As we drove away from campus I had a flashback to a moment walking down the sidewalk there past a certain grove of trees. It was September 1985, only a few days after I'd first arrived on the airport shuttle and moved into the dorm. I had spent that summer traveling all over Europe by myself with my backpack, mostly behind the Iron Curtain, with barely any money and learning to sleep wherever there was room to stretch out my body. No matter how bad a place was, I could always just get on the next train out of town. In Salem, I had only wished I could do just that. Get me the hell out of here. But I had forced myself to stay. I wasn't going to quit again. Now I was glad I'd stayed.
With the daylight fading, I took a few wrong turns in Red's Ford and got lost in south Salem while looking for my old place. We had to stop and roll down the window to ask a woman walking her dog for directions, but I finally found the school building that looked so familiar.
Circling around the streets there, I didn't see anything that I recognized, even though it looked so much as it did. I was just about to give up when I approached the corner of Cottage Street and said outloud, "Oh, yeah, this looks very familiar."
Amid otherwise nice old houses, the one at 1795 Cottage looked especially shabby, yet almost unchanged in twenty-five years. An old woman wearing a loose-fitting house dress sat out front in the lawn, eyeing us as we drove by, slowing without stopping. She looked like one of those famous Depression-era photographs from the Dust Bowl.
That was about all I wanted to do in Salem, as far as revisiting the past. We decided to finish the drive up to Portland on 99W rather than the Interstate, so we retraced our path back through downtown and over the Willamette.
By now the sun had set behind the Coastal Range, but the sky was still azure with gold streaks. The Valley never looked more beautiful than it did right at that moment, an earthly landscape manifestation of some vintage wine that the eye could savor.
As I resumed our course northward, I thought about the reasons I had come back to Oregon this time. I had started this leg of the trip, on the way to the Northwest from Colorado, with no other agenda than some deep intuition that I was supposed to come back here again, and that now was the time to do it.
Part of me kept trying to find some overt personal "reason" for it. At one point in my life I would have built up in my mind a structure of meaning as to what I was trying to do, something along the lines of liberating myself from the burden of the past so I can live in the present again.
I'd since come to understand the impossibility of trying to decide what the "theme" of any particular voyage would be. I'd already tried that kind of theme anyway, and yet here I was back again.
That kind of thematic decision is the province of artistic forms of narrative, but real life does not allow you to stamp such sweeping pronouncements of meaning upon it.
That's exactly the kind of mistake I'd made so long ago, when I first came here. After I'd arrived here, and gotten over the shock of wanting to flee, I had formulated in great detail what I thought the reason was for my coming to the Northwest, as if I were laying out the plot of a novel I was going to write. If there was anything else that Oregon had taught me, it was how foolish this idea was. But I can forgive myself. I was very young, after all.
They say that one's life over time seems to take on the quality of a story, with distinct chapters that flow into each over with a coherent plot. But in most cases, the vast majority of the time, this appearance of a narrative happens only in retrospect, perhaps partly due to the selective nature of memory.
Indeed there are times when it seems possible to decide that "this is going to be a new chapter of my life," and even to decide what kind of chapter it might be, at least as far as the first few paragraphs go. But even when that seems achievable, you have power only over your own role in that chapter. You can't decide whom you're going to cast in other roles in your story. That's always beyond your ability, as it should be, in a universe of individuals with free will.
With these unsolvable amusements floating in my thoughts, we arrived in McMinnville, where just the day before we had cut off heading to the coast.
"Full circle," I muttered to Red, as we merged onto the main highway heading back into Portland.
No grand themes. No great breakthroughs. No life-changing realizations. Those are for stories, not real life.
Just a peace of temporarily equilibrium, and the ever-fleeting but brutally constant power of the uncertain present moment.
The last light had disappeared from the sky. The next song came up on Red's Spotify list.
"Turn it up," I told her, when I recognized the song. "I haven't heard this one in a long time," I said, before beginning to sing along to the words, as loud I cared to sing.
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