Turning Point
When I tell people the story of my life, they usually respond with some variation on the following thought: “Wow, you’ve lived in a lot of places.” While it might be true that I have lived in more places than the average American my age, sentiment always makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Generally, I smile and I nod and tell them “Oh yes,” both out of a desire to be seen as a worldly traveler but also to spare them and myself the telling of an overly complicated tale. Because, even though I have lived in California, Guam, Hawaii, Washington, Connecticut, Vermont, Florida and visited more states and countries besides, I have done the vast majority of my travelling at the two extremes of the timeline of my life: when I was young and in the past few years. Most contradictory of all to this image of a veritable nomad is that the sedentary middle years of my life, fourteen of them, have been spent right here, in the state of Washington, just an hour up the road from where I live now.
I was too young to remember the first moves of my life, from what I am told was a hilltop house in San Francisco to an inland neighborhood in the United States Protectorate of Guam to a quiet cul-de-sac in Hawaii. My memories of coming to Washington are clearer but leaving Washington, for the second time, the summer of my junior year truly set the tone for years of my life to come. Although the road trip cross-country was harrowing, it was the leaving I will never forget.
The little duplex at Point View Place had made me sick. An acquired sensitivity to mold due to prolonged exposure, was what I told people. I didn’t explain the reality. The feeling of being squeezed inside, that something was terribly wrong and terribly alien inside of my body. I felt it in chest, as if it were packed not with meat and blood but with shards of glass. The bones of my hands and face and feet raced with fire, sharp unexpected pains which came and went seeming with no prompting but their own. More than pain, the idea that I had been invaded was revolting, horrific in that quintessential H. R. Geiger way.
The duplex had been a fallback, a solution to the problem of the Bad Years. My mother had sold the other house, down-sided for less work and less pay, to be closer to work and closer to life, out of the big house with the big yard on the small island (one in Washington, I had lived on big islands before that) and into this places. It was supposed to make things better for us. It was a sort of last-ditch attempted. Then that ditch flooded and we were forced to dig a new one.
It became real for me when we had our yard sale. All of our possessions, placed in the driveway, without even price tags attached. Foolishly, I had been deputized sales manager and, being naive and in pain with no prior experience in haggling, managed to be hoodwinked by every person who ventured down the hill into the long-ago landscaped but never maintained, semi-urban, semi-jungle tangle of our property. We couldn’t take it with us, none of things we had amassed in 14 years. If it couldn’t fit into two cars, it could not come. By the end of that day, we had ourselves, my mother and me, our animals, a large black dog and a small black bunny, and little else. By noon the next day, we drove off. I felt behind me the pain of my sickness and the hurt of all the other losses and minor tragedies a young man accrues. They had been building, a seemingly vast reservoir of resentment held back by the flimsy dam of necessity and proximity. It seemed to me that all that was good had drowned in there, by the time I was leaving I felt very little reason to stay. And as our cars pulled out of the driveway, I could almost picture that dam breaking and the wave cresting behind me. I heard it break and its great force rush towards me. In my blue Subaru, with a black rabbit beside me and my life’s artifacts behind, I imagined that I rode the surging tide.
And as we crossed the Narrows Bridge, I looked back at the city which had been my home and I said to myself, aloud because there was no one to hear, “I got out just in time.”