I want to go back

I was born in Wisconsin, but I grew up in Northern California. For a little while. We moved back to this state of dairy when I was in first grade. But California is like a ghost in my psyche. It never leaves me. Never.

I don’t have many photographs from my life there, my life when my parents were married. A few, a toeheaded girl in the back of a red pickup truck holding a siamese kitten. A munchkin running across a dark hardwood floor through a haze of afternoon california light. And somewhere there exists an image of a little me with a can of Budweiser in my hands. Take that as you will. But in my head, there are infinite visions. Some maybe imprinted when I was under 3 feet tall, others gathered on later trips to the coast to visit my father.

What I’m saying, is that even though I only lived there for 5 or 6 years of my young life, it feels more like home than any other place, for some reason. When I read this article, or look at the photography of some people that I admire that live there, I can’t help but feel this need to be there. I adore the home I have made in Madison, the family of friends that I have gathered, the memories that I have made here, but there is always something pulling me back to the Pacific coast. The smell of the cold ocean, the salt digging into my skin on the cold foggy breeze. The way the light always looks like it is glossed in honey. It feels like film to me, compared to the digital of everything else. You see?

I remember my father driving me up and down the hills of San Francisco, just so that I could look at the tile roofs, lined up, the sky criss crossed with electrical lines for the city bus system. We stopped in Chinatown one day to explore, and discovered that the best chinese food can be found in that place that doesn’t have a sign, that you have to venture upstairs, taking a risk that it’s not even a restaurant. I know what artichoke plants look like, alien and odd, because of the day that we drove past them. I remember a long driveway to my best friend’s house, studded with tree roots, a driveway that we would run up and down, spinning one arm in an attempt to run faster, exhausting ourselves. Laughing to the cows in the pasture next door. And a secret path behind her house that led to a muddy swamp with a small island in the middle. There’s a highway that is lined with eucalyptus trees, you can smell their intoxicating earthy nose from the car as you drive past. Towns with exotic sounding names: Bolinas, San Raphael, Bodega Bay, Petaluma, Tomales Bay, Novato, Santa Rosa, but all so familiar.

We hoped to make a trip to San Francisco next year, and then a drive up the coast to Seattle to visit my father where he lives now. I’m not sure if it will happen now. But even more so, I just want to exist there for awhile, to sit quietly in my pajamas with a cup of coffee and watch the sunset, to smell the sea, to walk a million miles along the beach, to see the fog bank again. I think, with the 300 mph racetrack that my life feels like sometimes, that I yearn for the stillness that I have always felt at the Pacific Ocean. I could always sit and listen to it for hours, without feeling like I had to do something else. I need that feeling again.

I just want to go back, or even, forward. But there. I want to be there.