My 600 Mile Mistake.

It’s raining in Portland. It’s not cold, though, which is unusual, I guess. I didn’t really get that much of a taste of it: I came flying over the mountains on a bouncy little plane, and as we descended the western facade of the Cascades, we plunged through the clouds.

I almost wrote, “Into a storm.” But that’s not true. Maybe I’ve spent too much time away in the last few years — I’m typically here for only a few weeks a year, anymore. In Minneapolis, when it rains, it rains, in gusting torrents that surge against the windows of your apartment and make it difficult to see as you drive. In Portland, it simply comes in a steady, meaningless thrum, like the too-loud music of your impolite neighbors. It rains, it rains, and then it stops for just long enough for you to grow cheerful and excited, and then it rains again. There’s an old joke told ruefully by Portlanders: it only rains twice a year in Portland, the joke goes. Once for six months, and then again for another six months.

I’m here on the back of the most ridiculous misadventure I’ve had in a long time. I’ve come to think of it as “my 600 mile mistake”: a few days ago, I piled all my worldly possessions — three months’ worth of clothes and musical instruments and general what-have-you — into my car, rounded up my cat from my parents’ place, where she’s been staying all summer, and set out to the east, across the high desert, headed for Boise, then Billings, then, theoretically, Minneapolis. I was feeling weird: it’s been a weird summer, and I was glad to be leaving the lack of structure and the boredom and so on, but I am heading back to a place that I do rather hate living in. Minneapolis is ugly and the weather is bad; the women don’t know how to flirt and the men can’t take a joke; the restaurants are boring and the terrain is flat. I don’t like it there. So I believe ambivalent is the right word for how I was feeling as the cat and I trucked out through the Drinkwater Pass and into the scrublands of Idaho: I just couldn’t decide what I wanted.

Maybe, then, what happened that night was indicative of some sort of total uncertainty of being. I got to Boise, checked into a cheap motel by the side of the highway, called my parents to report that I had arrived safely, and then set about hunting up my computer so I could watch something on Netflix or whatever. And I couldn’t find it. I found shell of an old, broken computer that I had shoved into my backpack. I found the six books I’m teaching this semester, each about half-read and marked up. I found Hana’s toys she never plays with, the bed she never sleeps in, the brush she doesn’t like me to use. I dumped out all the clothes in all my bags, I tore out everything from the back of my car, from baseball bat to life-sized Buffy cutout, and in the end I was reduced to real, literal tears of rage as it became clear that I didn’t have the thing. My computer was gone.

I can hear you, Dear Reader, as you smirk. Yes, the poor little rich boy cannot watch episodes of Scrubs on his thousand-dollar laptop. I agree, it is ridiculous. But there’s more to it than that, or at least I like to think so: on the hard drive of that computer (this one, actually, that I’m typing on now) was the only complete, extant copy of my 3/5-finished novel, the book which is already eight months overdue to my agent and which is meant to make up the thesis that gets my MFA and makes me, theoretically at least, employable in academia. I thought about calling my mother to ask her to ship the thing to me, but I just couldn’t risk the possibility that 19 months of work, the cause of at least two spiritual crises (one ongoing), would vanish through the rough treatment of a FedEx delivery guy who works that kind of job because it leaves him ample time to get stoned in the evening. So I loaded everything back in the car, and the following morning I set forth once more, back through the scrublands, over the Drinkwater Pass, and back to Bend, where I have been shiftless and depressed for the last several months. I found the computer sitting on the bedside table, idly burbling an NPR stream that I had set it to the previous day.

And so now I am in Portland, at the airport, and it’s raining. Is it weird that I get nostalgic for bad things as they end? I did not enjoy myself this summer. I worked hard — that was good — but I drank too much, smoked too much, spent most of it lying around, feeling fat and bored and depressed. And yet: as I watched Central Oregon slip away under the plane I took to get here, I began to feel sad. When I landed in this depressingly typical Portland non-storm, I really began to feel like I didn’t want to leave. Is that crazy, or what?

And the airport. I used to love airports, back in the pre-9/11 days when you could wander down by the gates and watch the passengers coming and going. But I don’t anymore. I’ve lived too much of my life in stasis, stuck between adolescence and adulthood; I don’t like to be reminded of this by such an obvious metaphor. I am becalmed, let me not be reminded. I would rather, I think, be driving back again, storming the Drinkwater and the scrublands for a third time, than be here, waiting.

You see strange things in airports. As I was walking from my gate of arrival to my gate of departure, I bumped into a woman I worked with in New York, years and years ago. We weren’t friends. We weren’t enemies, either; we were barely acquaintances: I worked upstairs, in the café, where things were fast-paced and I got to flirt with the girls (I was skinnier then, and more confident); she worked in the dark and studious basement. I couldn’t even remember her name when I saw her today. I recognized her because she looks a little bit like Snoopy the dog from the Peanuts cartoons, and as I was trying to remember where I knew her from, we made eye contact: oops. She recognized me, too. What do you say to somebody you spent two years studiously ignoring at every work party there was? It turns out that this woman and I said nothing — instead, we made strange, eyebrows-arched faces at one another, and moved on. We registered our surprise that such a token of our past would appear in such a strange place (she can’t have known I was from Portland — hell, she might be from Portland, but I wouldn’t know), and mutely agreed not to press our luck by trying to expand on the moment.

So now I’m in a bar. My flight boards in half an hour. I might be making another mistake, but I won’t know until it’s over.