by Andrew Cushing ’12 and Marta Misiulaityte ’14, students have been encouraged to join a discussion about socioeconomic diversity on campus. The discussion that followed stimulated thoughts about what made “home” different for me, personally. 

Home has always been a transient concept for me .

Characterizing my home in a photograph helped me visualize and conceptualize a part of me I’ve never addressed head on. For years I have lived in and out of “homeless” shelters, houses provided by housing assistance programs ,and rental homes. Although none of these may be the most traditional candidates for “home,” for me they have embodied every aspect of a home I have ever needed: Safety, warmth and family unity. But the home in the photograph is especially poignant and meaningful, as it represents my childhood spent in ephemeral living spaces. 

After being named an Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist in 2012 and gaining national media attention for my achievement in the face of adversity, that home became the most meaningful part of my entire award experience. My home was a gift from our county executive for my achievements. At the time, the gift of a house seemed unfathomable. To this day, it seems unbelievable that the place I have resided in and have cherished, a place that is and has been and continues to be fundamental to my very being, was the result of boundless generosity.

My house makes a pretty great home. It was a boarding house run by nuns sometime in the 19th century, and it sits in the woods in the out-of-the-way neighborhood of Lanesville in Gloucester, Mass. 

My dad’s side of the family (the Johnsons, formerly known as the Ojantakanens) has been in this house on Woodbury Street ever since the nuns left—I am something like the sixth generation to live in these hallowed halls (though they’re actually more hollowed by squirrels than anything else). When my dad was growing up, the family bathed in a tin washtub, used an outhouse in the backyard and tended to an ailing grandmother named “Nunni,” who I always imagine looked much like Grandma Georgina in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” My dad grew up sharing a twin bed with all three of his siblings. As various relatives died and my father’s siblings moved away, he decided to return home for good. 

My paternal grandmother kept the ground floor of the house in its original form all her life. My dad, however, had bigger plans. As he and my mother began their life and family, he started blowing out walls, putting up beams, wiring new outlets, running new plumbing and bringing our house into the 20th century. He built a set of stairs up to the second floor so my grandmother could have her own door, and a porch facing the yard and the woods for enjoying long, warm summers. I recently asked him how he knew how to do all of that, and he said, “Well, I knew how to read.” Kudos on that one Dad. 

Despite our determined efforts to bungle around in the present, my house is always bringing up the past. Our house is built on the old type of foundation: rocks that were just there, in the ground, that seemed steady enough to build on. Inevitably, our house shifts and moves, like the earth. Our dingy and cramped cellar is full of treasures—oil lamps, root-cellar style shelves, 4-inch-long nails and tools. 

Of course, it’s also full of trash—lead paint, broken sets of croquet and old air conditioners. But what I love most are the stacks and stacks of old photographs, report cards, military service discharge papers, newspaper clippings and even an empty flour sack dating to 1856 we found under some floorboards. It’s no surprise, then, that when we were cleaning out my grandmother’s closet this summer, I found a strange, block-shaped stone with a plug in the bottom, and my dad reached for it saying, “Ah, Nunni! We’ve been looking for her!” 

I know that I’ve been extremely lucky to have a home full of my family and full of my history. I am, as they say, #blessed.

For the next four weeks, the Orient is featuring a selection of students’ essays about their homes, in conjunction with the “Here Having Been There” photo exhibit, opening April 8 in the basement of the Visual Arts Center. 

Last summer, my brother and I began the process of tearing down our childhood home. It is a strange feeling to forever reduce your house to a pile of copper (to sell), metal and glass (to recycle), and wood (to burn). Slivers of guilt erupted each time I jettisoned armfuls of memory-infused popcorn ceiling, but a greater part of me relished the fact that my best-kept secret was disappearing from the landscape. After all, this home defined how I saw myself and how others categorized me growing up: as trailer trash.  

Yet, it is really my only home. After my parents’ divorce, I found myself living in a metaphorical mobile home. My high school and college years included stays between several beds and couches, including one in this trailer (at the time home to my brother). Consequently, I was ripping out fiberglass insulation from the thin walls of my only true home with mixed emotions.

The more I delved into its innards, the angrier I grew at how cheaply it was constructed. Staples and glue affixed every piece of faux wood paneling and molding to studs with the dimensions of matchsticks. I could not shake the idea that the trailer’s worn linoleum flooring somehow reflected my family as equally cheap, flimsy and temporary.   

I looked out across the fields where my father, brother and I had spent summers haying. My family’s 50 acres is the closest thing I have to a home. Here I learned tree identification and woodlot management. It was where my siblings and I raced to Mom after getting barbed wire stuck in our legs or concussions from sledding off barn roofs. It was where I contemplated life (as a 13-year-old knows it), my feet dangling in the gelid waters of our property’s moss-blanketed streams.

I could say that this trailer on a dirt road in rural New Hampshire taught me many of the values I appreciate in myself and in others. Home in the physical sense is not that powerful, though. No, it is my parents I wish to thank. My parents did the best with what they had, and gave me a humble resourcefulness that guides me through a world so unlike the one in which I grew up.   My brother and I will finish razing the trailer this upcoming summer. By then, this image will be the only vestige of my childhood home. And I’m fine with that.