I'm The Newcomer Now

Almost a decade ago, I read a book that anchored the building resentment and restlessness I’d felt since my family’s exodus from the 5 acres that I’d called home from age 3 to 17. Ana Maria Spagna’s collection of essays, Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging and the Crosscut Saw, gave me a purchase point from which to begin making amends with my anger at displacement. I felt justified in blaming Calfornians for my problem. The heightened housing market down South allowed Californians to buy houses in Washington the same way we used to buy clothes in British Columbia. Their dollar beat ours and in return we had to beat it as they moved into our houses, basements gurgling with bloated property taxes and sales prices. It seemed fair to blame the newcomers, even though some of my best friends, and later a longterm relationship, all originated from California. (It wasn’t them, it was the other Californians, the greedy ones). Scapegoating felt appropriate. It was easier to blame Californians for the sale of our family farm rather than confront the reality that my parents had been divorced for five years and it was time for my mom to move on, and in with someone else. Just because I felt at home on that 12 by 6 mile piece of rock in the middle of the Puget Sound didn’t mean my mom did. She was lonely, overworked, and eager for a connection with someone other than her two teenage kids. But, why bother acknowledging the complicated reality when there were BMWs and Land Rovers parked on either side of my Chevy pickup in the senior parking lot at the island’s one high school? It was easier to hate Them.

Neat tangent. What I really wanted to write about was what the hell has happened in ten years. I read Ana Maria’s book, a few times, and eventually wrote my college thesis on home and the housing market and if the two were compatible. I concluded that the out of control real estate market was in the business of selling the idea of Home: comfort, community, familiarity, friendship, family, safety… You could buy some or all depending on how many zeros you tacked onto that sales price. But the idea of a house as a financial investment and a commodity increased traffic and turnover of an already restless population. As Americans, and especially West Coasters, we have shallow roots. It’s easy to move to the next best place if it holds more promise than an underwhelming reality of here, this place. But moving and selling for more than you bought a place for, and sniffing out a community and deciding it’s not what you’d been looking for, I think, started pulling even harder at an unraveling thread of community in these fragile small places. I concluded my thesis that maybe I was wrong in asserting that everyone stop moving like the whistle had been blown in a game of freeze tag. Maybe it was unrealistic to assume that everyone could afford, or find happiness in staying put. So, I proposed that the next best thing would be to really get after whatever community you are currently a part of. Really live it up and help enrich it while you’re a part of it. Rather than sitting on the dock, jump on in because only being at the lake for a day is no reason not to stay on shore. Just be sure you pick up your cans when you leave and maybe leave a fiver in the parks donation box. And, for goodness sake, wave to the people at the campsite nextdoor, maybe even invite them over for a hobo sandwich and a beer. I figured if we could do something positive for this place we’re in today, it would be penance towards those little tears that are the result of us pulling up stakes and moving to the next place. Even if permanence is too much to ask of an impatient culture, maybe thoughtfulness wasn’t.

And that was five years ago now. It was easy to preach about community involvement. I’d been a resident of Seattle for much of the time since my mom had sold the farm. I’d spent a small stint volunteering as a firefighter on the peninsula, some time at a college in Oakland, California and a brutal six months in the cultural wasteland of Redmond, Washington. Besides that I’d made Seattle my home, unintentionally. I went to school there, I coached a college rugby team there, I played on my own city rugby team, I worked at the same family-owned store for years, I biked most of my routes in the city rather than driving, I left only to see my mom on an island to the north and my dad on a peninsula to the west. Seattle had become home and all of my unintentional ties had me firmly rooted to that landscape. I was still resentful of being in a city, fancying myself a country gal by birth, but I told myself it was temporary and I’d get out of the city soon enough. I just didn’t forsee how or where that would happen.

Getting the job offer in Portland, Oregon was a no-brainer. It was a crappy economy and getting worse. Job applications over the past two and a half years had turned up exactly zero offers of employment and word on the street was 4,500 applications had been allotted for maybe a hundred openings and to turn down those odds would have surely assured me a lifetime of holding up a cardboard sign as payback for being an idiot. So, I moved. I left the people I now considered family at work, I left the street signs I didn’t even need to look at, I left the muddy drunk college girls and the friends I’d known since we were those girls. I left the possibility of having dinner on a whim with my parents. The one thing I did not leave was the low-ceiling grey that apparently blankets the throat of the Columbia in as tight of an embrace as it holds the Puget Sound. The grey stayed, even though more than one person told me the weather was better down here. I suppose the Eskimos have over a hundred words for snow. Slight variations on wooly grey cloudcover is our expertise. It was rain, the same persistent death by a thousand drops that rolls in daily from the Pacific Ocean along this entire Northwestern coastline. It’s the only place in the world that could have had the motivation to turn the entire world to the drug of choice for the Northwest: caffeine, a vitamin D replacement for us who have moss growing out of our ears.

And I am still sidetracked. I’ve been in Portland (or the greater Portland area I should say) for 13 months now. Today it’s grey. But I’m sitting in a house hunkered a couple hundred feet from the lip of a canyon that opens up to the foothills of Mount Hood. Being the final stop for clouds that need to lighten their load to make the ascent to Eastern Oregon, it’s a bit wetter and darker here than a little further southwest in the wine country of the Willamette Valley. But, I take some solace in the pointy snowy shape of Mount Hood more than I would with a few more degrees of sun and a few less inches of rain. It’s no Mount Rainier that’s for sure. My mom always called Rainier “Grandpa’s Ice Cream Cone”. I don’t really know why but if Rainier is an ice cream cone, than Hood is an Otter Pop. Pointy and snaky, but a snow-topped mountain nonetheless. And Mount Adams is sometimes visible to the north and that’s even better, a true blue Washington mountain. I do miss the ranges though. Here, a snow peak will just stick up out of the foothills like a hitchiker’s thumb, like the other mountains left it in the dust on the family road trip. But, further north, (further home) the mountains are like teeth in a saw, too numerous to count even though they all have names.

And still not getting to the point. Okay, I think my point is that Ms. Spagna wrote another book. I just started reading it. I think I’m really going to like it. I’m living in a house on five acres that I bought a couple months ago. As happy as I am to have a little foothold outside the metro area down here I still think about home every day. The semi-permanence of a mortgage payment is good for me, it keeps me from giving up on newness, difference, unfamiliarity, and going back to what I know and trust further north. But, I do hole up here. I’ve seen very little of my neighbors even though I know all two of them are kind and good-hearted people, people I’d like to know better. I haven’t gone to church yet even though I’ve told myself that if ever there was a time to check out that dirty little habit now was that time. I haven’t turned out for the local rugby team, not good enough shape is my excuse there. And I haven’t really stepped foot in the community with any more effort than a Hi How Are You at the checkout counter of the local grocer. Here I am, the person I wrote my thesis on and following my own advice is a lot harder than when I was 21 years old and dolling it out like it’s what I was paid to do. In my gut, I want Washington to be where I raise a family, where I continue cultivating friends, where I grow old. But, in the interim, I need to open up a small piece of my heart to Oregon. It’s where I am, where I own a home, and, most importantly, who cuts my paycheck. It’s where my girlfriend feels at home and where her mom’s family’s from and her mom lives now. It feels strange to welcome a stranger into my home but I guess I’m the stranger, not this place. It’s always been here. I’m the newcomer now.