It has been almost TWENTY YEARS since I abandoned Los Angeles....town of my youth....for the Pacific Northwest...
It was a last minute decision...only a handfull of days to go before my second year at college, and I walked away from it....taking the long ambling drive up the most gorgeous highway in the US: highway 101....me and Brother Tom were to look after my parents new home while they sold our childhood home in San Pedro...(There are few points in my life that I can return to and really view the actual CROSSROADS of an important decision....how different my life would have turned out if I had decided to remain in Los Angeles....moving to a new place really allows you to REINVENT yourself....)
When we got there we drove out into the overgrown grass and conifer woods outside of Oly...there was a meadow with an old collapsing red barn ..(now long gone...)...the air full of the seed pod fluff of some plant or other....like a shot from the beginning of Ridley Scott's LEGEND....
During that summer it was idylic....wandering through the endless woods of Fort Lewis...the local army training base...over 30000 acres....exploring Olympia, overrun with self-righteous Evergreen College hippies (a.k.a. "greeners").....
One day I came down the road with our dog Luke (also long gone now...) and saw a van driving down our road slowly....seemly sinister....Back then there weren't as many nearby houses and so you didn't see many folks on that road...When the driver pulled up and rolled down the window, I asked if he needed help...more as if to ask him what he was doing there than to actually assist...
He said he was just visiting..that he had lived in that very area of the Evergreen Valley some 20 years ago...(this would have been in the 70s shortly after/before? I was born...), and just wanted to see the old place again....he now lived up in Whitehorse in Canada...possibly owned some inn or hotel?...I forget.....
He also went on to tell me that when he had lived in the area, that there had only been himself and 2 other people in the whole stretch of forested lands...(!!!)...I marveled at the image..like something outta Laura Ingels Wilder's time.....I have thought about him from time to time since....through that first winter...when my brother returned to Cali for a bit, and I spent a month or two secluded in that house...through all the ENDLESS rain ...ALL BY MYSELF..(it was heaven....coming from a family of 5 kids...)...every so often going into town, but mostly wandering about the country...through those woods...getting to know them intimately...it really did feel like a second childhood in a lot of ways for me...
Later I moved up to Seattle with some of my siblings who had shown up on the scene, and went to art school there...and then on into the thick of life.....
Recently, I was back at the ol' homefront for the holidays....walking down TUCKER ROAD as I had a million times since that beginning, and I thought about that guy again as I looked up to the ridge over the shoulder of my folks house across that field...now sans barn...there was a house now up there in the trees where once I had roamed without any thoughts as to whose property it might be....just wandering through thick untamed woods...once discovering an old auto mobile from the 30's or 40's ...sitting there in the trees long after any road that might have brought it up there to that spot had vanished into stinging nettle and wild buttercups....
Alot had changed since way back then...more and more people had moved into the area....sections of trees had been chopped down in that endlessly frustrating cycle wherein people move to the country and slowly forget WHY they moved there in the first place and try to TAME IT...thus completely changing it from the sprawling countryside...all lazy and scruffy...to a miniature golf course....go figure....
And here I was almost 20 years later....feeling that time gone and now it was my turn to step into that man's shoes....who would remember if not me...what this place had BEEN...after the cranky old gal nearby and her husband had died...and the kids divided up the property and sold it off and scattered to the wind...?
I wondered what this area would be like in ANOTHER 20....and where I'd be THEN?
Somehow it was all very appropriate to be thinking about as the new year closed in for the kill....I imagine it will haunt me like that guy did driving down the road...is he still around?...still in Canada?....Where will I be in another 20? Alive? Will I come back and drive down this road? Will I like what I see...?
HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of you.....here's to a new year with lots of good things in it.....
3 comments:
wow Johnny. this really struck home. i was thinking about the same thing on my latest blog - where will i be the next time there would be a blue moon on new yaer's eve in 2028. but also, having lived rurally for almost a decade, your beautiful pictures make me think of all the early morning bicycle rides i've taken around the back roads and the walks with my own dog and how thankful i've felt that much of this area is zoned as agricultural (people can't build on it - not unless that zoning ever changes). the first time i went to california, i made sure i reserved a convertible to rent. i was heading a friend's outdoor wedding in Big Sur. it was October of 2005, i think. i flew into San Jose, met a friend from university and she and i drove down. we got a little lost at first, but finally got onto coastal highway 1 and it was beautiful, though dark by the time we reached Big Sur, but we could hear the ocean and smell the eucalyptus trees and the salty air. I will have to go there again. I never made it to San Francisco or North of there. I'm sure it's beautiful. I've been to LA a few years later (days after visiting Guatemala with Habitat for Humanity). It was a culture shock (to say the least). I'll have to blog about it sometime. Thanks for sharing this. (I knew what you meant about loving solitude - I have five siblings myself and I've been living out here rurally alone for a good, long time. Now that my son is here, I know it will be better we move back into town amidst other families, more options for him, more resources for both of us. Plus I work at a university in town and it'd be nice to walk/bike to work.) But I'm glad he will get to spend the first year of his life in this old farmhouse so he gets a proper appreciation of nature and it's instilled in him. I have to buy a new tent next year so I can get him to start loving camping early ;) Beautiful blog, Johnny. Happy New Year (sorry for longwinded comment).
p.s. there's a vancouver band called Pacifica you might like to check out. (i just heard them on the cbc a few days ago). the woods ARE "lovely, dark and deep", Johnny. keep your promises and get some sleep!
thanks for your comment on my blog. i traveled alone to the Dingle Peninsula in the summer of 1991. I will write about the fog and what happened sometime. You inspired me/reminded me about it. The ring of kerry is beautiful. I traveled to the Aran Islands as well. Inis Mor, specifically. I accompanied some Spanish exchange students there. What happened to me in that fog changed so much inside me and ahead of me in my life. It was pretty monumental, too. I loved the quote you wrote on my post. Who said it? thanks for visiting my blog! {nancy}
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