Traveling In the Time of Zillow
I want to go back to the places I can't look up on a real estate app.
A cursed blessing of having traveled far, of living in a lot of different places in one life, is that it makes you believe you can live anywhere. Add the possibility of remote work and you end up checking local listings on Zillow everywhere you go.
We used to go to beautiful, interesting places and take a picture — maybe buy a postcard or a magnet. Now we cynically look up the real estate listings and mentally figure if it would be worth it to move there.
What’s that Oscar Wilde quote about knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing?
Last week, for a reunion, my family stayed at a house next to Lake McConaughy, the big body of water in Western Nebraska that Coloradoans love to visit. The place had a deck facing north where we could sit and look out over the rolling grassland and the 20-mile-long lake.
Below us, we noticed the next house to the north was for sale, so several of us looked up the listing on our phones and looked through the pictures, judging their decorations and fixtures and contemplating whether it would be worth it to suffer through Nebraska winters at that price. The group agreed that we didn’t enjoy catching walleye and tubing behind a pontoon for a few months every year enough to pay $625,000.
We do this everywhere we go. We stay in Airbnbs and look up how much the owners paid for the condo. Search for available listings in our area. Calculate the real estate market versus the surrounding beauty and culture to determine if it’s properly priced.
We say we’re just curious. But what we really want to know is if we have enough money or freedom to own a piece of a place we find interesting and beautiful.
We’re not appreciating our surroundings. We’re thinking about how much the property will appreciate in our surroundings.
I don’t read as much poetry as I should, but I’ve always loved the English poet Philip Larkin’s poem “Places, Loved Ones,” with its opening line: “No, I have never found/The place where I could say/This is my proper ground/Here I shall stay …” The whole piece is as much about why he never got married as it is about choosing a place to live. Luckily only half of that is my problem, and the one half helps with the other.
How many more times would I have moved in the past 10 years if I didn’t have a partner, a dog, and now a daughter, who have all, to use Larkin’s words, “mashed” me?
We’ve still moved four times in a decade, but we’ve stayed in this region, this country. If not for the stability of my home life I don’t think I’d even be writing this from the U.S.
Asia always calls out. That cursed blessing of having lived in another country and it going well while I was there. Of loving the feeling of adventure in even the small differences of living as an expat, or digital nomad, however you want to romanticize it. Or, in the case of correctly calling it immigrant life, not romanticizing it at all.
I do want to live in Asia again before I get too old. I want my daughter to know her mother’s country — its culture and customs. I want to take her to some of the places I loved as a young man. I want her to see the way most of the world lives with so much less than Americans think they’re owed. I want to take her to places you can’t look up on Zillow.