Will you stay? - #124

And how do you like it?

I’m still under the threshold of being a local. I know this is true because when I meet people, they still ask me how I’m liking it. How do you like living in this strange little town? It may come across as a kindness, but it has an additional purpose: filtering. The other side of the same coin as do you think you’ll stay? In conversations about making friends, many people have cited this as the reason they don't take the time to invest in new friends — so many of them just leave. Like the woman whose number I asked for at the library said, “if we’re meant to be friends, I’ll see you around.” 

How I am liking it, how I even got here, is influenced by how I liked everything before. If you’d plucked me straight out of the pasture in Ohio and dropped me here, would I stay? I doubt it. But a few more stops along the way and the narrative changes. The wants evolve and the needs cement. 

How does a person end up in a windblown avalanche town of 180 and choose to stay? What choices lead a person to that life? To loving that life? Here’s what led me. 

0-2, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Outside of astrological charts and passports, Pennsylvania isn’t part of my story. Too young to remember the battlefield next door or the dog that came home for a day or the house pictured in my Baby Book. We left before I knew we had a home to leave.

Where it started.

2-18, rural Ohio 

On so many HGTV shows, you can watch stories of couples buying homes on the street they grew up on, proclaiming their hopes to give their children the childhood they had. Their own parents live next door, grateful to be settled in decades upon decades of memories. They fly the flag of the big city sports team, they belong to the local church, they have everything they need. 

I didn’t have this. My parents raised me in Ohio because it’s where they had familial support and jobs, not because they loved it. One of the things that stood out to me the most as a child is how much neither of my parents wanted to be in Ohio. My dad wanted to be in the mountains and my mom wanted to be on the beach. And they talked about these fantasies in past and future — from the cabins they slept in on Forest Service duty to the islands they would travel to next year, the year after, the years to come. They were always dreaming of somewhere else, and in turn, so was I. 

There were 2600 people in our town and it wasn’t enough. By the time I was driving, I was driving to every other town to meet people. I drove to the beach at Lake Erie, to the park system with my bike in the trunk of my Mustang, to Akron an hour south to dance at the same club as Lebron James. I was an outside kid — in the pasture, in the mud, in the woods across the street, on a horse, on a bike, on a mission to leave. I didn’t picture the mountains, though. I pictured travel and a penthouse in New York. I thought I would be a banker. Ha, ha. 

Approaching my senior year, the school guidance counselor told me I needed to include a state school in my applications. I said no. I would never live there again. 

18-22, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 

Chapel Hill was all that was left. UCLA was too dangerous according to my mom. Miami was too dangerous according to my dad. NYU was too dangerous according to both of them. And Tulane was too dangerous according to me — I knew how much I wanted to party. So I found myself in North Carolina where it felt like every single person was wearing the exact same outfit. All the girls in Seven jeans, all the boys in khaki shorts, all of them together in Rainbow sandals. 

By the end of my first semester, I wanted to transfer. I didn’t belong in North Carolina or anywhere in the South for that matter. I felt contorted and visibly so. It was the week before Christmas break. George W. Bush had just been reelected, and Kelly Clarkson, Destiny’s Child, and Usher topped the charts. National Treasure was still in theaters and I was at a bar that doesn’t exist anymore talking to a boy that doesn’t exist anymore either. He was telling me to give Carolina one more shot, to see if I could find the thing that made it magical, made it different. He died a week later, thrown from a vehicle in a car wreck. Four weeks later I was losing my virginity in a frat house on John Belushi’s birthday. I knew because the boy in question had a poster next to the bed with a reason to get drunk every day of the year. Van Morrison’s Crazy Love was playing, and I thought to myself, “that was magical enough, I guess.” 

The real magic would be an a cappella group that was interviewed by a journalist named Mickey Rapkin who would release a book called Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory. They made a movie about it that was not dissimilar from my own college experience. Here’s my senior solo. We never had a sing-off in an empty pool, but we did occasionally have them in houses. 

Four years passed with three summers in the center: one in Ohio saying goodbye while my parents packed up for good, heading back to Idaho; one in Florence, Italy feeling out my freedom; and one in San Francisco feeling mostly disassociated after trauma. 

Come spring of senior year, I found myself in the British Virgin Islands for spring break. The a cappella group was on tour there — one of the girl’s godfathers owned a strange little hotel on Virgin Gorda. I’d been to the Caribbean before thanks to my saltwater mom. I’d been enough to know I loved it, enough to crave it.

22-23, British Virgin Islands

I graduated and flew to the Caribbean. I got a job as the Special Projects Coordinator at that strange little hotel. It was a fever dream. My days were spent trapped in a 10x5’ room with my boss who ate fried chicken every day, slurping the juices off his fingers while he told me to keep my figure for the guests. At night, I would sing in bars and flirt with the staff from Necker Island. The boss would become untenable, throwing staplers at me and screaming at me in public. I sent a resignation letter while he was on a plane to London. His reply said he would hunt me down. I would never work in the BVI again. 

It was the first time I lived alone, though, in my hotel room on the grounds. I never closed my patio door, never turned on the air. The humidity cocooned me, seeping into the cracks of the walls and my bones. I would wake up to the birds and instant coffee, staring out at the sea every morning, imagining what life would be. I would walk down the battered path to the beach, throw my towel on the sand, and begin my swim out to the buoy. I was afraid of open water, and it took me a month before I could make it to the buoy and back without turning around first. 

When I was kicked off the grounds, I moved around before landing on a boat with some friends, captains of their own boat. I cooked for their guests during the day and slept in their sail bag at night. Then, I moved onto my lover’s boat. I don’t know what else to call him. I cleaned the decks and manned the boat when he had errands on shore. We were both on the run from Customs and from ourselves. He would never settle down and I would never stay.

It was the same song on repeat. The same weather, the same sunrise, the same sunset, the same people, the same tourists, the same bars, the same over and over and over. I wasn’t a very big fish, but I still wanted a bigger pond. 

It wasn’t long until I was on a one-way flight to somewhere else.  

23-24, Washington, D.C.

DC was a strategic decision. It was where I knew the most people I loved who loved me back. I would never have gone home to Ohio, and I especially wasn’t going home to my parents’ new home in Idaho because what kind of job was I going to get in Idaho?

I don’t think my college roommates thought I would really crash on their couch in Columbia Heights for three straight months, but that is exactly what I did. I tried to be a ghost in their midst as best I could. And as soon as I got a job, I found a room in a house in Tenleytown with five boys. What did I care. It wouldn’t last long. Eventually I would be diagnosed with a tumor and tens of thousands of dollars of medical debt, and I would need a cheaper solution.

I found it in a one-bedroom apartment in Van Ness with a girl named Mallory from Craigslist who was more interested in cheaper rent than a functional living room, so she hired contractors to put a wall up in the existing living room, creating a bedroom for me. What remained of the shared space was enough for two litter boxes for our cats and a fur-covered futon. We only ever had one guest stay on the futon. It was my dad’s friend Marc who needed a place for the night and told my dad, “never again.” 

I had a cardboard nightstand and a mattress on the floor. It’s hard to know if I hated DC or if I hated my life. I was happy to have seasons, to have a salary, to have a walkable life, to have people who loved me. The city though felt staid, like a Pottery Barn and a J. Crew decided to wear commitment rings to one another. There was an art scene, but one it felt like you had to audition to get into. You had to be fully of it, or not. It is a city of uncrossed aisles. 

One weekend, my best friend visited me from New York. We were standing in a metro station waiting for a train. A woman came up to me and said she loved my pants. She loved how bold my outfit was. Claire’s face twisted when the woman walked away. I raised an eyebrow.

“No one would ever notice, let alone comment, on mustard colored jeans in New York.”

24-26, New York, NY

Later in life I would date a rich celebrity, and living in New York was exactly like this. It was glamorous and fun, but I was living someone else’s life. I loved New York, and I was miserable. I needed more sky. 

26-27, Boulder, CO

I left my 4th floor walk-up in the city to live in the mother-in-law suite of an old Victorian in downtown Boulder. My landlord lived in the main house. Her long gray hair tickled her butt and her mute husband sat on the front patio every sunny day. I rode my bike everywhere — to the grocery, the library, to work, to Target, to the Flat Irons, to my friends’ houses. I felt strong and free. When my boss asked if I would consider a transfer to LA, I said no. This felt like it, like a place I could stay. 

Of course then my cat got eaten, my grandmother died, and my boyfriend dumped me to be with his ex-girlfriend in New York — in one week.

Home in Idaho for the memorial, I got an email from my boss. “Do you want to move to LA now?”

27-35, Los Angeles 

The only girl in LA without a car, I found another mother-in-law suite attached to another house with another old woman seven blocks from the beach in Ocean Park. My front door opened to her enclosed back garden. I was back to living with the door open, the air off. I had my bike and a broken heart, and I fell in love with a city. 

I was riding my bike hundreds of miles a week, up the coast and into the canyons, through the gridlock to the Angeles Crest mountains. Life was meant to be lived outside in LA, and that’s where I was. 

Two years after crash landing there with a Uhaul, I moved into a 400 sq ft cabin in the Santa Monica Mountains with a boy named Ben. I had my doubts about living there, in his shoddy box, but I really liked the idea of splitting rent. (I also really liked Ben.) Every morning I would cruise down the canyon past the line of slow-moving commuters before turning on to the Pacific Coast Highway to ride into work in Santa Monica. 

I loved relying on my body. I loved being outside. I loved living in that little mountain community outside the hustle and bustle of the city. I loved seeing wildlife out my window every morning. I loved living in a cabin. And we both loved living there until we wanted to live somewhere else.

After our two-week evacuation during the Woolsey Fire, after eight years of allocating two hours to drive to the other side of town, after too many close calls with cars, it was time to leave. 

35-38, Southwest Colorado

How are you liking it?

Do you think you’ll stay?

There are a lot of reasons people can and cannot move: jobs, income, animals, children, parents, health, safety. “Do you think you’ll stay” comes with the implicity that you can, and that is never guaranteed. So the question really is, is your intention to stay? And it is.

I’ve moved a fair amount. I have tried a number of things. I know that I like oddballs and the outdoors, and that with age, I’ve come to enjoy being known. I know that I like living with my doors open more than I like the conveniences of the city. I know I love driving, but unmitigated by traffic. I know I need sunlight pouring in. I know I need to be able to ride or run or swim straight into the wild right out my door. 

There are things I miss, of course. I miss an easy Sunday stroll to a coffee shop. I miss humidity. I miss the beach. I miss diversity in food. I miss consistently good produce. I miss passionfruit. But if I were to find those things, I would miss soaring peaks, drifting my car over an unplowed road, living surrounded by national forests, and knowing all my neighbors. 

I like it here. And I know I like it because I goldilocks’ed my way around this continent making sure of it. I’m not sure what collection of places made this the right one, or at least the right one for now and maybe for the next 20 years. Was there some calling to the mountains from the beginning? Did I get the remoteness in the islands right, but not the climate? Would I find home in North Carolina if I tried somewhere like Ashville instead? Was the East Coast miserable or was I? I don’t know, but I’m glad I tried. There have been very few moves offered to me that I didn’t take. Now, it feels like there are very few that could be offered that I would. 

So how am I liking it? Pretty well. Do I think I’ll stay? Yeah. Yeah I do.

Home sweet home. Miss you Coopbutt.