I've been moving for most of my adult life: I've lived in five states, six mountain ranges, two countries, and too many houses and cars to count. I'm from the adventure set. You've seen us, driving the western highways with our cool sunglasses and our outdoor gear piled three feet high atop our four-wheel drives. Going to places like Moab, Boulder, Telluride.

Now, I don't want to go anywhere. Nine years ago I settled here-in Missoula, Montana-beneath these gentle weedy hills and the crushing gray of winter six months a year. I've vilified the pulp mill for our eggy air. I've cursed the noisy neighbors. I loathe the unmuffled pickup trucks and the beer bottles thrown at me from passing cars. The place ain't perfect.

But that's been my problem: perfection. I grew up in what my father called paradise: Lake Tahoe before the dawn of computer chips, weekend mansions, Mercedes SUVs. We had solitude, sugar pine trees, pinecones as tall as my knees. Bears raided our trash cans on Monday mornings, and no one seemed to care. A creek meandered through a long, green meadow, where my friends and I played in the willows and pretended to be wild.

Years later, when the meadow was plowed under for a golf course, I knew I'd never return. My father's Eden was gone. I set out to find my own, believing that another utopia lay just beyond the mountains, and not understanding that my desire was the very thing that had made nature a commodity. I couldn't see that my father, who had stumbled across that valley 40 years before, was only the first of many who would come.

I traveled for years in search of such a place, all around the West and even across the sea. Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, the mountains of Slovenia. I've found beauty, but nothing like my dream. I'm one of thousands. We travel over vast tracks of land believing-or wanting to believe-that somewhere out there lies that special place meant only for us.
Wilderness. The promised land. Home.

So how is it that I've come to love this town with its Wal-Mart and pulp mill and fast-food strips? I live two blocks from a Dairy Queen, crammed between dilapidated apartments and a street as wide and stark as an airport runway. It's not quiet, it's not pretty, it's definitely not paradise.

But it's home. It's home because I make it so. Because I ignore the next magazine article announcing the 10 best places to live. I rise in the morning shadow of the unmajestic mountains and I turn the earth and plant until my fingers are sore and my nails packed with dirt.