So tomorrow I’m leaving here (California) for there (Michigan) and for eleven days I’ll be gone from my work as we make our way home via automobile. I’m gonna take pictures and write words about it while I’m gone and then publish them here when I get back.
I used to keep a blog where I just wrote things down and people read them. That blog contains several books worth of writing but not a single “complete essay” suitable for publication. I don’t really know how I’d categorize that body of work, but whatever it is: this is gonna be like that. Me typing sentences.
In some ways, the plot to leave started before I even got here — in October 2010, between the six years I spent in New York and the five years I ended up staying in California, I stopped in Michigan to spend a few days with my Mom and a few days upstate for my high school reunion. I went to a boarding school for the arts in Interlochen, a town near Traverse City, a popular tourist destination with a mall we’d visit on weekends to get haircuts and go shopping with our gay best friends. I drove up with one of my best friends from school who’d lived in New York when I first got there but lives in Chicago now, and we picked up where we’d left off.
A day into the weekend, somebody said, You know I’m supposed to say “look how much we’ve all changed” but we haven’t, really. At Interlochen, I’d been a teenager dreaming of the cities I’d live in one day and now I was back and it turns out that chasing those dreams hadn’t changed a thing. There were my bones in the trees and everything I’d ever wanted was right there at the edge of the dock where J and I got in that big fight and he threw my favorite water bottle into the lake and we almost broke up but then we didn’t. I think that happened on Wok Night, when the teachers made stir-fry and everybody smelled like sesame oil.
Four of us spent the last day of the reunion at our writing teacher’s house by the river in the woods, mostly talking about how none of us were doing the right thing with our lives because none of us were living in Northern Michigan. Our writing teacher said, the craziest thing is that you all look exactly the same. We didn’t, of course, but maybe that landscape brought out something familiar in our eyes.
Let’s all buy a house together in Northern Michigan and write poetry, I said, or maybe somebody else said. The whole drive back we fantasized about inexpensive real estate and having a river in our backyards, and then I got on a plane and flew to California and it turned out to be just exactly what I needed.
I’m not moving to Northern Michigan, so I’m still not doing life exactly as I ought to. But I am moving back to Michigan, where I grew up, within driving distance of Interlochen.
This place — California, the Bay Area — has never felt like mine, really, except for when Berkeley reminded me of Ann Arbor. It’s been beautiful, though, and fun, and at first the space and the flush of a new relationship and my growing business in “cyberspace” (we make fun of that word but it really does feel like a thing happening in “space”) and the weather alone was enough to make me feel a kind of peace I never thought possible anywhere else. I felt, briefly, wildly happy, although suspiciously so, because that happiness relied on a very limited set of temporary circumstances. I had a hard time making new friends, you could say.
A few months into living here, my then-girlfriend M — she was from Canada, we’d met in New York, she moved to Oakland, then I did, and then we got together — got a carshare and we drove into the Berkeley Hills. There was a place we could sit and see everything, right next to the big white modern building where she had orchestra practice. We sat in the dry grass and smoked a joint and we could see all of Berkeley and Oakland and then the ocean and the bridges crossing it like ribbons towards a city of tall buildings smothered in twilight-tinted fog. (The views out here, I’m telling you.) I felt struck suddenly by the arbitrariness of either of us being there at all.
I said to her, We’re like a little spaceship or something, I feel. Like we just plopped down here from different planets, so far from home.
And she said, We’re just a little pod.
We started calling ourselves a “pop-up pod.” Like, “look where our little pop-up pod has popped up now!” On a boat! Having brunch in Portland! Waiting in line for toast! At a concert! At Half Moon Bay!
I think at some point she found some ground to dig into but I never quite did. Eventually I was just my own pod. Pop. Pop.
*
We’d had a plan, all of us, hatched in the spring of 2010: a house in Berkeley for all our friends — there were maybe seven or eight of us in on the plan. We started a tumblr called berkeleystraddle. The topic was how much better things would be in this imaginary house in this imaginary town we pretended was a real town.
in berkeley, it’s not a nerve or a tendon — it’s just healed
in berkeley, we will have a dishwasher and a washer/dryer
in berkeley, they’ll violate our rights only to make us eat more vegetables
But life is what happens when you’re making other tumblrs. Eventually, only a few of us moved to the bay, and not to live in the same house. M came first, followed by T and K, who’s apartment in Temescal I crashed at when I arrived until I moved into my own place on November 9th, 2010. T and K broke up and T moved to Portland. Last summer, K left for a job in Los Angeles. Now it’s my turn to leave. It’s weird that I’m the last one here, M said to me the other night.
Sometimes I feel like it was weird that I was here at all.
The Bay Area started changing right around when I got here. You’ve heard, I imagine (or not, maybe nobody cares but the people in it), but there is a technology “boom” happening in which tech and new media corporations hire people to work in Silicon Valley and pay them a lot and then those people want a place to live and so they move into places where poorer people used to live.
It’s gotten very expensive around here.
I say this as somebody who happily spent six years in New York overpaying for everything, including monthly rents of $700-$1,000 for tiny imitations of bedrooms in various mediocre neighborhoods. I’ve paid similar rents here, but for much larger spaces, so it’s been okay. Inexpensive New York apartments aren’t even real apartments, I’m sure aliens are laughing at them. But now the prices here are just spiraling wildly out of control, and because I work in cyberspace, it feels increasingly foolish to sacrifice so much income for space in a specific physical location. Especially now that I have Abby, but I’ll talk more about her a little later. For now, this: when she thinks about “home” she thinks about places that look like the places I call home.
Math and numbers feel weird to talk about when I’m talking about how a place feels but I need to give you some:
The median monthly rent in San Francisco is $4,225
Real estate in Oakland is up 21.6% from last year
Berkeley is up 32.4%
Bay Area rents have been rising an average of 44 percent since 2010
Rents in the San Francisco Metropolitan area are rising faster than any other major city in this country
In September 2012, I moved out of a studio in Oakland into the $1,700/month, 850 square foot two-bedroom apartment where I currently live. M and I went to the open house and applied on the spot. It was easily the best deal we’d seen in our month of stupefied, unhappy apartment-hunting, which so far had turned out to be as competitive and stressful as apartment-hunting in New York. The landscape had changed so much even from when we first got here in 2010. So my rent’s been around $850 for three years because of rent control.
The next tenants of this apartment will be paying $2,995.
In “Where I Was From,” Joan Didion writes: A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up.
A year and a month or so ago I was hysterically sobbing in bed, or maybe on the couch, (one of those two soft places), saying that if M was positive our relationship was over then what was I even doing here, why don’t I just move to Michigan. I threaten to move to Michigan a lot. What will you do there? The subject of my threat will ask. Live with my Mom, I guess, I’ll say. Cry. I’m really fun, you guys. I also send really compelling, reasonable e-mails.
M suggested Los Angeles, where I’d been pressing her to move with me for the last year or so because I felt lonely and all my friends live there, but the idea of moving to a city I didn’t like by myself — especially when most of my friends there are couples — felt stupid. I didn’t want to start over like that.
I ended up not leaving at all, not then.
The threat to move to Michigan was always made in a specific context: some element of my life fell apart and I didn’t know how to fix it or myself.
I’m finally moving to Michigan under an entirely different context: one thing ended and another, very different thing, began. After I finished crying about the end of my 3.5 year relationship, I took the plunge and put a down payment on a car — my first time owning one in over ten years — which changed my relationship to this landscape immediately. I felt like a bird who could fly anywhere, so I did.
First, I drove to see about a girl. Abby was from Indiana but was working at an orchard in Oregon that summer. The first six months of 2014 had been pretty horrible, I’d been monumentally depressed (I was lying in this post when I said I wasn’t). So the drive through miles and miles of postcard-ready scenery felt like laughing so hard you fall down a hill into a pile of puppies.
Then we fell in love! We rode a ferris wheel in Sacramento laughing so hard our faces fell off and we picked them back up and laughed at ourselves and I knew it right then. I was ready to leave the state but decided to stay a bit longer, there was cool stuff happening with farming for Abby to check out. So she got a job here and we tried to find our own place but nothing was affordable, so I kept this one. M also started seeing somebody seriously and ended up getting a place in Oakland.
Abby loves the midwest and believes in its inherent goodness with a ferocity rivaled only by that writing teacher I mentioned and the more she missed it the more I considered missing it, too. Being here felt fun but never “sustainable,” especially because California’s about to fall into the ocean.
You know that iconic “commencement speech” that says:
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.
I think about that a lot.
Abby wants to go to coding school so we looked for a good one near a friend or family member who might let us crash for a bit while we get sorted. We settled on Detroit, where my Mom lives. We’d be close to my family in Ohio, too, and Abby’s family in Indiana. Exciting things are happening in Detroit right now, like opportunities.
So now we’re leaving and I’m excited. I’m excited to be someplace new and figure out who I can be in a space that feels familiar but is being reborn and maybe I can find a place there. But I’ll miss some things, too.
The Escapist Comic Bookstore, Berkeley
I’ll miss the women’s only gym at the YMCA, because I see no reason to spend my precious 30-40 minutes of tranquil daily exercise with anybody besides hippie ladies in their fifties and sixties. It’s almost like being invisible. Everybody minds their own business.
I’ll miss Berkeley Bowl, and the abundance of fresh affordable produce in general. All the bookstores, too, like Moe’s three stories of books on Telegraph, Pegasus’s winding stacks and racks of ‘zines, the legendary City Lights with its entire floor of poetry. Mrs. Dalloway’s on College, which is like a gardening store that’s also a bookstore that’s also just really fucking cute. We found this comic book store, The Escapist Comic Bookstore, a few months ago I wish I’d found a few years ago because it has literally everything and when you think you’ve found everything you’ll find even more things behind it.
The Lawrence Hall of Science, in the Berkeley Hills, where Abby and I used to go all the time when we didn’t have a home to sit in. Georgina told us stories about hanging out up there in high school while the teenagers she used to be laughed nearby, smoking joints, drinking beer, whatever.
I’ll miss my friends here, who I don’t see as often as I should but when I do, I always think we should see each other more often than we should.
I’ll miss driving to A-Camp in San Bernardino. I bring a lot of shit to camp. Like I just bring whatever. You know how many magazines I bring to A-Camp for a three-hour ‘zine-making workshop? Like three hundred. I am not messing around with that shit. I bring full bottles of shampoo, Costco-sized whiskey, a giant whiteboard, sheets and pillows and towels, boots and shoes, boxes of crackers, truckloads of string cheese. I’m actually not sure how on earth I could ever fly to camp, which’s why I’m beginning my ten month campaign entitled “Abby, Let’s Drive To A-Camp,” starting now.
Speaking of Southern California, I’ve got hoes in one primary area code: Los Angeles. Even when I was still in New York, I went to LA a few times a year for one reason or another and since moving here, I’ve gone what feels like six or so times a year. For camp planning, “just to visit,” for a meeting, for an event. I usually see Alex multiple times a year, for example — her coming here, or me going there — and I’m gonna miss that a lot. However, I’m not gonna miss driving up and down the 5 with my woes.
I’ll miss everyone on Pacific Standard Time.
I’ve probably spent more time exploring California in general than I have exploring San Francisco itself and I’ll miss that, too, miles and miles and miles of it. There’s just so much to see out here and a lot of it is free ’cause it’s outside. I’ve seen the aquarium in Monterrey, the lighthouse at Point Reyes, the California State Fair in Sacramento, every bookstore in the Bay Area and the fainting goats of Calistoga. I’ve gone canoeing down a wide river in Mendicino, white-water rafting in the Lower Kern, camping at Lake Tahoe, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway and whale watching in Santa Cruz. That was rad.
But there is that city, too, and it is still quite something sometimes, even if it’s not the place I dreamed it’d be.
I love The Sutro Baths, for example. I love Twin Peaks. I’ve loved some Prides in Dolores Park.
My second night in the Bay, I went to Twin Peaks for the first time. It’s just two hills but from the top you can see the whole beautiful city with its teeny-tiny people and that big Rainbow flag in the Castro. The views out here!!! That night I went with M it was too foggy and dark and raining to really see anything, but I think that’s just the reality of my life: I only seem to make it up there when the weather is mediocre or even terrifying. The first time I went with Abby I thought we were gonna blow right off (like the joint that literally blew out of my pocket), tumbling down onto a winding car-commerical-ready road and then crushed by the city. Then Abby and I took two of our friends up there and then somebody stole our credit cards while we were petting puppies.
I’m going to miss the weed. That’s for damn sure.
*
in berkeley, there’s totally always tomorrow
in berkeley, no one needs a microphone.
*
I’ll miss the spot off the highway where Abby got down on one knee and waited for me to notice I’d walked so far ahead of her, turn around, and say yes.
*
From that first trip I took to The Lex with Crystal and Alex when we visited San Francisco in the spring of 2010, I’ve never felt quite as cool as everybody else here, which is hard to explain without sounding like a fossil. Also, for my work, I’ve started to feel disconnected from what it’s like to be queer anywhere but here, and sometimes I feel useless in a community sense.
Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft
It has been beautiful to the point of not always feeling real and I liked it but I’m leaving before it makes me soft.
*
I told Abby the only thing I’m scared of for Michigan are those rainy strip-mall days, when everything is cold and grey and it gets dark real early and you’re like, going from TJ Maxx to Kroger’s and stopping at the bank and it’s just dim. It’s easy to just give up and die sometimes. So there: I named my fear. Now I’m gonna face it.
My first year in California I was very happy. My second year I was happy. The next year and a half or so were good sometimes but often very sad. This past year has been almost entirely heart-explodingly fantastic.
When I think about the moment I get in my car and go — a moment that is mere hours away at this point — I still get that stab in the gut, that heart-achey cavern that isn’t missing something so much as it is the fear of missing something. Despite feeling always a bit disconnected from this place, I have also lived some of the absolute happiest moments of my life while living on this coast, and those moments have been because of the people but also because of the land. I will keep them in my gut, between the birds, underwater, shelved between something solid and something soft. I will keep them when I go.
berkeleystraddle was never really about Berkeley, anyway. It was about an imaginary town that shared a name with many real towns. It was about the idea of a place where there was always room. Room means space we can afford and space that can afford us, room means the chance to build. I’m heading East tomorrow in search of it.
I’m supposed to say look how we’ve all changed
in berkeley, there’s totally always tomorrow.
<3
Wishing you both the best clear-sky weather for watching the miles pass beneath you and the coziest and cutest little diners and gas stations along the way!
Thanks for your words, as always. <3
Safe travels, Riese! I’m excited for you. <3
I have an awful habit of always dreaming up ~my perfect life~ and it’s always contingent on living somewhere that exists in the way that berkeleystraddle did/does. So this, this rang very true:
‘berkeleystraddle was never really about Berkeley, anyway. It was about an imaginary town that shared a name with many real towns. It was about the idea of a place where there was always room. Room means space we can afford and space that can afford us, room means the chance to build.’
Also even the dildos will be solar-powered anywhere good in my head.
Wishing you and Abby all the happiness in the world! This was so beautiful. I really miss your personal, raw, first-person writing a lot!
I am just a little bit sad that I won’t be in California the next time I visit the US which will be…someday.
Oh Riese <3 Mazal tov, and best wishes to you two crazy kids.
Mazel tov? Mazel tov.
MAZEL TOV!
Best of luck in your travels and new beginnings in the Midwest!
good luck with the move!! I can’t wait to read about your whole entire trip! <3
this really resonated with me, and the wanderlust i’ve been feeling for years now. one day maybe i’ll be brave enough to take the leap. until then, safe travels and good luck! can’t wait to read all about it. :)
Well, I just love any post like this, infused with senses of times and places.
Also, about 4 years ago I was driving around Michigan and picked up Interlochen Public Radio, and got one of those weird, but happy, feelings you get when something reminds you of people from the internet.
Anyway, safe travels, and I hope all your midwestern dreams come true!
This hits in so many ways, Riese. Mostly, I’m unreasonably excited for you two. I got this feeling when I heard where you were heading — like, “of course!” I honestly believe (and sincerely hope) that you two will be happy there. Selfishly, I’m happy because I can see you and Abby when I visit “home.” And the feelings resonate, too, as someone who’s currently living in an arbitrary place [that word is the perfect description] and can’t decide how much energy to spend digging into the ground while I’m here. I miss the Midwest, and I often wonder if I’ll end up back there someday.
Love you guys. Safe travels :)
I want to give you two the biggest hug. You’re off on a great adventure, good luck!
Also, this:
#dying
Also @riese do you remember my dream about you and the women’s only gym and the water bottles? I foresee many more women’s only gyms in your future <3
I DO REMEMBER THAT DREAM! abby even went out and bought us both new waterbottles that she figured would fix the problem of them leaking in my bag, which was a go-to issue whenever we discussed why i’d buy a new waterbottle out in the world instead of just carrying the reusable one. and i didn’t want a nalgene ’cause i can’t drink it without spilling all over myself. so anyhow we got some really good ones with tight screw-on caps and reasonably small mouth-holes that are like, made out of robot parts or something, except we quickly learned on this adventure that the downside to those is that when it’s hot out, the bottles themselves get so hot you can barely touch them.
that is my waterbottle story of the day. my mom has a sodastream it’s sort of magical.
hey friend, i love you and i’m proud of you.
I might have to read this once a week from now until I move back to Texas in November, just to convince myself that home is a place I can be.
You guys, I hope you have a great amazing trip full of wonderful things to see and picture and write about. Can Abby still bring her truck next year for a hay grrrrl hay ride tho.
The skies are awaiting your leap..
..welcome to your horizon, to your infinite possibility!
+1 for A-Camp road trip. This is gorgeous as usual. Thanks for making me feel things while I drink my coffee today. Hope your life is amazing.
Rieeesseeee this is so wonderful and I love you and Abby and I can’t wait to be less than four hours away from you!
Oh, goodness.
As a fellow Midwesterner (upper Midwest, even!) in the Bay who’s also not sure how long she can ride this out or how long she should, this made me tear up at least six times. Seven, now, I guess. Yes, yes, yes all of it.
Safest and happiest travels. Thanks for this. Save some room for us back home for when we all make it back home, too, k?
i will. <3
This fills up my heart. Good luck on your adventure <3
The midwest is surprisingly queer. In like, a beautiful strong urgent lets-create-our-space way that I haven’t felt anywhere else, especially in any larger cities (I’m in Minneapolis). I’ve been trying to convince my California friends to come out here for a long time, the biggest obstacle and deterrent for others is the winter-and I AM curious how you feel about midwest winters. Anyways, I am excited for your move! I love living in the midwest and recommend it for anyone feeling burnt out in LA/SF.
This is the comment I needed to read today–I am also about to move to the midwest and have never really felt connected to the queer community in the big city I’m leaving. How do beautiful strong urgent midwestern queers connect? (How do I find my new friends?)
@miskate ahh hi welcome! Where in the midwest are you moving?? I’m in Minneapolis which is a hub of activity but I can offer suggestions for wherever you’re heading!
@whiskeyghost Thanks! I am moving to northeastern Iowa, about 3.5 hours south of Minneapolis. I’m coming for a job and don’t know much about the local/regional scene.
Chicago has a great scene too! If you can ever make it, we’d be glad to see you :-)
And Madison, WI too! (I am a Midwestern queer also in love with both of those things, so I’m very excited and hope you have a great experience)
i’ve actually missed winter a lot! i’m more worried about the gross hot humid days of summer than about winter, to be honest — b/c in berkeley it’s always 68-75 degrees and there’s only like one week that goes over 80. i like winter! i don’t like the sad dark slushy part of winter, but i like the part where things are white and snowy. i also don’t like when it’s so cold you can’t go anywhere or do anything. but i am a morose princess of darkness and probably the only person on the planet who doesn’t get sad when the sun sets at 6pm. i bet my car is really excited to witness its first michigan winter, though.
I’ve also lived away from my home-state for a while and this new city has never quite felt like it totally “fit”. Even in my own apartment, which I have obsessively and carefully decorated for maximum comfort-ability and familiarity, I can never quite relax or integrate with the environment. I used to be so antsy to leave my small town and live in a big east coast city…but i really long for those lazy, quiet southern days of warms breezes, Spanish moss, and always available pools and BBQs. I wonder if this feeling of not integrating will go away once i really find a “community” or more solid group of friends here, but I dunno. I’m super committed to making it work, so we’ll see. I would love to be able to work from my hometown though, full of all the familiarity and slowness that I once felt smothered by.
Anyway! Good luck to you and Abby. And thank you for writing this! it was lovely :)
this is lovely! i think a lot of people feel this way — you know, you don’t really know what home is til you figure out what home isn’t. which doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy or even spend your entire life in a place that isn’t home, it just means that it’ll never really feel like home.
Be safe guys <3
Have a great trip and hope all goes well with y’all’s move! I’m excited for you!
I love how Autostraddle always seems to be able to relate to my feeling about place/home/etc.
Thanks for writing this and good luck with the move! I hope that you, Abby and all your possessions make it there safely.
My (now) wife and I left Boston for somewhat less expensive, less trendy, less stressful six years ago and it was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. We still miss the city sometimes, but we can visit, and life here is just so good. Hope it works out just as well for you two.
* somewhere
Congrats Riese and Abby! I love the way you describe the past year, as “heart-explodingly fantastic.” I’ve felt that lately too (since I met my now-wife), and I just never knew this was a possibility.
My wife and I just took a road-trip honeymoon, from the midwest down south. It was our first time travelling to travel together. We had gone places to visit people, but this was the first time we were just exploring a new place together. It was so amazing, to see how we interacted with new places, both individually and as a couple. I got to see things about her I didn’t know, and I got to share different parts of myself, all because of a change of place. Due to work stuff, we will need to move cities in a few years, and it made me excited for who we’ll be and what we’ll learn together in a new environment.
Best of luck to you in your move!
Yes! Everything you describe about your first road trip with your wife is exactly how we ended up feeling on ours. We had to take two separate cars to get our cars from there to here, so we were also plotting the whole time about what we’d do at our next road trip when we could be in the same car. which is mostly a bonus because we like to know the history of everything we pass and everywhere we go and every small town we drive through, so when we’re together she drives and i provide the historical narration via internet on my phone. it’s a smooth operation.
Oh, oh, oh! You’re making me miss Michigan.
You will definitely be able to find some good replacements for the things you’re going to miss–Eastern Market for vegetables, John K King for books, the DIA and MOCAD (also the cafe in here is frickin’ amazing) and the Henry Ford Museum! Also Ferndale is super gay apparently?
Drive safe, and good luck with moving–make sure to stop at many ridiculous roadside attractions!
we went to the eastern market yesterday and it was fantastic AND we drove through ferndale and it also looked fantastic. also, I LOVE THE HENRY FORD MUSEUM. it’s hands down one of my favorite museums on earth, and i am so excited to take abby there.
This is lovely, I cried into my frosted shredded bite sized wheats a little. I hope everything goes well with the move and also with life in general.
Best of luck to you and Abby in this new chapter of your life! And you won’t miss the weed, Riese! It’s super easy to get a medical card in Michigan.
I’ve moved like 8 times in my life, and thought that this was the last one (Chicago), but my girlfriend here is from the Detroit suburbs and is obsessed with the Lions and all things Michigan. She dreams of moving back and is trying to convince me.
Best of luck and safe travels
Loved reading this, it made me want to move back to Michigan! I love Nashville, but Central Michigan, as small and “in the middle of nowhere” as it is, always has my heart. Best of luck to you both!!
Hey! Safe travels, congrats, good luck, and thanks for everything. (so pleased that autowin updated)
Aw, Riese, this is the best. I love this and I love you.
Even though I grew up in Northern California, spent some time away, and returned about 2 years ago, I still resonated with so much of what you wrote here, Riese! It does feel hard to put some roots in SF and I too, have been longing for ROOM and space and hope for a future with queers and wilderness and peace.
Good luck on your journey!!
<3
@melhank I truly believe that one day we will make a thing and there will be so much room. I love you.
@audreyfaye <3
I grew up in the Bay Area and I fucking love it here. I hate the way the city is changing but i tried living somewhere else once (Iowa in fact) and it was horrible and I just wanted to be home. Because SF is home and Marin is home and my community is here and my family is here but I cannot afford to live here. I want so desperately to stay but I don’t think I can and I don’t know where to go.
Good luck on your move. So much love.
I moved back to Minnesota after living around the country (San Francisco was my last stop). I swore I would never end up in Minneapolis, but here I am. And I love it. It feels like home. Something I have never been able to say about any other place I’ve lived. I hope you get that same feeling too, Riese. :) Even with the fear you have, I have a similar one that makes my depression/anxiety ridden self get nervous every fall and winter, I hope the community in Michigan makes those “shortened” days better. Safe travels!
This gave me so many feelings about place and belonging and California and leaving and staying and traveling and moving and home… I really don’t know where I belong. Is it where I grew up? Is it where my family is now? Is it about place, or about people? Maybe there isn’t one place, maybe there are different places for different chapters of life. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. I’ve had my share of Berkeleystraddle-type dreams… Maybe home is something you make, not something you find. I mean, what if we built Autostraddle-town though. Just think about it. What if we did that.
Thank you for your words Riese, safe travels and happy moving-in once you get there!
“I mean, what if we built Autostraddle-town though. Just think about it. What if we did that.”
I WANT TO DO THAT.
probably in the midwest. :-)
This is so honest and beautiful, make it there safely. Good luck on your sojourn home!
<3 you hit my Michigan feelings. Can we do Detroit/Ann Arbor straddler meetups?
YES WE CAN!
Welcome back to the midwest! Here’s to your future of muggy days on the lakes, hotdish*, county fairs, honey from local beekeepers, low cost of living, and very little chance of ending up under water as a result of global climate change.
*My particular brand of midwestern = Minnesotan.
Michigan has pierogis and pasties and paczki!! Good P foods in the mitten.
ooh yum Polish food! We have a lot of Finnish and Swedish-influenced food up here, like lutefisk and other dried and/or pickled fish products. It’s quite something.
i love a good county fair, that’s for sure
What a lovely read. These personal essay things always make me marvel at how invested I feel in the lives of Autostraddle writers, borderline drowning in my own feelings currently. Safe travels, best of luck etc <3
Please keep typing sentences. This was beautiful. All the best on your journey!
I’m a native Bay Area resident who is UTTERLY spoiled with regard to weather, but I do envy the Midwest one weather-related thing and that’s the summer thunderstorms. I long for them. Especially now that rain in general is sort of A Thing of the Past, in California (do Californian kindergarteners even, like, know what rain is? do they think it’s like dragons and unicorns, something only in storybooks?), but even before the drought, we never had rain like that. Only cold winter rain. When I was in Michigan in July a couple years ago I couldn’t believe how lush and verdant it was, like I was in a tropical rainforest instead of a Midwestern college town. I always pictured the Midwest as dusty and pale — cornfields, I guess, but I pictured them more like wheat fields? — and instead it was all green and wet and breathing.
I have such complicated feelings about the Bay Area — sometimes I want out, sometimes I feel I could never ever leave it. I’ve totally made this All About Me but what I really mean is I’m fascinated, both intellectually and for more practical purposes, by place and where people choose to live and why and how they feel about it and I am very much looking forward to reading your future sentences on this topic.
I’ve lived in the Midwest for all but two of my years, and the lushness of spring and summer surprises me every year.
it is SO GREEN! it’s just so green. that was the first thing we noticed when we crossed over into the midwest on our drive, was how green it all was. we’ve already had our first summer storm and it was lovely. it poured all afternoon today and that was lovely, too.
I guess we’re all always looking for home, right? I always thought it’d be new york for me, but i can feel my heart leaving this place. I think there is some west coast in my future, also some other side of the world.
But i hope that someday, like you, i will know were my heart wants to call home.
I hope you have a safe and beautiful journey
Safe travels!
Also, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-obsessively-detailed-map-of-american-literatures-most-epic-road-trips
oh that looks amazing!!
<3
oh god I love you and also those are some beautiful pictures
Thank you for this beautiful piece. And safe, happy travels.
Look at that fucking beautiful Trouble face up there.
But for real- just you wait until Abby takes you to experience the original Apple Butter.
That will make everything seem right.
Safe travels! I hope you have some fun along the way
I’m so happy for you, Riese. And jealous. Detroit has been my berkleystraddle for a few months now. And I’ve spent way too much time fantasizing about coding camps when I should have been thesis-ing, so I am very interested in hearing how the move works out for Abby.
Congratulations and best of luck! Give the midwest all my love.
Also, damn those housing statistics were scary. I had heard of the problem but not seen the numbers, so I broke the news to my GF yesterday that we will never live in SF. Then I told her that Malindo Lo said there are almost no lesbian bars anymore, it’s just hipsterville and she got over it pretty quickly.
I loved this. And congratulations on getting to here.
Beautiful.
Moving, changing, growing – these are my favourite things. Happy home-moving, saying goodbye, home-coming, all of it xxxx
This is beautiful! I hope ya’ll have a smooth move and safe travels.
If if ya’ll ever visit Bloomington hit me up. (Lol If anyone reading this is in Bloomington hit me up because my queer friends keep moving away.)
i am so down on the midwest right now, but your words picked me back up a little bit. thank you so much. i really needed it.
best of luck on your journey and in your new home! michigan is such a magical and beautiful state. my trip to UP was nothing sort of life-changing.
nothing short* of
Thanks for this beautiful geographic bio… Having just visited Detroit for the very first time, I feel compelled to cheer you on. Detroit is an amazing place to be right now. I just co-led a youth trip which included some service work in the Brightmoor community. Of course, one can always feel awkward about showing up somewhere totally different and pretending it’s even possible to help, but it was a great week. We were so welcomed into this special neighborhood that is rebuilding itself from the inside, yet totally welcomes the stranger in and says, thanks neighbor, for coming to help us do this. Gracious, lovely people are cleaning up the neighborhood and building butterfly flower gardens. Long term residents and new folks are taking over vacant lots and buying up foreclosed or abandoned houses and making organic farms and gardens, a Superhero Training Academy for local kids, hosting Wooffers and Americorps volunteers, and lending tools to each other and helping out and sharing mulch piles and holding a brand new Farmers’ Market on Fenkell in front of what is becoming a community kitchen and shared space. If you and Abby want fresh organic produce and to curb the onset of the dimness you write of, you could just go get yourselves a really cheap house in that neighborhood and become part of an amazing project of everyday resurrection. Bart Eddy founded the Detroit Community High School in that neighborhood too, and when the school boards put too much test prep into the curriculum, he found a way to move his hands-on training program to the backyard of the school and is now teaching kids to rebuild big trikes and put cool cargo boxes on them. There is so much to get involved in in Detroit! With all the dysfunction of city governance in the past, people have learned to create a new life for themselves amid the rubble. Now that there is a new mayor who is actually working FOR the city, things seem to be moving even more swiftly towards some new, great future. You probably know all this already, but my heart is still so wide open for Detroit–I am excited that you are moving there. I have no idea of the queer life in Detroit, but now that you are there, all will be well :) All the best for your new life! PS: best coffee: Chazzano over on 9 Mile!
Superhero Training Academy? Wait you just made me want to move to Detroit, that all sounds amazing.
I feel so much how this connects to my personal struggles with where to live, how to live, how to have space, how to succeed in getting what I want. Raspberry bushes and artichoke plants. I’m excited for you and your move; it sounds like good things are coming.
This happened to be featured on the Poetry Foundation site while I was browsing for lesson ideas and since there has been a lot of Midwest-love shared in these comments, I thought I’d leave it here:
Ode to the Midwest
BY KEVIN YOUNG
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/179814
This makes me feel incredibly hopeful about life.
Good luck on the move :)
This was so moving. I find your writing style very soothing, like it’s coming from somewhere inside my head or from somewhere inside my heart, maybe. Thanks for sharing with us, as always.
This is lovely, thanks for writing. My heart is in the Midwest too :-) I hope you love your new home!
“when she thinks about “home” she thinks about places that look like the places I call home.”
Thats about as beautiful as it gets.
I grew up in northern Michigan, near Traverse City, and that area will always live in my heart. I ended up settling in Wisconsin because I thought it’d be similar, but there’s nothing like Michigan. I miss seeing apples orchards instead of cornfields and sand dunes instead of dairy cows.
I’ll go back someday.
Thank you for this, it is so, so lovely. I went to college in Michigan and so much of who I am now started there and so many people that I love are from there that it feels as much like home as anywhere else to me now.
Also, Vault of Midnight comics in Ann Arbor is pretty comprehensive, from what I recall :)
This is so beautiful Riese. I’ve never gotten to live in the Bay Area but I visit often, and you’ve pretty much captured how I feel about it in this piece. Congratulations on this new chapter of your life :)
This was beautiful, and very timely since me and almost everyone I know is packing up and moving elsewhere.
OMG safest of trips, this is amazing. <3
Oh dang, what were you up to in Half Moon Bay? That’s where my fiancee is from :D
I’m so happy for y’all also Abby on one knee waiting for you to notice her is EVERYTHING. So happy for you making this journey. So happy for you. I love you so so so so so much.
I’m Bay Area born and raised and this piece touched me so much. For a while now it’s felt like time to leave, but every time I tell people they don’t understand why. But I’ve got a plan to move to the Midwest now with another a-camp queer and face my fear of the snow in search of more space to be me. Thank you for writing this Riese. I’ll miss seeing you in the Bay, and I know that something greater is out there for you.
Our first day of driving I’d check the comments on this post whenever I had a moment of non-driving (getting gas, eating, traffic) and it felt sort of poetic and wonderful, preparing to eschew the internet for ten days by witnessing a chorus of farewells and feelings from y’all humans who’ve come to mean so much to me. I can’t wait to write more and see what happens next!! I have SUCH GREAT PICS. Thank you, everybody all of you thank you!
This was so beautiful. It made me think of a line in an andrea gibson poem:
“You always said the word Michigan, like the sweetest prayer”
I’m sending only good vibes for the two of you and your new home (not so new now, but I’m only just catching up)