HOLDING BOTH 

by Patty Somlo

The first few weeks I lived in Portland, Oregon, I took long daily walks. This was not unusual, since I had been an obsessive walker for decades. But what distinguished these initial Portland treks from ones I’d been taking only a month before in my then-hometown of San Francisco was that I spent most of the walk trying not to get lost.

As I stepped along the uneven sidewalks that were lifted in places by hundred-year-old tree roots, I tried to memorize each street and turn, in order to find my way home. At the same time, I made sure to take in the scenery, mostly consisting of late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses – Victorians, Four-Squares and Bungalows – slathered in an array of bright colors, with raucous gardens spilling out in front.

I had moved to Portland with my husband, Richard, at a time of life when most people we knew were staying put. At the respective ages of fifty and fifty-five, we had packed everything in our overpriced, poorly maintained flat in San Francisco’s Richmond District, and watched the Mayflower movers haul it all out to their double-parked yellow and green van. As soon as they were done and our landlady, Margarita, had inspected the place, we got into our Toyota Corolla and headed north. Richard was a native San Franciscan and I had lived in that heartbreakingly beautiful city for over twenty years. We were only leaving, because like many other longtime San Franciscans, we had been priced out.

Unlike in Portland, I could find my way around San Francisco with my eyes shut. Perhaps because I had fallen in love with the city from the moment I landed there at the age of twenty-seven, I spent time in nearly every neighborhood and lived in quite a few. And, of course, I walked. In some parts of the city, it would be more accurate to say that I hiked. I hiked up steep streets in the Castro, past colorful Victorians set high above tall flights of stairs. I hiked up to Nob Hill and Chinatown, then down nearly ninety-degree California Street, which both thrilled and terrified me. I often walked from my studio apartment in the flatlands near a public housing project up to Presidio Heights, where I would be rewarded with glorious views of San Francisco Bay and the mansions of people like Danielle Steele, who sometimes had parties with valets parking scores of shiny black limousines.

Walking and hiking were key components of my emotional GPS system. For as far back as I could remember, making my way on foot had been my initial means of attempting to feel at home. My military family moved nearly every year to a town or Air Force base that had no resemblance to where we’d been living only the week before. As if I hadn’t had enough years feeling repeatedly disoriented, I continued on with this nomadic life long into adulthood.

I attended the fourth grade in a small Southern New Jersey town. Once a week, I walked from my house in a new development of split-level, look-alike homes to the library, a tall, century-old house set at the top of a flight of worn wooden steps. A voracious reader of biographies and the latest Nancy Drew book, I was only allowed to hold onto checked-out books for a week, which meant lots of treks to pick up and return borrowed volumes. I didn’t mind. The library sat on my favorite street, Main, where the handful of well-off residents lived – a doctor, the funeral director, and the owner of the largest car dealership in town. Unlike in my neighborhood, none of the houses that lined Main Street looked alike. They were large and elegant, many in the colonial style, pure white, with thick round columns on either side of front doors painted black or deep burnt red. Perfectly tended emerald lawns spread out from the fronts of the houses to the sidewalk, many the size of small city parks.

In addition to the lovely houses, ancient trees towered overhead along the route, keeping it cool and dark, even on the hot humid days of August. Saturday afternoons in late October, residents burned the fallen red, brown and golden leaves, after raking them into curbside piles. Years later, the smell of wood smoke still takes me back to those walks.

Having relocated to countless places in my life, all but one of which I had never seen before moving there, I became adept at finding my way to and from wherever I needed to go. But over the years, I began to realize that not getting lost didn’t make me feel like I belonged. A sense of belonging, certain of my bearings, eluded me much of the time. Rather than secure, I felt adrift, unmoored like a boat whose ropes had gotten loose in a storm and was pulled out from the safe harbor to the open sea.

Though I ended up living in Portland for twelve years, this is what I experienced there. While I liked my neighborhood and much that the city had to offer, I was nevertheless plagued by a sense of estrangement I couldn’t shake.

I felt most at home when I ventured out of the city to the mountains and forests, found in nearly every direction you drive in Oregon. But, interestingly, beyond the city limits, there was the real possibility that I might get lost and never be heard from again.

This was partially due to the fact that it didn’t take long to reach isolated areas after leaving the city proper. Even within the city, there were sections or neighborhoods that looked more like small country towns or wilderness, such as the far eastside and Forest Park in Northwest Portland. An hour east of Portland, you could be hiking underneath roaring waterfalls in the Columbia Gorge, or traipsing down a trail past a wildflower-strewn meadow on Mt. Hood.

To reach spots where hiking trails started often required a six to ten-mile drive on a one-lane, rutted gravel or dirt road, where going any faster than ten miles an hour caused the car to bump and lurch enough to feel like it might flip over on its side. Countless times on one of these roads, Richard and I would look at one another and one of us would ask, “Should we keep going?”

Weather frequently came into play. Some years, heavy winter snow in the mountains caused the melt to start late. Even in July, it was possible to head out a forest road, only to discover several miles in, that the way was blocked by mounds of white.

And then, of course, there was the rain for which Oregon is famous. Rutted gravel and dirt roads quickly became impassable, if dark rainclouds blew in and dumped a few quick bucket-loads down.

A final problem was caused by the fact that the Oregon woods serve as both places of recreation and sites for logging. Roads often appear on maps that were created for logging trucks but not as routes for passenger cars. On the map, these byways appear shorter than the wider main road, which they generally are not.

One of the things my husband and I loved about Oregon was its feeling of wildness. Coming from Northern California, which during the previous several decades had become overcrowded, and where longtime businesses were practically gone, replaced by hip, new spots, we couldn’t get enough of Oregon’s small logging towns, with their vintage houses, taverns and cafes in business for generations, and the feeling that you could lose yourself for weeks just steps out of town, in the seemingly endless back country.

The longer I lived in Oregon, though, the more I understood a truth about wilderness. People do get lost. They vanish on mountain roads and trails, some by choice, but many others not. Especially in the winter, late fall and early spring, the local news seemed to carry at least one story every week about a hiker or couple on vacation who’d gone missing – in the mountains or on their way to and from home. As soon as the first report appeared and search rescue teams went out, daily updates would emerge.

The most tragic was the story of the Kims. Having traveled to the Northwest for Thanksgiving from their home in San Francisco, the Kim family missed the exit off Interstate Five they were supposed to take, to reach a somewhat remote hotel on the Rogue River, where they had a reservation. By the time they set out on what they thought would be a shorter route, it was dark. Instead of turning around and going back up I-5 to the original exit, they veered off the first road, and found themselves on a forest road that should have been closed for the season, with the metal gate pulled across. An Oregon Department of Transportation worker had neglected to close the gate and the Kims had no way of knowing the road might become impassable. When snow began falling, they made the decision to stay put in the car for the night. The snowstorm ended up trapping them. A few days in, the husband, James Kim, set out on foot to get help. He neither found help, nor ever returned to the car.

Days later, James Kim’s wife, Kati, and their two children were rescued. Not long after, James’ body was found.

As we heard the stories of people getting trapped in Oregon’s back country, Richard and I tried to be more cautious. Rutted roads crowded with boulders that we previously would have followed now looked treacherous. Before heading out a slender road spotted on the map, which we thought might be a shortcut from Grants Pass to the Oregon Caves, Richard stopped at a gas station to make sure.

“No. That’s just an old logging road. You don’t want to take that,” the attendant advised.

Another time, when we were staying in the tiny Eastern Oregon town of Mitchell, where almost every business and Victorian-era home had a FOR SALE sign out front, I consulted the map, looking for a shortcut from one section of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument to another. As frequently happened, I spotted one of those thin-as-thread roads on the map, and announced to Richard, “Here. We can go this way,” sliding the tip of my index finger from starting to ending point.

Turning off the main highway, the road was framed by farm fields on both the right and left sides. After about ten minutes of driving, the pavement grew more and more narrow, soon shriveling down to a single lane. I was relieved not to spot any other cars. As the pavement shrank even more, we passed a farm, where a man in faded overalls and a red plaid shirt stood close to the road, staring at our car. Glancing at him, I had the feeling we weren’t supposed to be on that road. But since we’d already come that far, I kept on driving.

A few minutes later, the road started dipping way down and then climbing back up, like the metal track on a rollercoaster. One after another, we sailed down the one-lane road, and back up. After about three of these, I spotted something at the bottom of the latest dip. It appeared to be a deep pool of water.

I slowly eased the car down to that spot and stopped. As my first glimpse had warned, it was indeed water, far too deep to drive across.

“I’m not going through that,” I announced and turned toward Richard.

Despite my protest, he urged me on.

“No. It’s too deep,” I said, and asked him to take the wheel, back up the car and turn around.

If I didn’t know what had happened to the Kims, I might have made a different decision.

As much as I loved Oregon’s wild places – the Cascades’ snow-covered peaks, bare black rock fields where lava had once flowed, alpine lakes, meadows crowded with wildflowers, and the rushing creeks, rivers and waterfalls – I nearly always had this sense of being lost. A therapist I had seen for many years occasionally advised me that I could “hold both.” What I understood her to mean was that life rarely fell into categories of black and white. A person could feel happy and sad at the same time.

If I picture myself back in Oregon, hiking through the woods to McNeil Point, where the trees open up and there’s a view of snow-covered Mt. Hood behind a wide meadow filled with red, yellow and purple wildflowers, I can once again experience those profound feelings of gratefulness and wonder, but also the sense that I don’t belong. I am flooded with a similar complicated emotional mix when I recall floating in the middle of deep emerald Clear Lake in Central Oregon, having paddled out with my husband in our blue and white inflatable kayak. I have been to this lake countless times, hiked its trail, and eaten peanut butter and blueberry jam sandwiches, seated on the bank, enthralled by the view across the lake. Yet, the last time I was there it still felt somehow foreign.

But that is part of the allure. In these places where I can’t see any roads and my cell phone doesn’t get reception, I am able to lose myself. Or at least I can manage for a brief spell to let go of the me that’s calculating time — how much is left at work or before the weekend starts – as well as the woman who’s afraid of the simplest things and so anticipates them and worries. Here, that woman who spends way too much time in her head lets her eyes take in whatever is around her, instead of looking backwards with regret or forward in anticipation. She is right here, right now, not sure what the next moment may bring, but unconcerned. Surrounded by so much natural beauty, she is able to hold both the positive and negative sides of being lost, accepting that one just might not exist without the other.

Patty Somlo’s most recent book, Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing), was a Finalist in the American Fiction Awards and Best Book Awards. Two of her previous books, The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil) and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace (WiDo Publishing), have been Finalists in the International Book Awards, Best Book Awards, National Indie Excellence Awards, and Reader Views Literary Awards. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times and for Best of the Net once, as well as receiving Honorable Mention for Fiction in the Women’s National Book Association Contest and having an essay selected as Notable for Best American Essays 2014.