Last thing I remember
The Eagles “Hotel California”
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like
But you can never leave!”
For years we lived in a beautiful community in Northern California near San Francisco. The city really had all the things we were looking for at the time. A high priority on our list was an excellent public school system for our kids. We chose this place to settle down and raise a family, calling a halt to any more job-related relocations. The decision was a good one and we made a beautiful home for our family in that spot for over two decades. Our city was a community of high expectations: well cared for homes, neatly edged lawns, plenty of parks and trails. With kids to worry about, we delighted in a place that lacked surprises: crime was low, test scores were high, volunteerism and civic engagement were good. You could rationally expect home values and standard of living to increase at a nice pace. You understood the boundaries of the place as if they were the neatly laid out chalk lines of the many soccer fields on which our kids played.
Almost two years ago though, we sold our house there and bought another place in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, about an hour’s drive south from our previous home. Those mountains are a much wilder, far less structured environment than the “East Bay” from which we hailed. There was this one time after a good rainstorm that a huge lodge-pole pine fell across the road at the bottom of our mountain. The tree took out power and prevented all the neighbors and me from getting home. I had to call back up to my house to get someone to come back down on the opposite side of the fallen pine to drive me the mile or so back. Then again, I couldn’t make the call from where the tree fell because there’s no cell service there—so I drove back into town, made the call and then went back to the tree. Based on what I could see, Pacific Gas & Electric was going to have to spend considerable time to fix this, not only clearing the road but restringing the wires and fixing the pole. So having made it back home, I fired up the wood stove and got ready to wait it out. I can confidently say that nothing approaching this sequence of events would ever happen in the community we left. Big falling trees are a common event in Santa Cruz County, especially during the rainy season. Finding a novel way back to your house is a way of life there. Making sure we were always conscious of a different way home is precisely the reason we made our move.
There is a steady opiate of comfort in well-worn paths. Confidence that the road will always be clear and the power always on is a drug. Success and prosperity are as much a tranquilizer as Ambien. Habits become, well they become habitual. Back in the East Bay, I was getting to a point where small interruptions to the intravenous drip of my sweet life produced outsized anger. How dare that neighbor’s sprinkler fill up my drainage ditch! Who’s car was that parked at the end of the driveway? Consider also that keeping in front of a culture of expectation is a stimulant—an amphetamine if you will. The car you drive, the seat in church, the accolade for a child, the restaurant table near the window is a rush. It is possible for a place to have both the stimulant and the depressant happening simultaneously—I will hazard a guess here that this is a defining characteristic of most prosperous communities. The life-change of children leaving home, becoming “empty nesters” allowed us to think about comfort in a unique way. Children had to a certain extent locked us to the place, and when they left, there was freedom to consider alternative ways of living that exchanged the comfort of the known for the wonder that comes with the unexpected.
For myself, I wanted to be in a spot where a pine can fall, and you and your neighbors laugh at the splintered giant that took it upon itself to sever your connection to the rest of the world. I wanted prosperity to look like a basketful of eggs from a chicken coop. There are no right-angled plots of fescue here; water cuts its own path; your skill with a chainsaw measures you more than a hood emblem. The sheer randomness of this place is so lovely you can be shaken awake in the falling of a leaf; a redwood chains itself to your eye and will not let you look elsewhere. Relocating here was a detox move; a nature diet; an attempt to give the muse her voice back, and it worked.
I am not belittling the genuine tragedies of actual drug addiction—my family has direct experience with it; all the more reason for us to examine dependence in any area of our lives and take immediate action. Realize though there are societal opiates, cultural amphetamines and they creep into most lives uncritically examined. In my own experience, these addictions walked into the marbled foyer of my beautiful home; they didn’t hide; they were prescribed not by doctors, but by neighbors and Pastors. These were socially acceptable cravings, encouraged even. These dependencies kept the peace, made sure we stayed well within lines prescribed by our social circle. When friends and neighbors heard that we were leaving and where we were going, they thought we had gone mad. We heard, “Why would you move?” over and over again. Some people stopped talking to us not out of anger, but out of fear. We were checked in, but we weren’t supposed to leave.
You cannot take half measures with addiction in any form. Trust me on this. Dependency does not negotiate; it kills the hostages, and you’re one of the hostages. Think about your personal hostage status in its present moment. What addiction are you yoked to? Consider for a moment that you might not be as free as you had previously imagined. If you’re ready to consider that, try an experiment: put down your smartphone, and check back in tomorrow. Try to log off and shut down for 24 hours. Go crazy and try this: leave and not tell anyone where you are going. Skip using GPS. Go ahead; we’ll all be here when you get back. Our move was an attempt to get back some choices. To be deliberate in place can be a move towards freedom. A fallen tree can be a lesson in going home your own way.