All The Way Over Here
Artwork: Eddie Peake's 2018 exhibition Concrete Pitch
Photograph by Carina Cain
By Carina Cain
You will know it first and always as the place between mountains. Tucked up neatly in the armpits of great sloping hills. Here, you have been just born and just barely an adult. There are dirt roads and a best friend and entirely too many cats and the most perfect hill to barrel down on a bike. There are undulations of hurt and learning and unlearning and uncompromised joy and most of all a long string of good memories. (A string you like to tug on every once in a while. It doesn’t unravel and sometimes you cry a little because of this strength.) Here, it is brown most of the time, and, for a span of weeks deep into the end of every year, green green green. Seasons are suggestions that are left to steep in a big dry basin, filled with the state flower and bark from the redwoods and beach sand and artificial turf from all those new developments along El Camino. This place grew you until you felt that first itch of outgrowth, like lying in bed around the age of ten and taking note of the way your limbs ached from something your body was doing on its own, without your permission, but for your own good. Growing pains to urge you out and onward. So, you begin the task of trying something new and you flit back and forth, up the coastline and back down until a big envelope comes with a question and you say, okay yes, I think I know where I want to go.
And then you will know it as the place by the river. Now in a cradle made of mountains that built up and up until they burst, but way before you showed up, don’t worry. You get here just in time for the last great heat of August and lap it up blindly. And then all of the green starts to turn red and orange and yellow and a bit brown, but you don’t really notice it the first time because you’re not looking that far into place, you’re looking into people and buildings and books and yourself. You’re looking into the way you feel about leaving your basin and everything and everyone it contained. You look into it and decide the place by the river will have to do for now, or you’ll make do, and that should be fine. Here, everything is somehow both spread out and far too close together. After a while, you know cobblestones well and also rain and spruce and pine and juniper, and yes, part of you must have come here for the trees—bringing a slice of familiarity to the big gathering at the end of the year. You find a seat in the corner and eat this treat with your fingers, greedily.
The time in between places will never not be weird. Like finding an old sweater in the back of your closet that you wear maybe thrice a year. You pull it out because you’re purging and putting everything you can bear to part with in a huge plastic bag that you will take to Goodwill and leave in capable hands. You pull out this sweater and consider it. Probably, you try it on with three different pairs of pants, just to see what all the fuss is about, why it’s still comfortable hanging out with the other clothes you wear on a weekly, not yearly, basis. It looks okay with the pants. Not great, but that’s because this sweater is from 2012 and 2012 was a notoriously unfashionable year. You tell yourself this and take the sweater off and put it in the big plastic bag and purge a little more and feel a little better once your room is devoid of mess and excess stuff. But, just as you’re about to tie the bag off, an action that cannot be undone without a puncture or a tear, you experience a strange gnawing. It starts somewhere in the center of your body and snakes down into your toes, which curls them. Then it snakes up into your brain, which makes you consider the fact that you do still wear the sweater sometimes. And it’s so soft. Good for layering. You could find some better pants to wear with it. Yes, you could do that. And then your arm is descending into your purging bag and you’re sifting through time and space and the remnants of a younger, different you until the sweater from 2012 makes contact with a few fingers and then you’re yanking it out and smoothing it down and stuffing it back into your closet. And this happens every year.
You finish two and a half times in the place by the river and then you are preparing for a temporary departure. You will leave the cobblestones and rain and spruce and pine and juniper in the new year to rework yourself an ocean away. This departure is planned, but, still, you wonder about choice. A crisis of confidence. This happens often enough that you are concerned for one brief and intense night, but are otherwise undeterred. Besides, you’re bringing a friend, and this helps. You’re bringing one friend and one very large suitcase. And once you’ve spanned that ocean and curled up on a mattress too small to fit both you and your worries, you begin to understand this place day by day. You trip often on the building block sidewalks and hand over paper money to dodge the debit card fee (you jangle all the time now, carrying around so many coins). Trains—turns out you love them. You are surrounded by concrete all the time and find you don’t miss the trees as much as you had anticipated. There’s a squirmy feeling in your belly once you realize this. Walking, which is initially just a necessary endeavor, being where you are, becomes habitual and lovely. When it finally snows you are all alone all the way over here, in this place that always smells slightly sweet. And it’s been cold for a while now, even wrapped in cotton and wool and leather, and you take a moment to yearn for dry, steady heat every night as you unwrap yourself and turn on the shower. You scrub and prod at the body that grows around you, and when you blow your nose the sweet air you’ve inhaled that day shoots out grey against the white tile wall. Gross, but you’ve gotten used to it.
The next time you reach into your closet and pull the 2012 sweater over your head for another consideration you are surprised to find it fits more snugly than usual. But, you had been eating whatever you wanted, at any time of day you wanted, during your cross-continental stint. Whatever. Bodies grow and shrink and swell and deflate. Still, you find yourself frowning as you toss this information around inside your brain silo. The frown betrays your confidence, so you tell yourself all this stuff about bodies every week until it’s time to go back to the place by the river, and the afternoon before you leave you cry just a little because this is the last time and you feel almost like mourning.
But this feeling doesn’t last for long. Circumstance doesn’t let it. You return to the place by the river and the end of summer seems to stretch its legs a bit longer, its stride spans a few extra weeks and everyone praises the sun like proud parents watching their kid bow after an endearingly mediocre middle school rendition of The Odyssey. Falling back into this place is more comfortable than ever and you spend a few months wondering what the difference is, if the best really has been saved for last, or if you’re a fundamentally altered person from that first year you spent observing and trying to puzzle yourself into the newness everywhere. You don’t have an answer until one night around early February in a room eating noodles with people who make you comfortable, who have helped to alter you, and who themselves have altered right in front of you, with you, because of you. Thinking ahead, as you tend to do, still twists your insides, so for this moment you don’t. Instead, you settle into the comfort and accept the alteration and realize that being home is as much people as it is place. You realize this and it’s corny and it makes you cry.
Carina Cain is a Bay Area local who graduated from Lewis & Clark College this past summer with a B.A. in English. She is admittedly too fond of the hyphen, and wholeheartedly believes that arts education is fundamental to the well-being of society.
