Distracted by the Shiny

Last month, August 2026, marks thirteen years that I’ve lived here in the Pacific Northwest. Whew! It both feels like a very long time, and a very very short time. When people ask why I moved out here, the story I tell is a punch line: “My then-girlfriend said she was moving to the Pacific Northwest and I could come if I wanted to.”

That, of course, is a bit of a simplification, but an amusing and, basically, accurate one. I would likely not have come out to the PNW if she hadn’t been heading out this way, thus giving me the excuse. After all, I had a lot of friends back in Springfield, Missouri. I owned a house a few blocks from the university. My mum was only 4 1/2 hours away, up in NoMo (though back then a four-hour drive seemed pretty darned long).

So why did I sell the house, pack everything we wanted to bring out into the back of a Sebring convertible, and make the nearly 2000-mile drive to Hood River, Oregon?

In part, it goes back to a calendar.

I don’t remember when I saw this calendar, but it was many moons before deciding to move from the Midwest to a coast. I think it was an Oregon calendar, or it might have been a Dramatic Landscapes one. In any case, the image was of Oregon’s Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach. Haystack Rock is a “sea stack,” one of a number of tall, basalt outcroppings just off the coast. In the picture, Haystack is looming and dark, barely contained by the photograph, a mysterious mass beset by a spray of crashing waves beneath a darkened, cloudy sky.

That rock was a siren to my Odyssean desires. At the time, though, my ears were filled with the metaphorical wax of Daily Life. Still, that image of Haystack remained there in my subconscious, singing its song, waiting.

Another part of the draw was because in the way-back–let’s call it the way-way-back–as I was getting my undergraduate degree at Truman State University in Northern Missouri, I would spend my summers up in Seward, Alaska, working in a salmon cannery. Alaska was astonishingly beautiful. And stark. And dangerous. And mysterious. A friend who had gone up with me the first year joked that you could hold up a camera, close your eyes, turn in a circle, and snap an incredible photo with every blind press of the button.

Alaska, however, is a really, really, really long way away, and although it appealed to the live-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods part of my nature, it appealed less to my I-also-like-to-be-able-to-go-to-the-store-and-the-movies-without-a-pilot’s-license part.

But the Pacific Northwest of the Lower Forty-Eight has a landscape that echoes that of the Kenai Peninsula. Plus: far more widely dispersed infrastructure. So when my girlfriend’s tiny little bit of impetus pushed at my proclivity for maintaining the status quo, it turned out that the status quo blinked.

Living out here has not come without its costs, of course. Some of those are quite literal: it ain’t cheap. I bought a three-bedroom 1930s brick bungalow in Springfield for something like $106,000 in 2007. That’s a down payment out here these days. Even in 2013 it wouldn’t have bought you much in Hood River, on the eastern edge of the incredibly pretty Columbia River Gorge. The rent on the house we moved to was $200/month more than what I’d been paying on my mortgage, and it was for sale at the (I thought at the time) insanely unreasonable price of just under a half-million dollars. Probably worth double or three times that, now.

There have been other costs, too. Harder ones to pay. I miss fireflies. I miss thunderstorms (specifically, I miss thunderstorms that don’t start wildfires). Mostly, I miss hanging out with my old friends, going to HBO Nights every Sunday, bantering on river floats, and lunching with whoever is free.

And I miss not being able to visit my mum more than once or (sigh, rarely) twice a year.

It’s strange that in a society where connectivity should just be a few taps of the keyboard away (or even, gasp, a few clicks on the phone to connect with actual voices), that it seems so hard to do so. The algorithms keep content in front of you almost designed to (okay, actually designed to) distract you even from remembering that you wanted to check in with so-and-so, or just say Hi to such-and-such. Well, they do me, anyway.

Those things, indeed, have been a cost. So what have I gotten for my payment?

I have lovely friends out here who have taught me much about myself; I feel I’ve become a better human being because of them, and that is worth a considerable amount. I have a partner I wouldn’t give over if you offered me the moon and/or a Victorian in Nob Hill. I’ve traded fireflies for elk and bear and mountain lions. I’ve let thunderstorms go in return for gentle rain pattering on Western sword fern in temperate rain forests and fog drifting through Douglas Fir on ghostly mountainsides.

No loss at all was leaving scorching and humid summers behind for warm days and cool nights, for cottonwood seeds drifting past my kayak as I float on slow-moving streams, for disc golf played among towering pillars of pine.

I live just outside of Portland, now: Bridge Town, Rip City, Rose City, Stumptown, PDX. City of crows and misty winters, summer walks on the waterfront, the big farmer’s market across from PSU and the bigger local arts-and-crafts market under the Burnside Bridge every Saturday from 9-5. It’s a city of marvelous food, quirky shops (need a taxidermied jackalope? Check out Paxton Gate up on NW 23rd; while you’re up there, catch a showing of The Room or some other cult classic over on 21st at Cinema 21). It’s a place of strong emotions, a lot of people trying to do what they believe is the right thing to do, and surprisingly-little honking. There are adult soap box derbies, parallel parking competitions, World Naked Bike Rides, geese that may or may not try to eat you if you bike along the Willamette River, and so very much more.

It’s home.

And yes, not so very far away, Haystack Rock rears up out of the Pacific Ocean beneath a gunmetal sky, waves throwing themselves upon its base. I go and listen to its song whenever I want. But it no longer draws me.

I’m already here.