Three Weeks in Portland

It seems… not quit real yet.

Everyday we consciously navigate our way through unfamiliar terrain. The effort needed to move effectively burns extra calories. For a place to feel like home I guess it takes routine and comfort generated by familiarity. It takes an ability to move through ones surroundings half aware of them.

There also needs to be some type of connection with an area’s theme or feeling. Like the weather, street names, neighbors or friends, the familiar smile of the checkout girl at the supermarket, avoidance of the same pothole everyday as one makes a right hand turn onto a main artery of the city.

Weather is the best way to develop a connection. This connection can be a conversation between two strangers standing in a coffee line or being in tune with the seasonal weather patterns of a place. As an immigrant to a new city I am building, through daily experience, a time-lapse of local weather patterns. It will take at least four seasons. My body’s seasonal clock is used to a colder and dryer mountain climate. All week it’s been 65 degrees and rainy so, despite what the calendar tells me, I can’t quit feel out what season it should be.

Also, the texture of the air is different here. I can’t quit put my finger on why yet. It seems thick, bulky and persistent. Could be the humidity. Could also be the millions of people thinking, breathing and moving as each one navigates their individual mythos.

The texture of life is different here. In any direction we drive constantly through city. For most of my life I’ve lived in places where I could drive ten minutes and be in the country. Fields and fences line the two-lane road as it contours the mountains’ toes, dipping in and out of draws, cricks and drainages. Here, in the city, we drive on a grid made from overlapping rulers, hemmed in by giant vinyl and felt erasers, zipping along at whatever speed the traffic wants.

Last Wednesday we hiked a nature preserve located within Portland. It is an extinct volcano, one of many in this area. At the top we could see for miles and it was great to see beyond the next stoplight. But everywhere there were houses and power lines and streets crawling through the trees and up the sides of other extinct volcanoes.

I think that’s when it really began its seepage; the idea and the understanding that we are in a new area, in the city. It’ll be a slow and steady seepage, but one day, without me even knowing it, I’ll comprehend that this is my home.