5 signs you're ready to move to the mountains - #165

And 1 sign you're not.

Sometime in the 2010s, I showed up at the airport without my ID. I didn’t realize this until I was in line for security, waiting to scan my printed boarding pass and a card that verified my identity that was in another bag, resting quietly at home. Two men pulled me aside and interrogated me, by which I mean they started asking me to list every address I had ever lived at in order. I remember my throat closing at the prospect: every address? And so we sat there, me taking a stab at various numbers across 6 or 7 different regions and 12 or so different domiciles while their faces contorted further and further into fatigue and disbelief.

“Alright, you’re fine, go ahead.”

Fine was an interesting word for whatever circuitous path I’d just outlined; I’ll give them that.

Recently, I picked up

Meghan Daum

’s memoir, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House. I saw a review that described it as “The funny and charming true story of one woman’s quest for the four perfect walls to call home.” I was delighted: a sister in moving boxes! In it, she recounts her nearly life-derailing obsession with where she lives. But it takes a minute to realize that for Daum, it’s more outfit than wardrobe as she whirls through the houses and apartments. She grows up in Texas/New Jersey, goes to Vassar in New York, then moves to New York City, then vacillates a little between Nebraska and LA before finally settling in LA. She still allows herself to be defined by “place” but her true obsession is with the dwellings themselves. Her adult life might only have been New York, Nebraska, LA, but my god did the woman move within them.

There are a few different ways I segment the eras of my life, but the most common is by place. When I say I lived in the BVI, it takes a curious conversation partner to untangle that I lived in five different places while I was there. For me, unless the domicile was part of the story, the setting was always left as broad as the regional airport. I lived in DC, or I lived on the Red Line, but barely ever is it I lived in Columbia Heights, Tenleytown, and Van Ness. Almost never is it my friends’ couch in a cold row house, an attic in a cottage with five boys, or an apartment with parquet floors.

But Daum’s story was peeling back my own wallpaper, my mind wandering away from her narrative to see if it could remember the various tile patterns of bathroom floors I knelt on. Did I care enough about tile then to remember?

Where Daum’s search for a home seemed driven primarily by an image — the home itself as a structural projection of who she was — I only ever remember being driven by cost and proximity to work. Of course I wanted it to be livable with live-withable people, but even then, I would find out later that my standards were much lower than many of my peers. I didn’t define myself by my personal setting, but by my surroundings.

I was going to be an island girl, hair unkempt and feet bare. I would breeze through life, catching dinghies and waves. Life would reveal itself to me like sparkling pieces of sea glass in the sand.

I was going to be a New Yorker™, heels high and ambitions higher. I would run the office with a coy smile and an iron fist. Life would be a series of montages, each season more glamorous than the last.

I was going to be cosmopolitan in big sky country, riding my mountain bike to work with a pencil skirt rolled in my backpack. I was going to be decked in linens sipping espresso by the Pacific Ocean. I was going be a superathlete, climbing the steep and twisted roads of the Santa Monica Mountains.

I was going to be a lot of things, but it wasn’t until I moved into a hunting cabin in the woods that I felt something shift into alignment. In that house, the binoculars turned into focus; the lid sealed into place; the lock clicked open. Wherever I was, whoever I was, there was one thing I now knew I needed.

Wood.

If there were ever moments from the various places I lived that earned the spot of core memory, they all dealt with wood. A time worn boardwalk to the ocean, gray and splintered from tide and time. Unvarnished and unpainted built-ins wrapping beneath a jutting window. A spice cabinet whose maple door swung not open, but down, creating a table where there had been none. A ceiling clad in pine, the knots scattered like black holes in the night.

The hunting cabin was made up of so much wood that it’s hard to remember it being made of anything else. There was a sink and a bathtub and a stove and fridge, but were there tiles? Was there plaster anywhere? There was terracotta on the bathroom floor, but even the wrapping around the tub was wood. Wood ceilings, wood walls, wood trim, wood floor, wood decking, wood stairs, wood doors, wood stools, wood shelves, and we had a wood table and a wood bed, and a wood sense of being.

I mentioned wood in my vows. Ben became a woodworker. We named our kid Woods. If there is something calling to me in this life, it would not be farfetched to assume it travels through exclusively root systems.

For many years, roots conjured images of snarled entrapments, coils reaching around ankles to trap you, to drag you back into the earth. I was always running from something to something else, someone else, some new version of me — a snake eager to shed their skin, but embarrassed to look at it. Every time I left somewhere, the excitement to start anew, to be new, was always laced with shame, like all the people there had found what was special, tapped into it, and for whatever reason, I couldn’t. They settled dreamily into the beach chairs of that life, and my beach chair was being subsumed by quicksand, forever caught in a nightmare where no one notices I am drowning.

How could they so easily find what they were looking for?

It’s taken a long time to realize those skins, those shells, those chrysalises are not failures or missteps, but mere maps. Traces of time and place while I hemmed and honed on place and person. That the point was to search and there was never any shame in the searching.

When I envision the future, either ones I want or ones I could tolerate, I picture wood. I picture a wooden dutch door and a wooden pergola in a breezy mountainscape by the sea. I picture wood slatted walls and a wooden deck in the damp of the singing jungle. I picture wood benches and wood burning stoves and wood piles high and wide. I picture a woodworker and a Woods.

I joked last week about all the clickbait headlines I could write if I ever felt desperate to do so, the first of which was “5 signs you’re ready for mountain life, and 1 sign you’re not”. Despite my purest of intentions to not write that, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what those five signs would be.

How did we know we were ready for this mountain life? People harp about the weather here a lot. We are in a microclimate in this valley at 10,000 feet where it snows every month of the year and the sun is hot chicken hot and the wind sings like she’s been alone in the car for hours, forgetting anyone else exists. When we came from California, people acted like we might actually freeze to death, like we’d never owned jackets or shoes not made entirely from linen. We tried to tell people: it gets in the 40s and 30s in Topanga Canyon, and whatever temperature it was outside, it was the same temperature in our house. In our tiny, rat-ridden, single-paned, entirely wood house that we loved beyond measure, beyond reason.

All we needed was to feel cocooned and connected, and all we needed to feel those things was wood.

That was maybe the first sign: that we would rather live uncomfortably amidst logs than comfortably amidst drywall.

The second: that we would rather be worn out than worn down.

The third: that we would rather learn to do it ourselves than have someone else.

The fourth: that we would rather be outside than in.

And the fifth: that being ready didn’t really matter. We wanted to live in the woods, and so we did.

That is, after all, the sign a person isn’t ready: that they think not being ready matters; that they think shedding their skin for a new one isn’t something they can do again and again and again; that those skins aren’t the most beautiful sign of life there is.

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You can buy Meghan Daum’s memoir here. I loved it.