Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.
- “East Coker”, TS Eliot
pine and pinot
I made the journey West for the first time to the Pacific Northwest, and more specifically, to Portland, Oregon. It's a land that carries something of America's barren beauty, the fastnesses of the wild — vast pine forests hugging the inclines of mountain slopes, the careening Columbia gorge with its multitude of waterfalls and colorful wildflowers, deserted wave-torn beaches along the jagged coasts. But Oregon also carries a pleasing sophistication in-between roughness and elegance, where gritty nature meets a cultivated palette. There's the rolling wine country of Willamette Valley's superior Pinot Noir; pioneers of third-wave specialty coffee the likes of Stumptown Coffee Roasters, and renown food truck, craft beer scene.
I'd gone to Portland to visit my friend Kirsti, a third generation Finnish-American. One late morning, with the sun blazing mightily overhead, Kirsti brought me on a 11 mile (17.7 km) walk. We hiked past Wahkeena Falls to Angel’s Rest viewpoint, a long stretch through the woods, looping north past Ecola and Weisendanger Falls, and finally ending at the famous Multnomah Falls that thundered in its two-tiered stream. Multnomah Falls is the most visited site in the Pacific Northwest, helped massively by its location beside the Historic Columbia River Highway —many visitors drive rather than hike to see it. More than 2 million people come annually to gawp at the white sheen of endless water, punctuated by a footbridge that hovers above the second drop.
During our walk, Kirsti pointed out the remnants of a wildfire. It had razed patches of pine trees to somber ash, leaving skeletal bones of white trunks piercing the sky. In 2018, a teenager hurled fireworks into this very area, igniting a blaze that raged for more than 2 months and 48,000 acres. But on this day, a wildfire seemed easy enough to overlook. From Angel’s Rest, we gazed at the impermeable dreamy blue of the Columbia river beyond, and the pine woods lush and thick across the gorge. The birds were silent in the noonday heat, but the wildflowers still lent their cheerful bursts of purple and red to line our path.
doorways, homesteads
Of late, I have been thinking of home and friends, and how the two share some inimitable bond. Many of my friends have bought their own property, calling these places home, by dint of mortgage or marriage. But I find myself still an itinerant of sorts, riding a wind that hasn’t ceased to blow. That’s not to say that sometimes, I want it to. That’s to say that I feel caught between wanting a place to call my own, and the flexibility of living untied to a single location.
Visiting Kirsti in her hometown was a revelation of sorts. We met 12 years ago in a third country, and by any typical measure, our friendship would have been improbable, if not impossible. We do not share the same nationality, ethnicity, or culture, and did not go to the same schools or workplaces. In many cases, such friendship simply could not be — too many variances exist where people usually find common ground. Except for the deep bonds of our shared faith, we would not have met; for that alone, she is my sister.
Despite the years, we had not visited each other’s homes. But this time, I met her parents, siblings, nephews and nieces, and in their rowdy familiarity I felt an ache of something beautiful. In their everyday conversations and gestures, I saw glimpses of how my friend is the person she is. In the morning, I'd have a coffee in their garden, and check out the chicken coop where a stray chicken pecked unhelpfully at the blueberry shrubs. I'd see if the tomatoes were ripe (not yet), and rub some fresh dill from their towering stalks between my fingers, inhaling that aroma and filing it away. This perhaps was a life thoroughly ordinary to her, but to my eyes, it was remarkable. I had grown up in such different circumstances: in a bustling concrete city, with no such plants at my fingertips — in any case, they would not have survived the tropics. Opening her home to me was more than mere shelter, it was sharing her life, one so foreign that there was no way I could have reconstituted it. (E.g. I wouldn't know how to keep chicken alive, or build a Finnish sauna in the basement.) Thus her friendship became a door to another home — one that I would never be able to buy, nor build with my hands — but am able to find peace, security, comfort and rest in.
another way to have a home
In this world, I think the prevailing notion of home is primarily a materialistic one. To "settle down" means to buy a house or apartment, fill it with furniture according to one's style and budget, live there for some time. If one makes more money, then rinse and repeat the process, acquiring more property, calling them homes to live in.
What if this is just one way to have a home? For home means surely more than somewhere to eat and sleep in; it possesses an elusive sense of belonging, perhaps even in a place I cannot legally call mine. What if this is another way — even, dare I say, a better way, to have a home through friendship? Our homes would then be filled with people, experiences, and joys beyond what we could have obtained from our singular, and thereby limited, selves. Then our priority would not be money-making, but relationship-building, for therein lie the keys to friendship, kinship, and homes.
I left Boston two weeks ago. It had been home for two years. I found friends that became family, and above all else, they were the hardest to leave. Since I was 19, I've spent half of my life outside the country I was born and raised in. Establishing my formative years of adulthood in foreign places has given me a craving that's impossible to shed: I've found home in places I could hardly have expected, and there's a part of me lodged there, that would be foolishness to ignore.
Yet for all these wanderings I know that there is a purpose, perhaps beyond what I can see now, but that I can trust. Sometimes I wonder if I will own a home in Singapore: when I see the rising property prices, I tend towards a sort of despair. But then I think of my travels, and friends around the world — and I know that this path too has been a tremendous privilege, a gateway to homes otherly defined, and I am filled with thankfulness.
