Living Dangerously

Just submitted this to my local writer’s community for publication and thought I’d share it here too….

Less than a month ago, I moved from a forest just on the other side of the coast range to the western edge of the North American Continent and nearly to the edge of the North American Plate, a few hundred yards from Nehalem Bay. My new home has something new—little blue tsunami street signs on the streets all around, and there’s even a big blue stripe painted onto the northern end of the street as it pulls up to the Fire Department where I’m scheduled to take my first Community Emergency Response Team class in a few hours. I can’t realistically avoid the idea that a big wave is headed my way.

This week I set out to find the latest data about the Cascadia Subduction Zone and its building tension. I picture it to be like a cap gun that’s got its trigger half engaged. Most of what I could find online is so dramatic, it sounds like doomsday mania, but it’s based in science. The area where I now live will soon be destroyed, much like the coastal towns of Japan have been throughout recent and ancient history. In fact, it’s likely that everywhere I’ve lived for fifty years will be changed forever and unrecognizable to me. Most people I know don’t like to think about this. It’s too unsettling, too sad. But since I lost my breasts to breast cancer, I’m facing harder things in advance. Since I lost my mom to breast cancer, I’m facing big losses well in advance. I wish that I had loved my body more when it was pure and whole, and I can’t believe how lucky I was to get so much time with my mom while she was fading away. Visiting Burning Man taught me how to appreciate beauty, dancing around it, even as it’s going up in flames. I want to turn my fear into something stronger, but more than that, I want to really drink in the beauty around me while I can.

My first response is to grieve the home that I’m starting to build here. Sometimes I even regret moving. How can I pour myself into a home when it will be so limited in it’s duration? And also, how can I not? Something you build to be beautiful that’s bound to be swallowed up is even more precious, in many ways. I hesitate to hang original art and family photos, and as I do, my spirit is saying goodbye to them—letting them go. “If you want to hang here, you will be swept away by the waves, you know,” I say to them in my spirit. And then I let them do it. I let them hang here, on the edge. Part of me urgently wants to pack them all in suitcases and take them to the other side of the state where they’ll be safe. But I know that I belong here, and they go with me.

Friends in Portland, McMinnville and Forest Grove think that I’m living on the edge, and I am. I’m living in the place I have always loved most—the place where my grandparents came to breath deeply and to find a personal, sacred kind of peace. A quiet walk on the beach, a wind that pierces any jacket, shades of gray and the sound of crashing waves that calm, as soon as you have them landing together in your eyes and in your ears. These are my inheritance. My friends say “Oh, that’s not for me. I couldn’t live there.” They mean, “I don’t want to live so dangerously. I can’t risk all that I’ve built up for myself like that.” I understand them fully, and I appreciate that view. But my spirit answers back: “Wouldn’t it be more tragic to miss it?”

There are only months or years left in which to know this place. I’m told I will survive if I count the minutes shaking and then walk briskly. I can even tote a large backpack full of food and water and warm clothes. I may have to walk over broken glass and big chunks of upturned asphalt. I may have to carry my dog. I may have to live in a tent for a few months with my neighbors. But I will be able to outwalk the waves. My life will not be taken. My things will. My memories of this place will remain, bitter-sweet, I’m sure.

I’m coming to terms with this. It’s harder than I thought it would be. But the sounds of the waking red winged blackbirds in the cedar trees make up for the hardness. My ability to walk to the river and to the beach any time, and to have sand between my toes on any day, at least for now, is a richness that surpasses any kind of wealth. My new neighbors seem to share this secret knowledge. We are already a community because we value something different and we don’t have to explain it to each other.

When I lie in bed at night sometimes I hear the furnace come on and I think it might be the deep rumbling of the earth. I’ll get used to it soon. This season is about adapting to a life that intentionally includes danger. Later I’ll be less aware and less worried. Later I’ll be less severe in my awareness of the losses that are to come. But I don’t think I’ll ever forget about the lasting part—the community—which like the blackbirds, will still be here when the homes and cars and trees are swept away. We will be together in new ways that will be even more lasting. That will be an experience that I have no frame of reference for yet. It will be an honor to get to experience that kind of community, if it does arrive in my lifetime.