Mendocino County

When I was twenty-two, I did an unremarkable thing: I packed my belongings into my gray hatchback and I left Kentucky. As I drove, yellow ginkgo leaves dried on the dashboard. In less than a week, I’d pin them to the walls of a room over a thousand miles away.

I first met California when I crossed the state line into the Mojave, and then into Bakersfield where the orange globes of tangerine groves shone like lightbulbs. The citrus signs along the road were dusty. I passed cattle pens that rivaled suburbs. I grew up landlocked and I was used to dry cornstalks and fireflies, but here everything was wider, more expansive. After I curved up the coast, I saw San Francisco for the first time crossing the Bay Bridge. An hour later, I crossed the Golden Gate, and in Marin I bought a gas station coffee.

I finished the coffee an hour later, my toes dug into the crescent beach of Stinson. I ate one oyster and wrote in my journal at Hog Island. I was watching the pelicans having a party, dive-bombing with the freedom of never having learned an Olympic sport. They were erratic and flimsy and following their guts, beaks pointed straight into Tomales Bay. The sun was strong, sparkling off the water, but it was cool enough to zip my jacket to my chin, my hair pulled into a tight ponytail to withstand the wind. At one point, a man, assuming I was much younger than how young I already was, asked if my parents were around.

I left alone, following the ocean until I reached Fort Bragg, an old logging town bisected by the redwoods of Highway 20. I was in the middle of Mendocino County. I rented a room in a red house where I could see a shard of the Pacific from the roof. I laid claim to the previous tenant’s mattress, flat on the carpet, and her dresser, tucked next to the door. An electric heater buzzed from the floor. I hung a tea towel across the bare window. My roommates were two men in the fisheries who left their waders by the woodstove, drank tall glasses of milk, added edibles to every meal.

The night I arrived, I was in the magic of fantasy, in the imagination of what life could be now that my coordinates had changed, instead of what life is. I imagined I could fix the things I didn’t understand about myself by sidling up to something or someone else. In this instance, it was the ocean. I promised myself I’d spend every day watching seals bob like big gray marbles between bushels of kelp, putting my finger near enough to a starfish to feel the smallest whoosh of it breathing, pruning my skin with salt water. When I slept, I’d dream of spiraling out gills.

What I didn’t know at twenty-two was the choice to go, and then for a while, to stay, would create a decade-long migration pattern—the tracts of a loop between central Kentucky and Northern California. I’ve followed the twenty-five hundred-mile circuit at least a dozen times now, such that it’s become one of the more dependable things about me: not that I will settle but that, eventually, I will leave.

Mendocino, four hours north of San Francisco along Highway 1, huddled between the rich wine country of Sonoma and the redwoods camouflaging the floral fields of Humboldt: I arrived for the first time less than a year out of college and desperately seeking a narrative arc. After sorting out my exposition, I wanted to fall in love with first a place and then a person, and stay faithful to each, for this pin on a map to wrap me up in resolution, make sense of my rudderlessness, and point me toward a purpose that had, so far, eluded me.

Instead, during the first few months I spent there, I often found myself alone on a Pomo Bluffs park bench at sunset, looking out over the gray whales slipping through the cold Pacific, their offspring curved next to them, magnetized to their mothers’ barnacles and blubber, siphoning plankton between baleen like dust set loose from curtains.

Of course, I imagined that. I could only see the puff of their spouts like an organ’s long chord. In time, I learned that after they left their feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi Seas, the whales spent a quarter year swimming more than five thousand miles south to Baja. They spent another two to three months calving in the warm seas before returning north. Every year they swim fourteen thousand miles, from the top of Canada to the tip of Mexico.

I was born in Ontario, hundreds of miles from the new place I wanted to call home, in the concrete walls of what was then called Kitchener Waterloo Hospital. A few floors above me, in the psychiatric ward, my great-grandmother recovered from placing a plastic bag over her head and tying the loops tight. My grandmother ran between floors—her mother and her daughter—wringing her hands in the gap between end-of-life care and the arrival of a new grandchild. She was begging for direction.

When I sat at Pomo Bluffs, pinned to the wet, splintered wood of the bench, I sometimes felt like I was living out another form of her route driven by my desire for the same mammalian compass that drove the whales. I’d left Kentucky. I’d arrived in California. But I was still stuck in my body, in the same spiraling question: how am I to live with myself?

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I watched the whales after days spent in the office of a family resource center, where everyone was kind to me but I stayed standoffish, yoked to the very life I’d agreed to. I had the electric feeling of being both very young and meant for more than offices. But instead of creating experience, I wanted experience to present itself to me.

Almost every afternoon I snuck out early for the headlands. I watched seals beneath the trestle bridge above the harbor, in the coves between rocks that rose out of the waves like giant grasping hands. I watched them flip and dive and skewer the water like sleek rubber corkscrews. On weekends, I biked down wooden boardwalks to tide pools, clunking across sand piled up like eels. I took books. I learned to identify rockweed and wireweed and gulfweed and oarweed. I didn’t touch a starfish, but I stroked the bellies of clams and orange chitons.

This felt like life to me; these walks felt real. They became a form of worship: praise for the half-feathered bones of dead birds atop the sea wall and the fluorescent, jellied forms sticking to the sides; the pygmy trees east of Jug Handle Beach; the empty eucalyptus trail off Ocean Lane; the thick fog that rolled through early mornings, stretching like pulled taffy into evening; the soggy benches where I’d sit through the hours of March and April, waiting for the blowhole of a whale to splinter the flat seam of gray water. To know its massive body, all fat and crustacean, was floating out of sight. To catch just this peek of a whole universe existing below the surface.

On good days, the world was dewy with newness. Spending fifty dollars on the rusted red bike from the receptionist’s cousin was new. Spreading hay on the radishes outside the office was new, as was plucking snow peas from the trellis and rolling blackberries from the hedge. Careening the maul down onto quarters of wood in the backyard was new, the crack it made echoing at dusk. I learned the pleasure of drinking beer by myself in a small radio room late at night, and then walking to my car with my keys between my knuckles, and then going quiet as my headlights swam across three deer knocking knees in my gravel driveway.

Over the weekend, I volunteered at the botanical gardens. I walked loops around the rhododendrons—sat reverent in the small room of driftwood and cracked plastic where a whale skeleton dangled from rope like a crescent moon. I biked home with kale in the pockets of my raincoat, and then I planted the seedlings in the backyard, and they were new, everything as tender as a fresh bruise.

For a while, I was timid, and I stayed to myself. I wore wool socks and knit hats to keep out the damp. Sand funneled in between rubber and canvas and muffled the steps of my sneakers. My carpet was pixelated with it. My sheets below the tea-toweled window were milky with salt.

I slept in the tiny room, on the mattress on the floor beneath the tall wooden dresser. I owned no furniture of my own. On the wall above my head, I pinned the yellow gingko leaves from my dashboard, postcards from foreign countries, and a picture of my grandmother in her bathrobe on a dock before a red sunrise. I stacked my books below the window until their pages began to curl, and then I switched the stacks with my clothes in the drawers of my dresser. The room was narrow and monk-like. The door only opened a quarter slice before it met the bed; I shimmied in and out.

But time passed, and my shyness wore off; I became something like friends with my roommates, and then friends with their friends. We traveled up the coast to Arcadia, and we swirled around to a jam band, and I weaved in a sweaty mass of white-people dreadlocks and batik stripes, headbands and Hula-Hoops. We went to an old schoolhouse in Albion where a drug dealer was throwing his fortieth birthday. I wore a red lace bra under a black silk top that used to be my mother’s. I took off my sneakers to dance atop a bed that graced an empty classroom in a long diagonal.

My hair was still short. When I left college the year before, I’d chopped the brown curls that went halfway down my back to up above my ears. When I danced in my college town that summer, other women started dancing with me too. My friends asked if I was queer, and I laughed them off, like hair meant anything at all. But once, in a living room, I let my hips slip into another woman’s hips as music thrummed between us like insect wings. She drove me home, and I didn’t invite her inside, but I thought of her, a painter, for the rest of the summer. I’d known since I was a child, but in Kentucky, I’d rarely been brave enough to show it. Here, in California, in the classroom thick with bodies, I prayed someone like her would touch the bow on my side between hip bone and chest.

In Mendocino, that first year, no woman ever did. Our driver, one of the fishermen, got drunk, but we still let him take us home over the steep trestle bridges. We knew people who’d died this way, and violently, but we were not yet thirty and still felt invincible.

The next night, a friend taught me pool at Angelina’s, the bar next to the Motel 6, where a shark hung from the ceiling, and I had too much whiskey and went home with my boss’s son. He lived in a wooden shed behind his parents’ house. The wall above his bed was taken up by a dragon with green and yellow scales. Under the dragon was a collection of records. A stack of books buried the bedside table. When the titles on their spines started to scramble, I decided it was time to go home. He had nice hair. He was kind with a loud laugh, but I didn’t like him. I put my shirt back on, and I walked away in the lamplight of my boss’s bedroom window.

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That first time, I left Mendocino after four months. I moved to Berkeley for a job in bike tourism, and within a few weeks I wrecked a company vehicle, slamming into a parked car for no reason other than I wasn’t looking where I was going. I returned north and inland to a tiny town called Philo, closer to the coast than the city. I lived in a cabin with four other women and worked on a farm owned by a millionaire who wanted to teach high schoolers sustainability. I remained restless, looking for some job to latch onto. When that proved challenging, I found someone.

During a break between the crashed van and the experimental farm, I flew home to Kentucky where I spent a weekend with a man who I’d traded letters with since we were teenagers. It took just the weekend to admit what we’d been hedging toward for years—love—and I found a new purpose in partnership. I replaced the ocean walks with a new devotion, one that, for a while, felt like the realest thing yet. I followed him to Montana and spent a couple years bouncing between more jobs: cashiering at the local food co-op, harvesting vegetables from a farm, helping a florist stage weddings, leaving for a month at a time to take travelers on bike trips after I was forgiven for the van incident. I kept myself very busy; it was like trying on clothes to decide which outfit fit best. I was led, largely, by an intangible feeling, something Joan Didion once said: “I think most of us build elaborate structures to fend off spending much time in our own center.”

I didn’t know whether I was building elaborate structures or disassembling them. I didn’t usually pause long enough to consider it. I allowed myself to fall for the myth of fate—that I was meant for this person and he for me. Even while we bristled, and fought, against each other’s opposing natures, the tension created a space for us to inhabit, a place for us to settle while we continued to move—after Montana, back to Kentucky so I could attend grad school. We adopted a dog; we bought a small house; we got engaged. But over time, I found myself getting stuck in the car on the narrow street in front of the new red structure, unable to open the door after I reached the curb, spending an extra thirty seconds, and then thirty minutes, sitting in the driver’s seat turning over like a spit how I got there and where I could possibly go next. There was no pinpoint-able reason except that I longed to escape the very thing I had latched on to years earlier. I felt like I’d spun off from some preordained loop.

It took two more years, but after leaving school, I left our home, and as I disassembled our elaborate structure, I had no plan for what to do next except to find my way back to Mendocino, where Mendocino fog settled over Big River like hung sheets on a clothesline the exact silvery gray of late sun. Cars passing over the bridge. Tide moving in and out. Dogs walking on leashes. Dogs running off leashes. Swimmers. Waves. Harbor seals and tugged-out kelp. Redwoods on their second and third growths. Driftwood piled into shelters. Logs smoothed by the weight of people leaning into place.

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I was twenty-eight when I loaded my gray hatchback again and learned how life recycles itself. I again drove up from the Mojave and then into Los Angeles where my brother lived. I unpacked everything I’d stuffed into my car (because you never know, he said), including the bicycle that I now owned, which I had paid well over fifty dollars for. But I forgot my nice leather saddle in his apartment, and for the first four months I lived in Oakland, and then in Berkeley, I refused to buy a new seat and, instead of riding my bike, I walked everywhere. I walked from the apartment I sublet from a friend down MacArthur and then along Lakeshore and around Lake Merritt until I reached my office building on Webster. It was a mile and a half each way, and though I showed up to work with less than professionalism—sweat under my arms and my hair sticking to my neck—the walks freed me from the yoke. I no longer felt so trapped by my work or the desk where I worked at it.

Soon after I returned, I went to Fort Bragg. I spent an afternoon crouched in a dirt gully of a headland, my back to the wind, and observed that gray seam of water now wild and dancing. It is not an exaggeration to say I returned because I was in love with a place. I still don’t understand why I chose to leave the things I loved—the relationships, the settings. But after a while, they no longer seemed so resplendent.

A year after leaving the man, I sat myself down at the desk of a different apartment, the third I’d lived in six months, the top floor of an eight-bedroom house I shared with a dozen other people. From there, I looked out over the lemon trees in the backyard to the tall redwood one house over. I looked beyond it to the clip of ocean, the copper smudge of the Golden Gate I could see from my window, and I started the all-too-familiar ritual of goodbye. My temporary job had ended, my savings whittled down to emergency funds. I hadn’t sprung for a haircut in a very long time, and I had lent my car to a friend for three months for extra cash. I was almost thirty and I no longer felt invincible.

Days later, before I left California again, I woke up early in a friend’s loft. She lived in an old warehouse right before the bridge to Alameda. I crossed it to a diner at five a.m. and I ate pancakes and a breakfast sausage the size of my flattened palm. At sunrise, I paid my tab, and I took my coffee to the beach. When it started to sprinkle, I stayed, watching the joggers and the volleyball players and the purple light miraging the San Francisco skyline, and I thought about what I’d told my friends, that I was coming home to write without the cost of Bay Area housing, but once I arrived at my studio apartment in Louisville, with the water roaches crawling out of my sink and the pair of nine-foot windows that refused to open, I knew I’d returned not for this, but for another chance at partnership, another person I’d found resplendent while I was gone.

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I was a newly minted thirty-two the last time I returned to Mendocino, to an artist residency at a former commune six miles off the coast, where Albion turns off from Highway 1— the tiny town little more than a post office, a hardware store, and a market advertising Indian food on Saturdays and Sundays and unleaded gas for $6.99. A trestle bridge, the same one I took home from the drug dealer’s birthday party, crossed the Albion River, and hundreds of feet below, RVs looked like children’s toys, and crab traps were thrown like life rafts along the riprap. From here, I could drive twenty minutes to Mendocino, then ten more to Point Cabrillo, a lighthouse and an overlook for whales, where fog dips in the middle of the road like it’s trying to catch the car. I could walk down the one-mile trail, see waves broiling in like tiny tsunamis, stop at a USGS marker and wait, my hand over my eyes, until their heart-shaped spouts puff up like an organ.

Their presence, their continual migration, becomes a refraction of my own. Now a growing tinsel of gray hairs, more creases under my eyes, black holes of time wondering about the quality of my uterus, the quantity of my eggs, but still, I depend on them. I depend on the hours I spend sitting upon a smattering of bluffs just to see the silver knife of their gray backs against the sun.

I return to Mendocino, again and again, because it stuns me, and because I am trying, until it finally, blissfully, becomes irrelevant, to discern my own nature. My twenties, the turbulence of middle-class American yearning, could be distant, if she wasn’t here next to me, remembering the Frisbee field, the beers by the fire on the birthday, the deflating kayak down the river one Sunday afternoon.

I return because it feels good to sit along Big River, in the sand, my back against a log, the world spiraling around me without reference to me, more like a dust mote than a central sun, the dog chasing a stick into the water like a sprite. Because I care more about this feeling than whatever I am meant to care about. I do not know how long I will remain this way; perhaps the decade has done enough, perhaps Mendocino, or the dream of Mendocino, of a place that keeps you tethered to a place, will one day let me go.

My first night at the residency, instead of gills, I dreamt that I birthed a child who came out a toddler with amber skin and a big, toothy smile. He loved me, but in the dream, when I remembered he existed, I cried, because I knew that toddler-infant would anchor me.

After the dream, I woke up next to the woman I’d left the Bay Area to be with, the one I’d woken next to for the last four years, who loved me, but unlike the man before her, not quite enough to conceive of a concrete future with me. We slept in a cabin called Cedar, and in the morning after the dream, after I lit the woodstove, after I peed on a pile of leaves next to the path and stood with my face to a lifting sun through the thick forest of Douglas firs, I pulled a novel called Mendocino from the shelf. The book is a family saga, tracing the lineage begun by the coupling of an Indigenous Californian and a Russian immigrant in the nineteenth century. Over generations, the family pushes farther north and farther inland, tunneling away from colonizers into a home made from redwood logs along Big River, overlooking what would become the town of Mendocino.

I ignored the work I’d come to do, took a wooden chair above Cedar, and read through a week of January afternoons until I reached the penultimate generation, the 1930s when Callie, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant from San Francisco and the great-great-grandson of the family’s original patriarch, felt restless. Her mother didn’t understand her. Neither did society. She had a disdain for commonality. She dreamt of a bigger life.

One afternoon, whittling away the hours, she looked out over the coast and got a sudden compulsion to go sit on a rock above the Pacific. A passerby in a striped shirt and a small cap warned Callie that sneaker waves could bash her off her perch. Callie scoffed at the advice. On that craggy rock above the sea, she found “pure pleasure” that had gone unnoticed earlier in the day. Above her, an osprey soared with a fish in its talons. A spout of a gray whale on his way home from Baja emerged like a “watery exclamation point.”

“She was surrounded by dazzle, a happy prisoner in a crystal ball. All around her, life blazed. A rush of joy filled her. She wanted to embrace it all… If only she could save such times, capture their color and glory, remember and preserve their power and effect. Then others would feel them, too. They would be hit with the same force she had been and they’d understand each other without words.”

Then, of course, the wave took her.

The passerby in a cap pulled her out of the ocean. His last name was Prinz, pronounced like “prince.” Callie remembered a story her mother told her years ago: “One day you’ll be swept off your feet, and there will be your prince.”

Not an actual prince, but a figure of speech, her mother continued. A person who will save you.

On our last morning, I finish the book, and I put it back on the shelf. The woman and I button up the cabin—dump the toilet compost in the humanure pile, the kitchen compost in the trio of piles above the orchard, put the coffee in paper cups purchased with the cost of a bar of chocolate at the Little River Market the night before, double-check that the woodstove no longer has embers, leave the note to the next guests on the desk, and I shoulder my backpack, walk up the steep trail past other, sleeping cabins, past third growth redwoods, through two latched gates, all under the beam of my headlamp—and we drive back to Point Cabrillo Lighthouse.

Dawn emerges as we walk a gravel path, and in front of the lighthouse, a mass of cypresses with long, outstretched arms chisel the early sun. Deer hover in the field, blending the hay color of their hides, and along the path I read signs about whales: which whale is the longest, how far do they swim, do they have ears, or belly buttons?

We sit on a picnic bench, hands in coat pockets, nipping off bits of gooseberry scone from the morning prior, and I look for signs—puffs like brief lines of fog, backs like gleaming quarters—that they’re still here, still en route, still achieving the myth of forward momentum.

The night before, I took a walk off the property, along a gravel drive that leads to a private pasture. The light swished down like a skirt atop the redwoods. A grove of eucalyptuses groaned and creaked. The sky purpled with sunset when I reached the end of Middle Ridge Road, and I wanted to respect the road’s end, to not need to go any farther. I knew that the woman and I would separate, and soon, and I wondered what might happen next if we didn’t, and what I might see if I stayed.

I recalled the book: when Callie met Prinz, she decided that the moment was preordained. It was fate. Her life took off splendidly, but then the Great Depression robbed them of their promises. Callie ended up spending her life working and rearing children from the very home she’d sought to escape. The loop of leaving and returning caught up with her.

A decade after meeting California, and this tiny section of coastline, I work to accept this loop. When I say accept, I mean confront. When I say loop, I mean, of course, myself.

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Before I finish this essay, I return to California one more time, but not to Mendocino. I am thirty-three. I stay with a friend in Oakland, the one who I once lived with in the warehouse by Alameda, who now occupies the second floor of a house a mile off Lake Merritt with jasmine blooming on the wrought-iron front gate locked by a gold key I slip in my pocket when I jog to the lake’s edge.

The jog was like a return to life after a summer spent losing my mind. The woman and I had separated, and the man and I had entered an arduous phase of forgiveness. I never asked what he did with the gray diamond I returned to him, but I asked what he did with the letters I wrote. Burned some, he told me, threw others away—my earnest adolescence all ash and landfill. The loss felt like the loss of a friend. He told me through a text message, while I was again away from home, whatever home was, in a yellow kitchen in a house a mile above sea level. I moved outside into the late sun, consoling myself at the red picnic table with a bowl of cherries and a beer. I remembered back to that time as a teenager, the things I felt before I felt the security of being loved, and how that security required more of me than I had found in myself to give.

I put up with the same inadequacy from the woman, because I thought, after breaking one heart, that I must deserve to have mine cleaved too. But now the letters were gone, and so was he, and so was she. It was an isolation I hadn’t grasped at the headlands, an untenable loss of direction. It was perhaps the only time I thought about the plastic bag, and my great-grandmother, and the loneliness that can take us there.

But now I was moving again, and Oakland was bright with sun, and perhaps only a few miles from me, underwater, the whales were trialing a life so foreign and so much the same. Back and forth, a continual migration between who they were and who they are becoming. Perhaps they too try to understand their past selves; each repeated path down the coast like a pencil line traced darker and darker, pulling them closer, like gravity, toward the inevitable center of things. On my drives between Kentucky and California, the most important part of the trip was the movement. It wasn’t the leaving, or the arriving, but the getting there. The in-between was so quiet, so solitary. It’s when I felt most myself; alone, ambient, almost reaching a plane of satisfaction in my own body but never quite getting there. I almost had it, this elusive unlocking of myself, and right when I was becoming the pelican, dive-bombing toward awareness, I shook my head and it was like I suddenly woke to the sound of gravel under my tires, pulling into the parking lot, and it disappeared.

It was like how it felt the mornings I drove to Point Cabrillo, looking beyond the windshield to the bluffs, the lighthouse, the sea. The in-between after a dream but before I opened my eyes, pulling at the phantom of it as it thinned like gossamer, stretching back into nothing. What had I almost seen there before my senses overtook me, my eagerness to smell eucalyptus and salt, to feel wind curl up like a secret behind my ears? Physicality always overwhelmed me before I keeled into the deeper meaning. It was like opening the car door, walking through tall grass, passing the deer to the hills and the Pacific. Once there, knowing the puffs of whale spouts would greet me again, their mist like an open mouth between water and sky, that interminable answer: the in-between is the center, and the center is always moving.

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Off my flight home to Kentucky, someone new picks me up, a disco ball hanging from their rearview mirror and glinting gray on the dashboard. She jumps out of the car, arms out, knees bent, a goofy smile, like she’s waiting for me to jump right in. She wears a baseball cap I gave her, camo with the neon orange name of an art gallery in the town where I once owned a house with someone who was once my fiancé, wearing the same style of boot my old girlfriend once wore, and these people, the memories of them and their physical bodies, were off somewhere else, cooking dinner or going to bed, maybe alone, maybe with another person, absentmindedly patting the soft heads of the dogs that I left behind when I left them. I can look across town to their houses, the one with the long porch, the other a narrow shotgun just half a mile from my own, but I couldn’t look back, or, at least, I didn’t want to anymore.

There’s no conclusion, at least none like what I was hoping to find when I first moved to Mendocino ten years ago, when I first tried writing down what so moved me about the place. In Mendocino, the characters spiral over and over into love that fades and does not save them, even though the beginning promises resolution at the end. Sometimes, from far off, I have to remind myself: Mendocino was a real place; it remains a real place. Sometimes, I catch a rendering of myself; the people I could’ve been had I stayed, and the one I must stay with regardless, staring back at me from the reflection in the car door.

I attempt resolution over and over, but it’s far off, nebulous, misty, like the gray puff of the whales I can see but never reach. I’ve created a story I can’t end.

While I wrestled with this essay on a brick patio in Kentucky, the person with the disco ball in her car showed up with a waxy bag of egg rolls because I forgot my lunch and I complained that I was hungry. She was running late to work, and my shift started in nine minutes. Still, she jogged over in sneakers, black pants, a gray shirt I’d never seen on anyone else. She kissed my forehead.

She’d never been to Mendocino. It didn’t matter. For now, the only place I felt pulled was this specific, concrete moment. A gray shirt, a cup of coffee, a bag of egg rolls. After she left, I was still here, and when the wind rustled the green summer leaves, only I heard the water.