I’ll take you on a journey.
It starts here, at my childhood home. Where I’m from is a funny little place. It’s a ranch, all cowboys and surfers and miles of open country that runs into the Pacific. At the extreme of a westward curve on the California coastline is Point Conception, what the Chumash call Humqaq, “the raven comes”, the Western Gate. There’s an air force base nearby and early in the morning, maybe once a year, you might feel the earth shaking as a shuttle is launched into space.
But if you’re a kid growing up somewhere like that, somewhere so isolated, so beautiful, you start to think a lot about geography. You start to think that if your own backyard is this big, then imagine what it’s like to travel somewhere really far away. Maybe at the time you have no appreciation for the ranch, or at least no real appreciation, and maybe it starts to feel too familiar.
So go east. Go east to the blue of the Charles River and the red of the October leaves on Boston’s narrow streets. That’s four years of winters so cold it hurts to breath, summers so hot it hurts to move. But it’s different. There are political rallies, shopping sprees, college lectures, late nights, cafés that never close, bars that never ask for ID.
But what was it Baudelaire wrote? Something like, “Do you know that fever which grips us in moments of chill distress, that nostalgia for a land we have never seen, that anguish of curiosity?” There’s a real nostalgia for a place you’ve never been all right.
So keep going east. This time stop in Oxford because for whatever reason you’ve always been haunted by it, even if you didn’t always know it. Is it validation or fate or just lucky that the first night you’re there you meet someone to fall in love with? Oh, I know it sounds unlikely, but that’s how it goes. And then stay there for awhile.
That’s me, anyway. I’ve been to some extraordinary places. I’ve been in Fés and Nairobi and Paris and New York; and in love and in despair; and in broken boots miles from anywhere, and in luck. My parents like to tell this story about me when I was about five. They were talking, in a vague, adult way, about the possibility of taking a trip next summer. But I heard “trip” and I disappeared from the room and when I reappeared moments later, I was lugging a suitcase that I could have easily climbed into and I said, “well, I’m ready!”
Still so very many places unseen. The anguish of curiosity. But also, in the meantime, isn’t the space in between interesting? Isn’t it amazing how you can adapt suddenly to a place you aren’t from–or how you can walk to the corner shop for some milk and feel irrevocably, irrationally in love with your dusty East Oxford home? Yes, I think it is.
This Is How We Begin
I’ll take you on a journey.
It starts here, at my childhood home. Where I’m from is a funny little place. It’s a ranch, all cowboys and surfers and miles of open country that runs into the Pacific. At the extreme of a westward curve on the California coastline is Point Conception, what the Chumash call Humqaq, “the raven comes”, the Western Gate. There’s an air force base nearby and early in the morning, maybe once a year, you might feel the earth shaking as a shuttle is launched into space.
But if you’re a kid growing up somewhere like that, somewhere so isolated, so beautiful, you start to think a lot about geography. You start to think that if your own backyard is this big, then imagine what it’s like to travel somewhere really far away. Maybe at the time you have no appreciation for the ranch, or at least no real appreciation, and maybe it starts to feel too familiar.
So go east. Go east to the blue of the Charles River and the red of the October leaves on Boston’s narrow streets. That’s four years of winters so cold it hurts to breath, summers so hot it hurts to move. But it’s different. There are political rallies, shopping sprees, college lectures, late nights, cafés that never close, bars that never ask for ID.
But what was it Baudelaire wrote? Something like, “Do you know that fever which grips us in moments of chill distress, that nostalgia for a land we have never seen, that anguish of curiosity?” There’s a real nostalgia for a place you’ve never been all right.
So keep going east. This time stop in Oxford because for whatever reason you’ve always been haunted by it, even if you didn’t always know it. Is it validation or fate or just lucky that the first night you’re there you meet someone to fall in love with? Oh, I know it sounds unlikely, but that’s how it goes. And then stay there for awhile.
That’s me, anyway. I’ve been to some extraordinary places. I’ve been in Fés and Nairobi and Paris and New York; and in love and in despair; and in broken boots miles from anywhere, and in luck. My parents like to tell this story about me when I was about five. They were talking, in a vague, adult way, about the possibility of taking a trip next summer. But I heard “trip” and I disappeared from the room and when I reappeared moments later, I was lugging a suitcase that I could have easily climbed into and I said, “well, I’m ready!”
Still so very many places unseen. The anguish of curiosity. But also, in the meantime, isn’t the space in between interesting? Isn’t it amazing how you can adapt suddenly to a place you aren’t from–or how you can walk to the corner shop for some milk and feel irrevocably, irrationally in love with your dusty East Oxford home? Yes, I think it is.