One Year Down
Settling in during unsettling times
Last week I celebrated the one-year anniversary of my move to Southern Oregon. July 11th, 2023 marked the date I received the keys to my studio apartment here in Ashland. It's a little wild to consider all that's happened since then: I started out working part-time at the local bookstore, then added a job organizing in support of a city ordinance to electrify new residential construction. In the early part of this year, I transitioned to a full-time statewide organizing position focused on advocating for Ranked Choice Voting. There were a number of weeks with some overlap between all these; add in my freelance writing, and February became what I called the “Month of Four Jobs!” (usually texted to friends in explanations for my lack of response), or also, “The Month I Let My Nascent Social Life Die.”
That description may have been true, but a benefit of all these many jobs and side-gigs is the way they've helped connect me to community here. Though this can get a little overwhelming too, given the volume of people to meet. I may be in a small town but that’s still many thousands of new people, and the number grows as I find myself in other parts of the region. Some days at the end of the day I try to write down the names of new people, to aid in remembering them. But I often forget to do this. Mid-spring I ran into someone I had just met, whom I immediately felt warmly towards, and was happy to find I had their name easily at hand—only to realize I'd been to so many events that week that I could no longer place them in context. (It had been at a work party for a notable straw-bale construction project here in town, which I wound up writing about in a piece you can read over at Mother Earth News.) It was a reminder to myself to leave time for integration; learning of any sort, including about people and places, can get impeded when there's no downtime to let everything sink in.
Yet it's hard to slow down when it feels like there's still so much I don't know about the place I now live. I'm still in a land of constant firsts: The first time at any given restaurant. The first walk up this particular trail. The first time at any particular community group or meeting. That first big backpacking trip I did to try and learn the watershed. I saw my first show at the Britt Festival just this month, and while I've caught a couple one-person plays, my first viewing of a major production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival won’t happen until this September.
In honor of this one-year anniversary I also held my first real dinner party in my apartment, exactly one year to the date after moving in. It was tiny. The temperatures that day prohibited hosting outside as I had originally hoped, and if you will remember, I said studio apartment. The consensus seemed to be that we could have fit more people around the table if I hadn’t insisted on making quite so much food; there’s certainly worse feedback to get from guests.
All throughout last week, and through much of this one as well, I struggled with what to write here. I had begun this post, but then worried that with the weight of recent events in the world, this update on my personal life might come off as fluffy, unconcerned. The reality is I’ve been reeling a bit from the recent Supreme Court decisions, and from the national response, or lack thereof; it seems to me we’re experiencing a critical collective failure to grapple with how power is truly wielded in this country, manifested by the obsession with Biden’s debate performance and the Democratic nominee1 rather than the presidential immunity case, and the further criminalization of poverty (or, as I have said before, what is really the criminalization of being human) in Grants Pass v. Johnson.
After days of dithering, I came to the conclusion that, seen from another angle, this little update isn’t trivial at all. For our state of being connected to others and the places where we are—that is, of having people to call upon, and of knowing the resources available in one’s community and how to access them—is actually a matter of some urgency in our current moment. For it’s these kinds of local ties and connections that will help us weather the state of constant uncertainty and change moving through so many basic aspects of our society at present.
A lot of my firsts in the past year have been both about knowing a little better this place where I live, and about becoming what I tend to describe as “a more useful person.” In recent years this has involved a lot of learning how to build things, basic tool use I was never taught when I was young. This past year, it has looked like doing my first mushroom hunting trip to find out where and how to harvest them here, and making my first attempt at growing food in such an arid climate, through heat waves hotter than I’d planned for. I finally took my first-ever backcountry fishing trip, having slowly been learning and acquiring gear for some time; and I did in fact catch and kill and clean and eat several trout all by myself, something I had never done.
I don’t have fantasies of self-sufficiency here; I’m looking for flexibility, supplemental options should things in the world quit working quite as they have—be it the climate or economic systems or others. I want to be someone who has the ability to share with others at moments of difficulty, rather than panic about how to take care of myself. My studio may be small, but if supply chains ever get wrecked when some major earthquake renders I-5 trucking routes inoperable, it’s stocked with enough food to feed myself and a few neighbors for a month.2
Probably the biggest such step I took this year was purchasing a vehicle. It’s the first I’ve ever personally owned, and was the end result of a long process in overcoming some deep-rooted, trauma-reinforced fears about driving in order to use it. I had to get it for the new statewide organizing gig, which created both the incentive and the means to help me finally take the leap. But in the back of my mind were also conversations I’d been having as I asked around to get a sense of whether there were any serious systems in place to account for people without cars, in case of evacuation from fire. The answer, I could tell, was not really. I figure now I’m ready to take myself and someone else as well.
Maybe that mindset is how I ended up picking up a random passenger the other night in nearby Grants Pass. I had just finished delivering a presentation to a local political group. I was on the same block as a small transit hub, and as I packed up, I overheard the one person waiting there talking on his phone, trying to figure out how to get home given rumors that the bus was broken down on the highway in the heat. My response was reflexive, and didn't require much thought. It was hot and smokey, and chances were there would be no other buses showing up that evening. So I walked over and offered a ride without even bothering to ask how far he had to go. It was not the shortest drive, but he turned out to be very chatty. He had just ended a shift at a small restaurant, which means I got not just conversation but a little free food in exchange for my trouble.
(Picking up not-quite-hitchhikers is also definitely a first. But chances are, if we know each other in person, that you’ve given me a lift at some point in my life. So know that I’m finally doing my best to pay all those free rides forward.)
If you’re wondering about this disaster-prep outlook of mine (though it’s common enough these days), let me share one more recent first, another meant to face the reality of where I live and the times we are in: On July 4th I finally put together a genuine go bag. It had been on my to-do list since last year, after I’d finally finished unpacking everything, but at that point fire season had passed and it became an easy thing to delay. That morning I looked at the forecast with its extended heat wave and thought about the long holiday weekend, with its implicit encouragement for people to do stupid, explosive things, and knew it was time to take the task seriously. I took most of the day to clear out the clutter in the house created from back-to-back work travel and my time in the Sierra, then found my important documents and looked over checklists, making decisions about what to put in the bag and what to leave in its usual place.
It took me longer than I expected, and by the end of the day I’d missed all potential social events, both those celebrating the day in customary fashion and those held specifically to create space free of the patriotic color palette. Oh well, I thought; at least I had done something useful. Then I picked up my phone to silence it for the night, and found it full of notifications about a fire that had sprung up not so many miles out of town (though just far enough to not be too immediately worried). What a strange mix of emotions in that moment: to feel justified in how I’d spent the day, but sad and wary at the same time, while also calm, knowing I’d done what was needed.
And that’s how the final week of my first year here began, before it ended with a cramped table full of food and friends. Which feels representative, in many ways, of the broader picture: the joys of the everyday in relief against the backdrop of worry about the planetary and political climate both. As I recently wrote to a friend: “It's been a little strange, actually, to experience having my personal life feeling full and fantastic, and the dissonance with what's happening in the world at large.” So it is. Strange but tremendous, and I'm very grateful to be here digging into shared life and community as we all try together to face whatever is coming at us down the pike.
Which is not to say this is inconsequential, only that the laser-focus of news outlets and accompanying social media pontificating on the matter, and on the Dems vs. Republications narrative more broadly, at the expense of so much else, can and often is a distraction (sometimes intentionally so) from other issues.
A few years back I took one of the community disaster-prep trainings offered in Seattle, where concern about earthquakes—especially “The Big One”—looms larger than concern about fire. One of the basic take-aways for me remains the difference between an emergency, in which one might expect to manage on one’s own for 72 hours without outside help, vs. disaster in which one should aim to take care of oneself for 2-3 weeks before expecting any outside aid. Since that training, in an era of multi-pronged climate disaster and economic precarity, I have taken it as a given that the appropriate thing to do is to be disaster-level ready for myself and several others outside my own household.