A Month in the Furthest Place From Home

I catapulted myself across the country, aimlessly aimed at Seattle, hoping this crevice of Pacific coast would offer me a place to fold into.

It did. I’ve been here for almost six weeks now, and I have to say, I’m pretty smitten.

A lot of what I’ve done in those six weeks has been totally ordinary.

I’ve adopted a new coffee shop where I sit to work at least once a week, watching the ferries make their neverending loop across the water.

I’ve taken those ferries myself on maybe a dozen occasions, shuttling myself to a bookstore, a marketplace, a concert.

I’ve discovered the ridiculous bounty of dripping-ripe Washington produce, eaten peaches that demand leaned-over sinks and wet paper towels. Actually, I’ve eaten a lot of stuff, wonderful stuff: carby things, seafood things, piroshki, crab cakes, Thai food. Guys, eating is SO COOL.

I’ve gone backpacking for the first time in my life, waking up in the middle of the night bleary and bear-scared to scurry out stupidly barefoot and pee under a scree of stars.

I’ve reunited with old friends and made some pretty incredible new ones. I’ve gone to the dentist, the doctor, had my carpal tunnel officially diagnosed and continued to type thousands of word every day because I have to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I spent my thirtieth birthday climbing a mountain before ferrying over to the mainland to watch a (fairly iffy, admittedly) blues cover band at a combination bookstore/study space/food court, taking it in from the comfort of the mixing booth. There was a lightning storm outside that made national news, flickering the lights off for a moment mid-set. People danced. I laughed, thinking about how I would never have been able to predict where I’d celebrate this landmark, not six years, six months, six days beforehand.

To be clear, I haven’t really spent that much time in Seattle proper. As it turns out, there’s another thing I couldn’t have predicted about my 30-year-old self six years ago: she hates cities. Hates them. The noise, the crowds, the overstimulation. So after spending a week in a glorified parking lot of a campground in Lynnwood (the closest available and legal place to stash an RV in that metropolitan mess), I moved back across the water to a long-term park outside of Port Townsend.

It’s a little bit funny; it’s a 55+ community, though it’s open to me because of a camping club membership I have. But I am definitely dragging down the mean age by a decade, and I do get some strange looks from my neighbors.

I love it here regardless: the way the fog settles over the trees in the morning, the way the sun breaks through and sparkles in the afternoon, dearer for its scarcity. The way you can watch the rain pouring over the mountains, or sit in your car while hail rockets down amidst sunshine.

The deer here wander in broad daylight, fearless, crossing the main thoroughfare by way of the gas station as if they’d casually stopped for a snack.

The people seem unsullied, too, somehow; a stupid number of people here have shared food with me — pure strangers: the man who was celebrating is 62nd birthday by hiking, who invited me into the group to eat one of his expensive, flown-in-from-California chocolates; the family at the laundromat who didn’t gender their baby and whose most masculine-presenting party was wearing a skirt along with their beard. The baby’s mother was eating a whoopie pie, caught me eyeing it. “Here,” they said, despite my feeble protests. “Part of it just fell off, anyway. The universe says yes.”

I’ve also been doing this poetry workshop out of a local bookstore in town — and by the way, did you all know that Port Townsend is the seat of Copper fucking Canyon? It’s one of the biggest poetry presses in America and I just accidentally navigated myself to its hometown, didn’t figure it out until I drove past the tiny white frame house that serves as its headquarters.

Anyway, the poetry workshop isn’t connected to CC, though it’s being taught by a poet who’s published with them, Gary Copeland Lilley. Being in a writing-focused community environment, even for only a couple of hours a week, has been refreshing, especially in the form of one possibly-octogenarian firebrand by the name of Nan Toby. (Yes, you must use both names.) The first week, she read through my “fuck”-laced poem without so much as flinching, before bringing in her own eulogy to a lost almost-love whose strong arms and pianists’ hands she recounted in detail. She walked with me out of the bookstore after class one day, almost outpacing me; seeing a handful of spilled change, we bent down in tandem to pick up two pieces of good luck each.

I keep doing this, somehow; keep shoehorning myself into new communities, keep trying to start over again and again. Only lately I’m figuring out it’s never really restarting, that there is no such thing; there’s only now and now and now.

And so I’ve been slowing down, in general, no longer running away from my body or my work or my future. Today, I stood in a grove of dahlias and watched a bee perform his ablutions for what had to be a full fifteen minutes, smiling, smiling — and almost crying, too. All the tiny little beautiful.

Perhaps most shockingly of all, the Olympic peninsula has made me one of those people I’ve openly bemoaned and never understood before: someone who drives the speed limit, or even a few miles under. Without even thinking about it.

Part of it is that it just takes longer to get where you’re going out here, that you have to capitulate to travel. But there’s the sheer force of the beauty of the place, too; the leaves changing and falling, the clouds over mountains juxtaposed against the dappled sunshine where you are. The shine of the water and the puff of the ferries and the gullsong that undergirds it forever.

It mesmerizes you, makes you remember how little anything actually matters.

Or maybe I’m just getting old.