The Pacific Northwest = Love?
Back when I first started this blog I wrote an article titled “Love Is A Bonus.” It was about how there are many different kinds of love and how we tend to put romantic love on a pedestal and expect it to make up for all other deficiencies in our life. I argued that you don’t need romantic love to be happy and that you can fill that space in your life with platonic love, passion for your job, etc.
To be honest, I haven’t felt that way in the past year. Much of the passion I once felt for my interests has been absent. This may be a product of the depression that I’ve had on and off my whole life. I have felt unfulfilled by my life, and it was not until I was living in the Pacific Northwest that I started once again to feel love, but this time for a place.
Growing up in the Midwest, I absolutely hated saying I was from there. People always joke about “the flyover states” and how everything is corn, and to a certain extent these people are right. A large chunk of the Midwest is just tawny brown fields of corn, wheat, soy, and other products that the government is single-handedly sponsoring. I wanted nothing more than to get out of the Midwest, and I applied to ten colleges, only one of which was in the Midwest. Ironically, that’s the school I ended up attending, and I ended up loving it. However, I was still yearning for something else when I graduated, and I this time I made sure that nothing I applied to was in the Midwest.
This is how I ended up in AmeriCorps in Sacramento, and as the movie Lady Bird says, “Sacramento is the Midwest of California.” It is also surrounded by agriculture and is at least two hours from the kind of beautiful wilderness areas that California is known for. I was hoping to be one of the two teams to get the much-coveted Alaska projects, but when I found out we were going to the Pacific Northwest, I was almost as excited as I would have been for Alaska.
Views from our first day in North Bend
When we arrived in North Bend, Washington, where we were living at a Christian camp in the woods, the terrain was about as different from my childhood surroundings as it could have been. It was drizzling as we wound through wooded roads, circling mountains that were the beginnings of the Cascades. It baffled me that people lived here, with this view every single day. I jumped out of the van, and while everyone went to explore our lodge, I wandered into the yard and stared up at the white-capped mountains, which were shrouded in mist. My stomach and heart were doing the nervous, excited fluttering that happens when you talk to your school crush or when you know you’re about to kiss someone new. The feeling of loving something is surprisingly similar to loving someone.
That night as we cooked dinner, I looked out through the window above the sink and saw young deer frolicking in the yard. I knew that the next few months would be my favorite of the program, and I was determined to make the most of my time there and possibly even find a way to stay.
I did both of these things. My friends and I went hiking nearly every weekend, sometimes 9 or 10 miles at a time, waking up the next morning unable to walk without waddling. During one of these hikes up Mailbox Peak, we got within a quarter of a mile of the top but had to stop because we were knee-deep in snow. The views were National Geographic-level insane, but we knew that if we continued it could get dangerous. I sat on my jacket and sled down several hundred feet of the buried trail.
Hiking Mailbox Peak
On another expedition, we climbed up nearly 10 miles of Mount Si, only to find that it was too cloudy to see anything. A weekend earlier, we had hiked Rattlesnake Ledge and had an amazing view, but my friend nearly lost her waterbottle as it rolled and stopped within an inch of the cliff at the top. When my mom came to visit, we went to Olympic National Park and the Hoh National Rainforest. I also saw Forks, Washington, which you may know as where Twilight takes place. Middle School would have been so happy, not only because I was seeing the playground of Bella and Edward, but also because I was existing and thriving thousands of miles from where I had spent the first 22 years of my life.
Just another day at work in the Pacific Northwest
Everyday we worked out in nature and saw some of the most beautiful places on Earth. On Earth Day, we planted trees with the Puget Sound and the faint outline of Mt. Rainier as our backdrop. I have never been happier than during those months, and I decided to apply to local jobs in the hopes that I could stay after AmeriCorps was over. I got a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service working with the salmon population, and while this job didn’t work out, I know that I will be back to the Pacific Northwest, hopefully permanently someday.
It was with great reluctance that I left for our fourth and final project, but like with romantic love, I know that if it is meant to be, I’ll somehow find my way back there.
Your blog is exactly what I’ve been looking for !
Thank you!