It is here I feel most at home. Oil City. The worst name for the best place. No oil, no city: a developer’s name, a get-rich scheme. There is no imagination in the name only nature here, no boundaries or lines. We are one and the same. And that’s why I feel so at home here, on the Washington coast where the forest meets the sand, where I’ve joked to my kids you can bring my ashes. Out here there are no clocks or mirrors, I can blend into the tides and the changing light, the fog settling on the trees, the raptors sitting high looking down. I can forget myself, I can let go.

I’ve been coming here for 25 years now. The river lets into the ocean there, its source a glacier on a mountain many miles up the valley I climbed when I was a lot younger, a lot dumber. We brought our kids here, our best friends. We made memories and came to celebrate, to cherish this place.

Now the morning sun has poked through and it’s time to set my phone down, to resume. It’s so hard to just be but when you are, there’s nothing better. I wish I could be like that more often.

We leave camp in the morning but decide to keep our tent up and drive into town for lunch. At the diner in the town of Forks they are playing country music, a new kind of country that’s saccharine sweet, and the mood cuts across everything as the workers refill our ice water and jiggle clean silverware. And the lights are too bright with different styles of bulbs but everything’s alright, we know we’ll get a good meal.

I sit across from my daughter and realize one day all I’ll be to her is a memory so I do my best to be my best self to her. I can see the two of us sitting there laughing, smiling, sharing a piece of pie. It can be hard handling the past because no matter what there’s always loss. Maybe that’s what it means to be wise, to reconcile the past. It hangs on you.

I go back to that scene where we did the sand tray therapy as a family. There’s a room lined with figures of all sorts on the walls and everyone picks a few and places them on the table. The figures come in all styles and shapes; we talk through them to describe what they mean to us. I pick three. The third is the hardest, I choke up. There is something about my past I need to reclaim here, in this scene.

We may go to our graves and never know, that’s the knowledge. Maybe all we really want to do is just go home. Whatever it is about who we are and came to be, who we lost, it all starts and ends there, in our imagined world. We don’t own any of it and we can’t keep it. But we’re pained by this need to hold on, when what we should do is let go.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, journal writing, pacific northwest