In the transient weather of June we drive west with a mission of some beauty. We are interviewing cities, searching out a new habitat before a new home. Houston, which had sheltered us these past months, will do no longer, the daily temperatures too frequently in the triple digits of the Fahrenheit scale.
Interviewing cities is a complex act, easily demonstrated by asking anyone about their favorite, or their home town. Out come adjectives in streams, beautiful, vibrant, alive, tiny, boring, progressive, hot, leisurely. Adjectives alone do not suffice, layered over with evaluations of the housing market and job prospects. “Cozy means tiny,” we are told, and “quaint means old and possibly broken.” “Oh I love this apartment, I’d stay if I could find work,” says a man moving to Alaska for its prospects. “Well the money is alright,” says another friend of his work, which is a remark as dense as a Craigslist apartment ad. Translated over a beer and into my ears, it means “I’d rather do something else.”
The picture, though, is less shady, as we have chosen June so as to see places at their best. Exactly as we moved to Houston in September, to feel the heat and welcome the gorgeous winter, so do we visit the west coast now, allowing the warnings of gloomy Februaries to bounce off of us in the sunshine. “This is the best weather yet this year,” we hear, in more than one location, and shrug. To inhabit a new place is to both accept unknown flaws as they emerge and continue to celebrate the reasons we had for arriving.
“You are lucky,” a friend says, “it’s not many people who get to chose a place they like to live.”
These words follow us for days on the long stretches of I-5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between there and Portland, and back. On I-80, heading again East to Colorado, we consider them. “I could live anywhere,” we both say, independently, and the truth is out. There are, we know, excellent reasons for inhabiting every place, as we have heard for Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Seattle. Even Houston, which we have resolutely left, casts a certain charm from it’s position on the Gulf Coast. Perhaps, with our homeless stature, we grow easier to please, able to imagine ourselves any place with a bed, or without. Yet in each location our interview follows the same pattern, rigorous. We scout friends’ apartments, are escorted to bars, restaurants and grocery stores, and then are cut loose, to discover what we will in the longest days of the year. Walking, car parked and bicycle boxed, we bounce from back streets to river and ocean, from expensive districts to ones even more so. By interviewing cities we are trying to discover what sort of people they hold, and what beauty. At the end of most days, footsore and un-fed, we have found people worth watching and people worth meeting, and neighborhoods we’d like another month in, or five. Though we have limited our search to a few of the nation’s most liberal urban blocks, the feeling which overwhelms us as we drive is of the world’s scale, and the small choices that make up our lives.
“Moved here figuring on one year, maybe a couple. Been here fourteen, and well, yeah, just look at it,” says a friend of a friend. He speaks of San Francisco, though the echo I hear is of the world, and of living.