North by Pacific Northwest

Bouncing Between the American West & East

A picture I took of a Pacific Northwest mountain range from a plane

In the past year and a half, I’ve managed to make the five-hour flight cross-United States into something of a quarterly route. I’m from Seattle, WA but currently reside in New York City, NY, and return home to visit family a handful of times a year. I’ve grown more accustomed than ever to cramped legs on airplanes and queasy stomachs in taxis. A lukewarm sandwich from an airport deli that’s as egregiously priced as it is visually unappealing. A growling stomach and scratchy throat on a tarmac. Too much money begrudgingly added to my credit card statement within seconds of my phone’s power button being double-tapped. And above all, copious amounts of idle time in airports, the final frontier of cursed liminal spaces.

I make this mad dash to and fro - hopping over the country’s heartland to its other bookend - with such ease now, you would think I’m commuting daily to an office job. The speed at which I’m able to skip town - skip coast! - is so personally alarming that I sometimes joke that I’m not actually flying, but rather the background outside is changing like a painted backdrop from a Golden Age Hollywood film. I’m not moving, my surroundings are. The act of traveling this far gives that illusion. Time passes at a bizarre rate, compressing and stretching while I sit still. The culture of either coast I venture to oddly mirrors how time is manipulated. When I go west, I gain hours and my days grow longer, characteristic of the wide open spaces and long expanses of freedom and restlessness that often occupy my time in the Pacific Northwest. As I travel east, I lose daylight and the minutes pass at an accelerated rate, leaving me with a sense that I accomplished very little in my few bustling, waking hours.

The more I see of the United States, the more I’m reminded that certain clichés got their reputation for a reason. The easy, laid-back quality of the Californian coast carries northward, where people reside among trees, mountains, and other natural marvels, lacing up hiking boots and stewing local blends of tea, sourced from Sunday street markets. What I’ve seen of the East Coast feels far denser, far more trodden upon, which I suppose gives it a greater sense of character, and thus, place. New York City has a way of making me feel right at home, even though I have had virtually nothing tying me to it for most of my life. When you’re one among a sea of pedestrians descending into subway stations and gliding across avenues, there’s a greater sense of synergy than when you’re bumper-to-bumper on a western freeway, one driver per vehicle. In the West, major cities are younger and much more geographically isolated, adding a layer of chill to the warm ease.

This is all quite relative though, particularly when you add value judgments. True to form, most people seem to want what they don’t have. Many young, metropolitan professionals I know seem to make a quick break for the coast on which they didn’t grow up, eager to access whatever qualities their previous home lacked, whether it’s the ease or the hustle, the sunshine or the seasons. We justify this migration on the grounds of being exposed to what’s “new” but often find ourselves drawn to what we came from in one way or another. When I walk through Washington Square Park on a clear fall day, I’ll stop and sit on a bench on the park’s perimeter, letting the cold air hit my face and chill my fingertips. If I turn and tilt my head at the right angle, I won’t be able to see the buildings on the outskirts of the park and am left with only the trees, which I dumbly conflate with the evergreens and firs back home. My camera roll is full of images of trees in Manhattan parks, with the buildings strategically cropped out - I like to think I could trick a novice into thinking it’s the Pacific Northwest, but my mind is likely warped with bias. I’ll always find a way to connect just about anything back to Washington State.

Straddling either coast can make me feel a bit rootless at times; while I’m quite settled out east, my identity is clearly marked by the West, what with my “granola” personality and tendencies. It’s quite sweet to think that all of our core personal tenets and senses of equilibrium are marked by the places we hold dearest. My eyes and hands start to twitch if I’ve gone too long without seeing green and crunching pine needles underfoot, others if they’re too far from the sand and sea, arid desert sky, or sprawling metropolis. My love for my home is like a recipe passed from grandmother to granddaughter and then disseminated at neighborhood potlucks. Each drive upstate, each stroll through a park, each tree mistaken for a fir - I reveal a new piece of myself to my friends and themselves to me in select environments.

And yet, when I’m home, New York whispers through my brisk stride as I cross the street and in my once distant, now direct eye contact with service workers. In my newfound comfort in city settings and, at times, misplaced confidence in American public transportation. Regions that feel so different somehow fit well together inside of me, some always more durable than others. It’s gratifying to know there are multiple places to belong and to be shown that so blatantly as I travel west to east, east to west. They joke that “to be loved is to be changed,” and in some ways, maybe it’s also to stay the same. Some parts endure while others have an appetite to bend.

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Writing about home has become a recurrent trend for me. Going into my second year living away from my hometown, I’m still finding new threads to pull apart and look at in detail and likely will for quite some time. For an essay on a related topic, check out my piece Where Do We Come From? on searching for a sense of place in increasingly homogenized American hometowns - it’s one I’m quite proud of.