Gettin’ Policed, Johnny Chicago and Jersey John, Bojh and the Fort Bragg Scene

My plan for getting from Eureka to San Francisco was: go down the coast until you are in San Francisco. There’s a point where Highways 101 and 1 split off from each other, 1 meandering slowly down the coast while 101 goes inland a bit, taking most of the traffic with it. I didn’t mind meandering.

My first ride out of Eureka only took me a few miles out of town, to an exit that led to a few trailers and a lot of nothing, but at least it was south of Eureka. I put my backpack down against a mile marker and started thumbing for another ride. After maybe half an hour a police car pulled up. Now, I’ve exchanged plenty of pleasant waves and smiles with police officers on my trip, but other than the one in Dubois, Wyoming who told me I had to walk a little ways out of town (which was fine), I hadn’t had any negative experiences. But some circumstances conspired against me this time. He told me I couldn’t hitchhike there, patted me down, and drove me to the next exit, telling me I couldn’t walk or hitchhike on this highway. Larry, my next ride, would tell me that 101’s identity alternates between highway and freeway a few times on that stretch, and pedestrians are allowed on one but not the other. That being said, there were plenty of other people walking down the same stretch of 101 I was, and even a group of guys with their thumbs out closer to town. But at least the only consequence was being driven to a dumpy exit.

There was no traffic at my new spot, and since I didn’t want to get caught back on the highway and there was no other road to take me back to Eureka, I called Jim, my host from the night before. He was there in 10 minutes and didn’t mind at all (he’d offered to drive me to a good hitchhiking spot before I’d left that morning anyway), and soon I was back on the outskirts of Eureka and ready to try again.

Larry was exactly the sort of character I’d been expecting to ride with on the west coast. An ex-hippie with kind of a Cheech aesthetic, his backseat was packed with pallets of plastic cartons of grocery store juice, and as we drove he talked at length about how the speed limit on the sign isn’t the same as the speed limit police actually enforce, and by extension all other laws are also fluid, defined by their implementation rather than their letter. He was in San Francisco in the ’70s, and now he was out here in rural northern California, which some say should be its own state. Larry was riled up about a lot of things, but also very relaxed about it. He dropped me off at a roadside gem and mineral museum, which was pretty neat and had lots of fossils – I’d been forgetting to look for those, and I’m grateful for the reminder. They had some Devonian coral from Iowa.

Bonnie had never picked up a hitchhiker before, but she was in the right kind of mood that day. She’s in her 30s and works with businesses as some kind of environmental sustainability consultatant, though she has more fun running a brewpub on the side. We talked about northern California and its culture and its redwoods, good ginger mints and bad kale chips, and about rebounding after coming out of long relationships. Before branching into 1 and 101, the road swoops deep into thick redwood forest studded with the kind of quaint roadside attractions like the one-log house that you don’t see along the big interstates. Bonnie dropped me off at the fork, within view of a place that lets you drive through a hole in a tree for five dollars. It was a nice place to stand, and I would have been content to soak up the quiet and watch the woods for a couple hours. A girl coming from the other direction pulled up and told me she’d totally give me a ride if she was going the other direction and gave me her card. She lives in Seattle and runs a business making cannabis chocolates.

If Larry was regional archetype I’d hoped to meet, Dante was the other. A shrieking, rumbling white Jeep-like thing pulled over, driven by a skinny white college dude with a short beard and one of the most righteous manes of blond hair I’ve ever seen. Surfing wasn’t Dante’s main thing, but the quintessential California surfer dude is a more flattering comparison than young Chad Kroeger, so I’ll ascribe it to him. Dante goes to Humboldt State in Arcata, but he’s from the Bay Area, and he was driving to Fort Bragg for the weekend to meet with his friends and go diving for abalone, an aquatic snail that’s a delicacy in a lot of places but has been overfished to the point of being endangered. In some parts of the west coast you can’t touch them, but up here folks are permitted to harvest a small number. Dante would be sailing out and diving for them in shallow water, which is probably a lot of fun.

The road here twists and wrenches itself around thickly wooded mountains, and if you’re prone to carsickness, you’ll want to keep your head up. Dante was listening to Mac DeMarco and later transitioned to The Growlers as we reached the coast – both tap into an aesthetic that feels uniquely Californian to me, a modern psychedelia that evokes the grogginess you can only feel while half-napping on a sunny beach, your energy sapped by the heat and the stretching of time. That’s what I heard as we emerged from the woods onto high clifftop oceanside road. Mist glowed golden in the sun over the roiling water that assaulted harsh, rocky cliffs with lunging waves. Plumes of water sprayed and ricocheted from the battle line, a marvel of untamed power. The spectacle continued down the coast for miles, and I was struck by the lack of an audience. This was some awestriking stuff, and in the Midwest people would be flocking to something like this. Up here the coast was unspoiled, almost deserted, left to take care of itself while the people mussed and dirtied and parked on the beaches further south. Those beaches were surely beautiful, but these empty ones were something extraordinary.

Fort Bragg is not a small town, but definitely not a big one. Its touristy downtown was more compact and better developed than Brookings’, but still had that touristy beachside-town feel that Eureka didn’t. It was now cloudy late afternoon, and I needed to figure out where I was going to stay. I walked around town for a bit, mooching wifi and keeping an eye out for someplace to busk later. I was on the corner of Highway 1 and Redwood Ave when I heard a tearing of paper and the contents of a paper bag exploded onto the sidewalk beside me. The man whose paper bag had burst pulled his bike over, and I helped him pick up the bottle of Orangina and various baked goods and snack foods that were salvageable. An overturned styrofoam cup full of dried cranberries was not to be recovered.

The man’s companion turned around on his bike, and the two of them asked what I was up to and invited me to accompany them into a big, quaint wooden building with a big two-story plaza inside, surrounded by a couple restaurants, a cookie place, a yoga studio, and some other stuff, sort of like a rural coastal tourist mall food court. Johnny Chicago introduced himself and Jersey John, whose food I had helped scoop up. They had just come from the free meal at whatever homeless shelter or food bank is in town, and in their bags were the spoils of the trip. They plugged in their phones and Johnny got talking.

These guys are too great to make up, and they still feel more like characters in a movie than real people. Johnny Chicago is actually from Evanston, where I lived for the first few years of my life. A gray-bearded man full of energy, his bedraggled-professor persona suits him well as a teacher at the local high school. Jersey John is a bigger dude in a beret whose stoic calm counters Johnny’s enthusiasm perfectly. They’re the ultimate fulfillment of the whole “like an old married couple” schtick. Johnny gets ahead of himself, then John starts explaining the same story in an even, deliberate way, then Johnny gets frustrated and tells John to hurry it up, then John defends his narrative choices, and now they’re arguing about that and the story is forgotten. Then Johnny will pull back from the argument and, hands making Xes and then parallel lines, saying, “See, we’re always on different pages, but then we’ll be in the same place, but then we’ll lose each other again – back and forth, back and forth.” And so on like that.

Johnny just bought an RV, and that’s where they were going to stay that night, and they said that if I didn’t find a place to stay that night, I could squeeze my sleeping back in there somewhere. It was great to have a fallback. They recommended I check out a tavern up the street and see if they want some live music – something I’d been meaning to do on this trip, actually, but kept procrastinating on trying. Before I left, Jersey John insisted I take a bagel and a few other food items from his bag, and I showed Johnny Chicago how to do some things on his smartphone that had been frustrating him. They have my information, and I hope I’ll see them again. They deserve to be characters in a story that people know.

The bar owners were receptive to the idea, but decided that since it was a Friday night, they didn’t want to spring a banjo guy on their patrons at the last minute. But they helped me figure out where the foot traffic goes, and I found a nice quiet busking spot that, while not on a bustling foot-traffic corridor, was central in Fort Bragg’s small triangle of bars, so it was as good a place to play as any.  And it paid off! I busked a few hours and made some really solid money. But meeting Bojh and his friends was the real highlight of the night.

Bojh (pronounce it like “Bo”) was out with a camera. He stopped and listened, then asked if he could take some picture of me while I played. Lots of people do that, but from the way he listened, looked, and asked, he was obviously doing it as a creative rather than as a tourist, if such a distinction can fairly be made. He did that, then said something affirming and went into the bar. Later on he came back out to smoke with a couple friends and listened some more. We talked, and he asked if he could try my banjo, another question I’m asked pretty often. I almost always refuse, but I trusted him. He figured it out pretty quickly – he has the instincts of someone who’s comfortable fingerpicking an open-tuned guitar, and that’s all you really need. By this time we’d talked about my big trek, and I now had a comfier couch to spend the night on. I made a little money, then took a break and went inside for a drink, his treat. I met Terrance, who is the best.

When they were all done, I rode with Bojh, his wife Sara, and Terrance, an older dude near 50, back to their place, a nice ranch house in the woods. Bojh makes photographs and films, but he also makes music, and he’s good at it. The guy’s music room has a drum set, two acoustic guitars, one electric, an electric bass, a ukulele, a dulcimer, and definitely some other stuff that I’m forgetting. He was excited to jam, and it may just be that he’d had a lot to drink, but he was really down with just putting me on an instrument and improvising. He’s into jazz.

We did that, and it was super fun. Terrance played drums. Then we went out so Bojh could smoke. Now, Bojh calls Terrance his mentor. In the bar, Bojh told me that he was having feelings about his early 30s, and that I had plenty of time to figure stuff out, but Terrance, at 49, was his mentor in lots of life’s areas, but also his role model for how to age youthfully. Across the room, Terrance was laughing hysterically with some folks I hadn’t met, drink in hand, wearing sharp sideburns under sharp coolguy glasses and long hair. The dude was alive. Now Terrance was on Bojh’s porch, telling me with absolute drunken sincerity that what I was doing was pure and worthwhile and special. Guys, if you want to meet someone (convincingly) encouraging, meet Terrance Reimer.

Half an hour later, Terrance was conked out on a chair and Bojh was prodding and tugging him to get up and into a bed so he wouldn’t be miserable the next day. Then Bojh busted out his sequencer and I goofed around on that while he played drums. That was a strange and delightful experience, and I think Sufjan would be proud. If anyone has an old sequencer collecting dust, I’ll take it.

Then the house was quiet and Bojh and I were talking about creative life and he was showing me videos he’d made, and we decided it was probably bedtime. The couch was comfy, and I slept perfectly.

A lot happened the next day – I rode with a group of young San Diego-dwelling Texans in a hippie van who were going to a wedding, a dude named Kenny who raises exotic reptiles (“You know how kids collect baseball cards? I sell to lawyers who do the same thing with snakes”) and aspires to be a sponsored wingsuit flyer, and Laura, who works for a NASA-sponsored organization that teaches teachers how to teach better science. She and her partner put me up for the night on a mattress in a little shed in their backyard, which was great, because I wasn’t gonna meet anyone to stay with busking in Santa Rosa – weird suburban nightlife there. The next day I caught a ride with a pro poker player, possibly named Dave, and another with a pro fiddler named Rebecca who goes to old-time music festivals and has busked and hitchhiked around Ireland. And by nightfall I was in the living room of college friends in San Carlos, in the SF Bay area. After five days of improvising I was back in familiar company, with a place to stay and time to be settled. And those five days were pretty stuffed with stuff – it’s been hard to put it all together to write down. But that night meeting and jamming with Bojh and Terrance and Sara was the heart of the journey.

That morning I picked apples from the trees in Bojh and Sara’s backyard, then looked through a book of his photography of Fresno while everyone grogged awake and showered. We took breakfast at a place called Cafe 1 in Fort Bragg, a cool little organic-friendly restaurant that looks from the outside like any greasy roadside diner. Terrance had just moved into a new place near Yosemite, so he was going to head back that day to go unpack some boxes while he still had the motivation. But first we went to Glass Beach, a little stretch of shore that has stubbornly reincarnated itself from town dump to tourist attraction. They say a lot of the best colors have been scavenged away in spite of the rules, but parts of the shore were still composed of little beads of eroded glass in myriad colors. We climbed on rocks where primordial seaplants clung fast against the battering waves, where giant stalks of kelp had washed up in the low tide, now covered in buzzing flies and drying in the sun like some giant sheddings of an unfathomable bottom dweller. It was the first time I’d seen the low tide on this trip, and its alien remains were stranger to me than the glass. The glass I understood.

A lot of my traveling days begin with no destination or bed on their horizon, and they usually work out. Fort Bragg worked out a lot better than most. If anyone asks me why I’m traveling the way I am, why all the uncertainty, I’ll tell them about Fort Bragg.

[Sidebar: In the car I mentioned that the linked Mac DeMarco song reminded me of the soundtrack to Earthbound, and I just saw an AMA on Reddit that confirms that he was 100% influenced by that soundtrack. I feel like a genius now.]

Police Ride, Eureka, Swiss Matthias

Gold Beach is about 25 miles north of Brookings – a good hike. But it was early morning and I was up and already south of Gold Beach, so I started walking down 101, ready to signal some cars. It was brisk but not cold, and the road was wide and fast but not a highway, so I felt okay walking its edge. I didn’t expect to go far before getting a ride, as this was the west coast and all, but after three or four uphill miles, I began to consider the possibility of walking all the way to Brookings. But then I got a ride from two small-town doctors, one older and one younger, who were going into Brookings to run the clinic for the day. They were pretty neat.

There wasn’t much for me in Brookings, but I bought some groceries for my backpack, made some polite small talk, and wandered for an hour before crossing the Bridge to the south side of town and getting ready to hitch some more. I was beginning to wonder if all the small towns on the west coast would be calm and nearly empty like this, and it was a discouraging thought. That would mean my busking income would be limited to the big cities, and that would not be great, and that meeting people through music wouldn’t come easily. But Brookings conferred a comfort to me before I left in the form of a jolly store owner unloading his van who asked me if I was travelling and gave me a big bag of snickerdoodle popcorn. This stuff was good, man – cinnamon sugar, buttery enough to balance the dessertiness. It was the best thing, and I ate of it for days.

On the south end of town I put my thumb out and was quickly picked up by an off-duty police officer with a bony face and a deep voice, probably named Clay or something. He drove me past Crescent City (into northern California). He quickly steered our conversation in the direction of “some people are only out to manipulate others, but when our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ returns, all that won’t matter.” This started a really fun conversation in which he, prepared to evangelize me with precisely memorized scripture combos, was surprised to find that I was already on his side, and I got to play at asserting my more flexible theology against his without making him feel challenged. It was a fun game, and it felt constructive. He didn’t mind. He’s a little harsh on what it means to be saved – faith alone vs works and obedience, etc –  but we got into some good stuff on the matter of how the god of Christianity might view people who never hear about Christianity. He dropped me off at a quiet, shady stretch of 101 past Crescent City and said he wished he had more time to hang out with me, and I felt the same. I thought about him for a while afterward. I’m not enthused about such a mentally and theologically rigid man serving and protecting me, yet he also picks up hitchhikers and seemed to genuinely care about me. I still don’t know what to make of Maybe Clay, but I like him.

My next ride came quickly in the form of a big blue van with a sleeping area in the back and Dan, I think, a sinewy mountaineer type. He works in north central Washington for Outward Bound , where they take teenagers backpacking until they learn to be better humans, or something like that. Dan’s role as a veteran leader is to be a sort of instructor to the instructors, a mentor – something I wish more nonprofits and ministries would think to do. It’s easy to burn out when no one’s got your back. Dan was driving to Chico, but he was happy to take me as far as Arcata. I dozed off after we talked about teen stuff and the outdoors for a while, and then we were in Arcata, a college town full of hippies and pot, with a big park in the middle of town full of hoopers and goofs and beggars and travelers and singers. It was very California, and a little claustrophobic for me. I talked to no one, was hardly there an hour, and by evening I’d found a ride with a Humboldt communications professor to Eureka, the biggest town in the area, where I would stay the night.

Eureka worked out pretty well. On my way down from Brookings I’d submitted several apologetic last-minute Couchsurfing requests, and by the time I got to Eureka I was all set for the night. But Jim would be busy until 7:00, so I had some time to kill. Eureka’s downtown straddles 101 and snuggles a bay connected to the ocean. There are a couple of everything a downtown has, and a big plaza with a guy in a dress juggling something, but still not a lot of people on a Thursday evening in October. I busked up a few dollars in front of a bookstore, then walked to the waterfront and banjoed some more, just for myself. I ended up outside of his townhouse until 7:45, when he pulled in with apologies, but it was fine. He’d been at a bar with Matthias, a young Swiss dude who was also Couchsurfing there that night.

We spent the late evening in Jim’s living room, drinking Jim’s rum and Matthias’ Swiss chocolate (I really need to work on having gifts for my hosts). Jim is an older dude with a sharp gray goatee, kind eyes, and a faded gray Obama campaign hoodie. A cardboard cutout of President Obama faces the front door when you come in. Jim hosts Couchsurfers regularly in Eureka, and if you’re looking for a host there, I recommend him. He took a genuine interest in me and was invigorated by the traveler’s pace Matthias and I brought with us. We felt wholly welcome.

Matthias Röthlisberger is a distant relative of a Pittsburgh Steeler, but more importantly, he’s a buoyant, friendly Swiss meteorologist with an open, curious mind and an appetite for discovery. He was in the States for a conference in San Francisco, taking extra time to cruise around through Fort Bragg, Eureka, and Redding and catch as much redwood and coast as he could on the way. No stranger to the world’s reaches, he recommends exploring Europe by starting in Istanbul and working upward – he loves what the process of healing and rediscovery has made of Eastern Europe and says it’s a much more worthwhile trip than just going straight to Paris and London. We talked a lot about our respective continents and the perspectives of the people in and around them, the relative weights of various issues between them – Europe with their refugee crisis, us with our Donald Trump crisis. In Europe traveling to another country is as easy as driving between states here, and the influence that distinction has on a person’s worldview is profound.

We slept comfortably and made bacon and eggs in the morning, then took turns showering and packing while listening to Jackson Browne and CSNY from Jim’s record collection. Then, having thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company, we headed our separate ways. Matthias says that to many Europeans, visiting America or Australia is so easy that they don’t even bother when they’re young. His 20s were for exploring South America and Southeast Asia, not padding around our boisterous cities and cushy national parks. So really the only part of the world I’ve explored is basically Matthais’ future victory lap, and that makes me want to move faster and farther before I slow down.

Two Days Leaving Portland

The last few days have been rich. Tappety typing away in the San Carlos Public Library on this summery October afternoon, I’m noticing that the people and places from the beginning of my trek down the coast are slipping through the cracks in my mind already.

There is no dispute in the online hitchhiking community that Salem, Oregon, is a bad place to be and a worse place to hitch out of. There’s no popular route straight to the coast without heading back northwards, and it’s getting cold up there, so south trumped west in my planning, even though Salem was the first city down the line. Eugene seemed neat, so I decided I’d try to get there instead. I took a bus south and scoped out an on-ramp – too short, too narrow for a car to pull over – then walked south and repeated the process a couple times until I settled on a stretch of road that forms the outer wall of a convoluted part-cloverleaf, part-diamond interchange between I-5 and 217. There was a decent shoulder, but cars were moving fast and with agenda. I waited a long time. I’d gotten a late start that day, so it was already mid-afternoon when I turned down a couple rides to Salem. Not being in Salem seemed more important than being anywhere in particular.

Eventually I was picked up by a dude in this rickety old black VW Beetle from the ’50s, its windows covered in stickers, parts held together with little more than stubbornness and character. The driver was a dive-bar dad who was driving through the area to see the dentist and hit a record shop (in Salem) before heading back to some rural destination out of my way. He took me as far as Wilsonville, a little town with not much in it but decent traffic and a crisp suburban vibe. There was a better place to hitch from there, and I was offered a ride almost immediately to Albany, Oregon. Albany is about halfway between Salem and Eugene – not a lot to it, but past Salem. But the sun was setting and I wasn’t optimistic about getting to Eugene by nightfall, and I decided to hold out for a longer ride. If I didn’t get one, I could always just bus back to Portland an spend another night with Kaily’s friend there.

I didn’t get a ride to Eugene. I did meet a sparsely-toothed old tramp who spent about 20 minutes teetering forward and back and around, under the burden of two giant backpacks, one across his chest, making him look like a turtle tottering on two feet, all while his dog watched with muted concern. The smell of booze overpowered his grungy body oder, but he never stopped smiling to make up for it. He told me that if I wasn’t out of Wilsonville by the night, I could have some of the coconut curry rice he’d be cooking behind the Fred Meyer grocery store, and he was sincere. The poorest dude I encountered was the one most willing to share. I took a bus back to Portland, but I wonder what that would have been like. It would have been the interesting choice.

Determined to try a little harder, I left before sunrise the next day and took an early-morning-only bus that goes further out than my southbound bus from the day before (almost as far out as Wilsonville). It was pretty chilly, and it didn’t get warmer as the sun rose to gray the misty, drizzly sky. This was that Pacific Northwest weather I’d been lucky enough to avoid almost entirely on this trip. I layered up and fidgeted to keep warm, alternating which fingers stiffly held my “Eugene” sign and which I stiffly stuck in my pocket.

Then I got a ride from Stevo. Stevo used to be a medical assistant, but now he works full-time trimming marijuana (legal in Oregon now) for the state-approved dispensaries. He’s pretty excited about where he’s at in life, making good legal money, having an infinite supply of pot (“They said they’d fire me if I passed my pee test!”) and working for the government. He was on the road to go pick up the used RV he’d just bought. He plans to paint it in two distinct color schemes – Seattle Seahawks colors on one side, Portland Trail Blazers on the other, both to show off his dual allegiance and to confuse drivers on the highway. A friend called him as he dropped me off, and he explained the new job, new RV, and ideal paint scheme to her with the same exuberance.

I got a short ride from there in the SUV of a dad with a toddler daughter in a carseat behind him, who told me his wife was finally getting help for her mental illness. He’d hitchhiked when he was younger, when times were rough. He dropped me off by a Pilot station at the last exit before Salem, where I went inside to warm my hands and take a breath.

There wasn’t a ton of traffic getting back on the highway, but the road was long and straight, so I positioned myself at the end of the on-ramp, where cars in the main lanes would be able to see me too. As I was walking up, a young Pilot employee told me I’d probably get picked up pretty quickly. He used to do it all up and down the state.

Travis didn’t pick me up immediately, but I didn’t have to wait long. Travis is 26, lives in Brookings, OR, and is going to be a father. He was on his way back home after visiting his pregnant ex in Seattle and patching things up with her. I don’t know their story, but this week, at least, he got to play the role of persistent romance-movie lover, swooping across two states to say, “You’re not getting rid of me that easy.” And whatever their history was, his happiness at the reconciliation was pretty apparent. This dude was excited to be a dad with this woman. But first he had to drive back home in time to work a 10-hour shift at McDonald’s. He’d done better work as an electrician, and he intended to do so again when he moved up to Seattle, which was now a very real plan. I don’t know if that ought to make his shifts at McDonald’s easier or harder to bear, but it must ramp up the intensity somehow.

Brookings is at the southwest corner of Oregon, near the California border. If it had been warmer I might have asked him to drop me off in Eugene, since I hear it’s pretty neat, but I was relieved at the chance to blast a little further south. We drove together for a few hours, and we talked about a lot of things, most of which I’ve since forgotten. At the point when we broke off from I-5 to start heading west, we passed a couple of older teens walking a dog. Travis wondered aloud where they were going, and I half-listened, disinterested. But about a mile later, Travis turned the truck around to see if they needed help. They were apparently a boyfriend and girlfriend, both white and wearing mostly black. She was thin and small, and he was mildly doughy and wore a beanie with a big pot leaf on it. His name might have been Sean. The dog was definitely Daisy, and it huddled on her shoulder for most of the trip. We didn’t ask them much, and they didn’t volunteer much other than thanks and directions to the McDonald’s they asked him to take them to – the one by the highway in Riddle, OR.

After we dropped them off, I wondered what their story was. Travis was sure they were teen runaways, or at least that the guy was. I’m still not sure why he made that distinction, but the overall theory checks out. They seemed to know the area well enough, so they probably weren’t train hoppers, but they would have been walking a long, long way without a ride, and they hadn’t been asking for one. They were on their own out there.

We finally reached the Pacific Ocean and turned onto Highway 101, which follows the coast pretty much all the way down. The water was immense and quiet, sparkling in the sharp autumn sunlight. It didn’t feel real at first,

Travis dropped me off in Gold Beach. There wasn’t much there – it had the feel of a tourist town in the offseason. I walked through town, seeing very few people up and about, ate one of the most disappointing burgers I’ve ever had (to be fair, it was only about $3), and walked down the beach as the sun began to go down over the Pacific, determined to set up my hammock someplace where I could see the water and the stars as night fell. On the south end of town was a tiny patch of maybe ten matching new houses along the water. The last one in the row was just an empty shell, unused and somewhat unfinished. There were tall posts reaching down from the roof on the side facing the water, and those became my hammock poles.  The sun was down by eight, and I lay in my hammock, dozing in and out, until the sky was dark and a full sky of stars shone overhead. As the cold ocean winds intensified, I accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to stay warm that night. I threw up my tarp, intended more for use as a rainfly, as a windbreaker and slept as well as I could, waking up tired and somehow triumphant.

All Citied Out in Portland; The State That I Am In

Seattle was my first real destination, an end goal after a trip of substantial stopovers; it was the first time in this journey that my momentum came to a halt. By the end of a month or so there (Vancouver fling included), my loved ones thoroughly visited, I was getting antsy to leave. So I took a bus to Portland on Thursday. Since then I’ve spent a couple nights on the couch of my cousin April’s acquaintance from college, then a couple nights on the IKEA foldout of my pal Kaily’s old friend from home. I reconnected with a fine cousin in Vancouver, WA (essentially a Portland suburb), and later today I’m going to see Dan, a friend of a high school friend who was just becoming a friend-friend in the final months before I went off to college.

Portland has a similar composition to Seattle, but without the big-city thrum and pressure, and without similar city Vancouver’s world-savvy Canadian sheen. It’s a little grungy, very casual, pretty walkable, and ripe for people-watching. Does it live up to carnival-of-coolness reputation, caricatured in “Portlandia,” that many know it for? Maybe a little. I’m not sure. I think it would reveal itself to me more if I was a resident, in tune with all the local events, stable enough to have money for the trendy stuff. As a backpacking pedestrian, I’ve passed plenty of cool bars and coffeeshops and restaurants, a local arts-and-crafts market, swarms of food trucks, and a hemp (weed) festival by the water, as well as a lot of 9-5 commuters, homeless people begging on corners, and vast residential areas just like anyplace else.

Portland is a city, and after Seattle, I’m kind of over cities right now. I can see why people get excited about it, but it’s hitting me at the wrong time. This week it’s felt like Seattle without the close friends and family and familiarity. I haven’t been isolated here by any means, but I’ve been lonely, and the place doesn’t feel different enough to be invigorating. Maybe I’ll come back here someday see it with fresh eyes, but they’re not fresh right now. I haven’t decided if I want to shoot straight for the Pacific coast from here or continue south through Eugene and just book it to California on the main highway, but I’m excited to get going.

I’ve been pushing myself to reflect on my internal state. The second leg of my trip has begun, and my path and destinations aren’t as clear as they were between Chicago and Seattle. I have friends in or near all the major Californian cities, and there are loads of places I’d like to see, but there’s no way I’ll see them all, even though I have no real deadline – the urgency of beating the autumn cooldown won’t mean as much as I head south along the coast. So my sense of purpose is a little weaker; or rather my abstract internal motivation – self-discovery and healing and all that – is now my primary propulsion. And that’s more subject to the moods and whims of the present.

Roaming downtown Portland yesterday, on a dark, drizzly northwest Sunday afternoon, after being disappointed by three of the weekend’s four promising busking opportunities (there’s no intense nightlife thoroughfare to provide good foot traffic, and the few legal areas for buskers at the weekend market were occupied by buskers and panhandlers), I was discouraged – not discouraged enough to want to head home or anything, but a little in the dumps. I still think about Jillian all the time – what she’s been up to, how the two of us fell short in our marriage, what could have changed, what still hurts – and on days like that, it’s a lot harder to apply the self-talk necessary to keep myself buoyant. I still don’t know where I want to end up, and while I’m still pretty sure a creative career in music and/or writing is the dream, it’s hard to believe it’s a feasible career. But I have the mental safety net of knowing that what I’m doing now is creating space for those issues to air out and clarify, and there’s not much else I can do but move forward with intent and let time do its work.

As I travel down the coast, I expect to have more to write about than I have sitting still in the city. My opportunities to record them may come less frequently, with the more meandering course I mean to take. Reader, I’m honored that you’ve taken care to keep track of me this far, and I’ll do my best to show my gratitude by giving you a trip worth reading about. If you’re in California, see you soon.

Vancouver and the Woods Just Past It

Whoops! I spent about five days taking the BoltBus up through Bellingham (for ice cream and hiking) to Vancouver, and then I came back and procrastinated awhile before composing my thoughts. Not that it makes much difference to you, reader, but between me and myself, I would really like to do better at channeling my life’s momentum into prose before  the thoughts settle too much.

Some things about my trip to Vancouver:

1. I like Vancouver. It’s a medium-sized version of big-city Seattle – coastal, progressive, casual, outdoorsy – but with quieter streets, an easier pace, and a Canadian twist. There’s a lot of beachy coast encircling the city, and downtown is capped by an enormous park. It’s a softer city than Seattle, but still vibrant.
2. I Couchsurfed with Natasha (in the Canadian tongue, it slant rhymes with Nebraska)  a girl from Calvin (Hope’s nearly-identical rival school) with whom I share some acquaintances. It was nice. We ate sushi, I checked out her church, and she helped me figure out how to get to all the cool places, but most of the time she was getting over a little sickness and going to work, so most of my travels in the city were solo, which was fine.
3. My first meal in Vancouver was at a poutine place that was blasting Rush. I was ready for the patrons to start a pickup hockey game.
4. Loonies and Toonies, Canadian $1 and $2 coins, make a huge difference in busking. In the States, 90% of my tips are one dollar, which is great. In Canada, it’s much more common to get a handful of change, which in Canada means lots of dollars. My visit to Canada cost me nothing but BoltBus fare.

On a sunny weekday afternoon I took a bus north of Vancouver to Lynn Canyon Park. The main attraction there is a long, swinging suspension bridge that crosses the river and its deep valley. The bridge itself is just a minute’s walk from the parking lot, but a few miles of trails loop around the thick forest. I walked across the bridge, took a peek down, and figured I’d find a loop as I went.

Hiking up the dirt-and-root trail, I realized I wasn’t having fun, and it suddenly struck me that I was power-walking, and for no reason. There was no distant attraction or time limit inciting me to rush. In the city, any city, everything rushes. In Lynn Canyon Park, I was the only thing rushing. I stopped for a minute and breathed and listened. Then I started walking again, now so slowly that you might call it creeping. I felt a lot better.

One might imagine the forest unfurling and revealing itself to me in my silence, animals coming out of holes and bushes to sniff and whisper to me, flowers blooming and turning their heads. And there may have been an imperceptible difference, but my own change was enough. Rather than stampeding through the forest and thrusting my senses out carelessly to pillage whatever I could take by surprise like an ersatz arbiter of Manifest Destiny, I was letting the forest tug me along and stop me as it told me its message, slow speech in a language I didn’t understand, underscored and subtitled with the trees’ long shhhhhh.

Last night I went with Andrew and his friend Drew to an hour-long group meditation at a mindfulness center. He’s reexamining his life in a way that’s pretty harmonious with what I’m doing. I was way too sleepy to withstand the stillness, so I kinda missed out on the benefit of the whole thing. Afterward, the psychologist in charge facilitated a brief conversation that was mostly about being aware of your awareness, listening to yourself think, seeing your mind as a spectator. Ideas like that never get me excited for long – too circular, too insular. But creeping in the woods of British Columbia, lowering my will and substituting my focus for openness had value. It lent me an experience I would have otherwise missed.

A jogger zipped by me. A tiny Yorkie off-leash, followed by a small family. A young Eastern European couple who seemed to be stewing after an unresolved argument. A woman gabbing on her phone. Another jogger. I must have looked motionless to them.

I crept past spindly young deciduous trees whose thinnest branches waved like fingers. I crept over a slug built like a hot dog and painted the sickly color of overripe summer squash. I crept past tree stumps with as many as three young trees springing up out of them – who can say if they’re alive or dead? Creeping further, I stared into a thick conifer trunk to see innumerable mosses and lichens, caterpillars, insects and even husks of insects that called the same tree host and home. I came to another bridge. The way down to the water was blocked by a fence was barricaded with giant DANGER signs that said that lives indeed had been lost climbing down that slick, stony wall. I stopped awhile to imagine the blood on the rocks, the horror of the friends of adventurers who had perhaps loved nature too carelessly to fear it. I crossed the river and went back to the entrance. I’d covered very little distance, and I felt very accomplished.

The higher up the food chain a creature is, the fewer there seem to be – roughly one wolf to a zillion squirrels, right? There’s probably a scientific term for this, but I majored in English instead. For every big tree, there are thousands of smaller things that live in the folds of its branches, the earth between its roots, the pads of its leaves. They don’t ask for much, so they find it. That difference is the reason I’ve seen a lot more rodents on this trip than bears. But I’m restructuring my values as I see the worth in those small things. The earth is covered in plants and insects. Tiny animals ride around on top of all that, and a few of them are a little bigger. Bears are cool, and all the more so for their rarity, but when every leaf and bug and chipmunk is new to me, what’s the difference? I used to spend 40 hours a week typing on a computer in an office.