The California Magnet

While I was back east last weekend, I stopped for a spell at Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau famously sequestered himself away from the world in the early 1800s to live alone in nature and embrace his introverted personality. He happened to pick one of the most beautiful spots in Massachusetts, not far from the city of Boston geographically but very much removed culturally, even to this day. It’s a gorgeous and peaceful spot that I have stopped at quite a few times in my travels from Boston to Western Mass, where I grew up.

Walden Pond

I never thought of myself as an outdoorsy girl while I was growing up in Massachusetts. Although I grew up in the woods and surrounded by lakes, rivers, ponds and beaver dams, I took those things for granted and dreamed of living in California—a place I had never been but had developed a fantastical idea about. California represented the opposite of everything I hated about Western Mass. In California, I thought, I would never have to shovel snow or carry firewood on a freezing winter day. I would never have to peel my frozen jeans from the clothesline and thaw them over the wood stove before the sun was even up, so I could catch the school bus for the hour-long ride to my rural regional high school. I was terrible at these things and resented having to do them. I wanted to live somewhere free of snow and endless, soul-crushing winters and long lonely bus rides. And I wanted to get away from everything I disdained about my life. Perhaps a little bit like Thoreau.

The house I grew up in

The first time I came to California I was twenty. My college boyfriend Paul and I took a month-long road trip the summer before our senior year. We camped and fought our way from Western Mass to Seattle, gave each other the silent treatment all the way down to Santa Cruz, then broke up somewhere around Kansas. While in California, we spent one single evening in San Francisco, at our friend Mike’s apartment in Haight Ashbury, where we smoked pot and airbrushed the wheels of Paul’s Honda in trippy dayglo colors for the trip back. California was exotic, full of courageous adventure, a constant party.

The Bridge of Flowers, in Shelburne Falls, Mass

The second time I came to California I was following my subsequent boyfriend, Kirby. He was finishing school at CCAC in Oakland, and I moved in with him for nine months before he graduated. This time, I found California to be a lonely place. The streets seemed too wide and empty, as did the sky. I felt unmoored. We moved back east again.

The view from a friend’s house in Charlemont, Mass

The third time I came to California it was for my next boyfriend, Kevin. By this time I had been living in Seattle and loved it there. But Kevin thought it was depressing, and I acquiesced. I moved in with him in Los Gatos, and we began a four-year process of trying to find any common ground. I desperately threw down anchors. I made a life in the yoga world, cultivated friends outside of my shitty relationship. Threw myself into hiking. Eventually we broke up, and I went on to work for a famous yoga teacher, who dragged me back to Massachusetts once again.

A hike I took in Zoar, Mass

The fourth time I came to California, it was also for a guy. But this time, it was to get away from one. I left the oppressive yoga teacher and retreated back to the Bay Area, once and for all. 

 Still, I don’t always feel like this is home. Only when I’m on my mountain, or out in the Headlands, or by the Pacific, or otherwise engaged in nature, do I feel totally at home here. Perhaps that’s how Thoreau felt, too. Perhaps that’s why he withdrew from the world to build a cabin in the woods by a beautiful lake and write. So he could finally feel at home.

Here’s the full excerpt from Walden:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”