The day takes shape slowly. Getting out the door just happens. Once you do the bus is ten minutes late. Then so is the MAX, but you don’t mind. You’ve been quietly extricating yourself from time. You wait in the chill beneath an interstate, listening to teenagers gossip. Staring at the spikes lining the steel beams beneath the roadway you think perhaps a bit too long about pigeon deterrence.

Boarding the wide slick new cars of the Green Line, you laugh occasionally at a Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me podcast and take another stab at the crossword you started two days prior. Disembarking in Lents, you pass a crop of green, swirling, solar panel-topped sculptures, walk beyond cold, new planters toward Foster Road and gaze on Lincoln’s giant face on the side of the New Copper Penny.

This landscape is neither foreign nor familiar, a domestic banlieue swept to the edge of the green movement’s model city.

The mission is murky at best. You walk west under another freeway, looking for a well-reviewed video game merchant you found online. It’s not clear why you went this far. You don’t play games often enough to make them a destination, though you suspect the entire point was to ask just such questions. Wedged next to a 7-11, the store is smaller than you imagined, as cluttered and cramped inside as the clamoring chaos of the intersection between which it’s squeezed. A man lingers at the counter, trying to squeeze pennies from the business as he sells old games. There are two many people in the store. Despite nostalgia stirred by the pile of old NES games all you want to do is leave. Asking a quick question of the clerk, he assumes you’re there to make a trade and for some reason won’t look in your eyes when he talks with you. Nothing in the store interests you enough to make a purchase.

Not quite ready for lunch, you head the other way beneath the freeway to see if you can find some sort of treasure to justify the journey. Past a barber shop and tiny antique shop and a handful of businesses closed for the weekend, all you can see in the distance is a long road.

You turn back toward the MAX line, but can’t ignore a taqueria down a side street. Inside, fake pepper and onion and garlic plants line the ceiling. Elephant statues raise their trunks from every surface behind the counter. They’re outnumbered only by ducks. Rubber ducks. Ceramic mallards. Wooden drakes and plastic hens. Ducks. Everywhere.

Everything else is as traditional as taquerias seem anywhere. Staticy TV stations play spanish-language music videos. Hand-written specials fill a dry-erase board. A dozen bottles of hot sauces and salsas sit on the edge of every table. The red, white and green of the Mexican flag on the wall mirrors the facade’s paint job.

You make your order quickly, and simply. Tacos. One pollo, one pastor, and one cabeza.

You sit down at a middle booth, ponder discoveries and road trips and that burning itch to travel. When you pull from your bag the latest issue of Harper’s, it opens to an excerpt from a writer who spent five weeks in residency at London’s Heathrow Airport. He describes arrivals. Expectancy. The cultural filters thousands of us pass through each and every day. Crunching tortilla chips and hot salsa you sink into the words, wishing you wrote that way, or that you could be there, documenting the everyday, spinning it into lush, rich language.

A family comes through the door, led by a girl of no more than seven hobbling on a cane. She’s dwarfed by the boisterous entry of her oversized relatives. They settle into the larger table in the middle of the room. You find yourself inching away as one sits near you, the slightly unpleasant odor of her exhaustion hitting your nostrils just as your meal arrives.

Embarrassed by your quick judgment, you let the discomfort pass and eavesdrop on their cheerful Saturday afternoon conversation. They plan errands. The mother recalls a long-passed uncle’s favorite foods. The boys and girls chirp. A man, a boyfriend or brother or son, sits at the head of the table and doesn’t utter a word. Not one. The women talk about an 18-year-old niece’s thwarted hopes to hire a male stripper. The $150 cost of the house-call is too high and she’s too young to go to the 21-and-over club in town with male exotic dancers. Mother and daughter and aunt discuss the situation as the younger kids laugh and joke, oblivious. It doesn’t seem anything is resolved, except the family’s decision to include tacos with breaded fried beef in their order.

You sprinkle a little too much habenero sauce on top of your second taco, the chicken. A middle-class couple walks in. The woman is cute, blonde, maybe mid-30′s and wearing a long, knit sweater-jacket. Her partner is about the same age, with a meticulously cropped red beard around his chin and a tight, pastel green t-shirt from another Northwestern metropolis. They ponder the menu and make their orders. They’re loud, somehow more so than the sum cacophony of the family, which somehow seems to have gained even more members in the fifteen minutes or so they’ve been in the restaurant.

You turn your attention away and sip your lime Jarritos. A waiter offers more tortilla chips. Though you decline, on each of your remaining five or six you carefully dab a few drops of a different sauce to find just the right one for your last taco. The name of the favorite escapes you now, but you sprinkle it carefully on the taco, only a touch so as not to overpower the pork.

Taking a bite, you sit back in the booth and notice another herd of elephant figurines in the corner.

Follow the Map | See the full photo collection

Why don’t I just write the story? Why didn’t I just report each day’s journey? Why can’t the words come out straightforward?

I don’t even remember when I wrote this. Presumably it took shape some time in the past month, as I’ve done something akin to settling into a new home, while I’ve dragged out my move from Los Angeles to Portland, moving no longer across hundreds of miles and instead creeping slowly, randomly across my new home town.

For weeks I’ve been plotting maps, tweaking Google Earth settings, uploading and arranging photo slideshows, transcribing audio, adjusting WordPress themes, reinstalling broken databases, sorting notes, scrawling in journals, browsing help forums, maintaining computer files, arranging furniture, pitching stories, visiting labs, reporting, attending meetings, filing emails, postponing responses, mailing postcards, paying bills, signing leases, opening boxes and otherwise transitioning through life, both digesting and avoiding my recollection of my journey from Los Angeles to Portland.

It has been a mixed blessing. Sometimes I kick myself for not writing enough, not writing when the trip was fresh, not writing soon enough, early enough. Other times I realize something that K.C. Cole told my class of science writers at USC on more than one occasion, something I found incredibly encouraging. “Even when you’re not writing,” she’d say, “You’re writing.”

I wonder what I’ve written as I’ve not been writing, and as I’ve fretted each day about losing the memories that so recently burned themselves into me, that brought me, simply, from there to here. I don’t want to wonder about it too much, though, lest I get caught up in the pointless tedium of writing and reading about writing.

What I can recall distinctly is a sentiment I felt somewhere between Lassen and Modoc counties, when I emerged from a forest to see sunlight like I’d never seen before swirling across the tree tops. Then, I uttered the following into the digital voice recorder I babbled at throughout my journey:

I don’t know how quite to describe what I’m seeing and what I’m passing through and how to record it for permanence. I don’t know quite how to capture the sense of the sun on the line of trees up high with the trees still in shadow beneath, the changing landscape from thick fog and patches of snow to only small patches of snow and these, what I think are lava beds, pouring over the side now in a landscape becoming more rough bit by bit. I don’t know how to keep describing everything that I’m seeing, the complete emptiness of it all, the complete soloness of my drive at this moment.

I guess what I’ve written is what you see here. What I’ve produced is what you’ve found. What I’ve created is in front of you and, quite possibly, it is changing just as quickly, just as astoundingly as the light shifting and scattering and spreading across those treetops in a faraway corner of California.

The Mother Lode

I didn’t pan for gold.
I didn’t climb aboard a vintage railcar.
I didn’t sip local wine.
I didn’t read Mark Twain in Calaveras County.
I didn’t track every place I ate.
I didn’t always talk to strangers.
I didn’t program my route in a GPS.
I didn’t tag my coordinates.
I didn’t blog.
I didn’t care how many bars I had.
I didn’t log my miles.
I didn’t measure my footprint.
I didn’t keep this in order.

I wandered.

I listened.
I ate.
I visited old friends.
I overheard bartenders gossip with regulars about workplace drama.
I ate seafood in the mountains.
I stumbled upon the Mother Lode.
I gathered pretty rocks at turnouts.
I read about vanishing hotel investors in newspapers stacked on front desks of their erstwhile property.
I crossed the San Joaquin Valley.
I explored lava tubes.
I heard shotgun blasts and ducks quacking.
I listened to cows moo and sheep bleat in mist-enshrouded riverside farms.
I played blackjack with drunk Iraq war vets at tribal casinos
I ate freshly baked maple bars.
I got waylaid in fog.
I gripped my steering wheel on mountain passes with no one around.
I lost touch as I rose and fell into the gray, freezing blanket.
I got bad directions from teens but had fun trying to make sense of them.
I took an entire day to travel 100 miles and still felt like I was rushing.
I fell asleep to tales of California’s geology.
I kept the road ahead of me open.

I wandered.

“Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.”

Roger Waters’ voice floats through my car, settling among my backpack, torn bags full of clothes and piles of randomness stuffed on the backseat — as they have been for days and will be for weeks longer. The Pink Floyd bassist and singer’s first breath emerges from the stereo just as I turn from Highway 49 in Jackson, California, to Highway 88, headed toward Volcano, headed toward black chasms, headed toward forests and storm clouds, toward gravel roads, turkey flocks, store shelves groaning with ancient merchandise and through the valleys and hills of Gold Country.

By the time the ethereal opening of “Shine on you Crazy Diamond VI-IX”ends I realize how the first time I heard the song was 13 years earlier, in the dark kitchen of a lone cabin on a small island at one end of a lake in a landscape much like this. That earlier time, a mid-summer night, I relaxed with fellow trainee camp counselors, eating fresh-baked brownies covered in melting vanilla ice cream, savoring how well the music mixed with each sweet morsel (unaided, despite what the scene I’m painting might suggest, by chemical enhancement), feeling a sense of calm community and simple summer joy as our young charges slept on the island’s nearby beach.

Those early camp years helped first stoke the allure of the road when a treasured few of those summers included drives back from camp to Southern California. I remember descending from the Sierras into a landscape of rolling, golden hillsides dotted with oak trees. I fantasized about growing up to buy a home in a fold of one of the remote foothill valleys beneath us, about lazing in the summer sun in the high grasses spread out forever below, about the bluer than blue skies of those mountain summers. After the road flattened we’d skirt the monotonous cities of the Central Valley — still yet to explode with sprawling growth — and stop for lunch or a snack in quiet, tree-lined Downtowns I didn’t yet know were reminiscent of the Midwest towns I didn’t yet know I’d pass through on cross-country treks between California and Ohio while I was in College.

Though our route varied each time we took the journey, at least once we kept to the backroads and returned home by way of Highway 33. On that journey, we crossed the San Andreas fault and soon afterward found ourselves at a remote shack somewhere between Maricopa and Ventucopa, in the southwestern reaches of Kern County. We walked inside for a Coke or a burger or just a chance to use the restroom. My mom noticed the small rack of postcards and thought about buying a few for her step-father, who she knew collected postcards and, more importantly, was an avid student of Kern County history. Rather than just sell the cards and see us off on our way, the person working the counter (I don’t remember if it was a man or woman) invited us to see their “real” postcard collection.

We were led out of the small cafe to a barn behind the building. It may have been dark and dusty. It may have been bright, with sun piercing cracks between the beams of the building’s aging frame. Whatever the case, it held what seemed like generations of family keepsakes. Really, it felt just as you’d imagine a barn turned storage shed in the so-called middle-of-nowhere might feel.

We were allowed and encouraged to paw through boxes and boxes of old postcards the family had received over the years, no matter that they featured the sentiment of their relatives and friends. We were fascinated, and I was enthralled by the hospitality of strangers, really something I never experienced in the alternative universe that was my exurban childhood.

That moment of spontaneous welcome embedded itself deeply. All at once it was a moment of connection, a moment of wonder, and a moment of adventure. It sparked in me a realization that beneath the surface of society, beneath our expectations, beneath all the rules and mores and standard ways of being there is another current, another way to live, another world.

More immediately, the experience taught me that there was so much going on that I had no clue about so close to my home. There, less than 100 miles away, was this quiet out of the way gas station. There was a back country no one ever talked about in this state so focused on coastlines and the urban landscapes spilling out of its core and across the edges of our nation. I’d later learn that all of Ventura County’s 10 incorporated cities together fill only roughly half of its geographical area, all of them gathered south of the Los Padres National Forest, a theme of dichotomy echoed in other regions I’d later live, and a contrast characterized by this country, by much of this world as a whole.

These journeys from camp to home and back each summer weren’t my only experience traversing the unseen landscapes surrounding my erstwhile home.

When I was even younger, my parents often dangled a tantalizing possibility for my brothers and I on our journeys to our grandparents’ house in Northridge: The back way. Though I suppose the route wasn’t so much our choice as my parents’ interest in avoiding freeway traffic, the “back way” has taken shape in my memory as an adventure along country hills with butterfly-inducing dips and tree-shaded stretches of asphalt. Though I know Highway 118 and the communities along it exploded with the cancerous growth of 80s, 90s and early millenial exurban expansion, I imagine my recollection of the journey is a bit more fanciful than it might have been had I grown up two or three decades earlier. Nevertheless, I remember the “back way” with fondness, now more so after this other alternate route has carried me from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon.

Waking Darkness

It takes the darkness to wake me up, the uncertainty, the presentness of the road after a meal.

I eat my first road dinner in Dos Palos, California at a small diner where beefy men in overalls talk about gang executions and tell Portuguese jokes and a young, expectant mother joyfully exclaims, upon reading the menu “They have a chili-cheeseburger!”

After dinner I feel reinvigorated by getting on these roads where I don’t quite know where I’m going. Where the San Joaquin Valley was getting exhausting, its endlessness has been replaced by a darkness through which all I can see are two white lines, some yellow dashes over and over again and a ditch off to the side. The glow of my headlights makes this valley seem so much more interesting. I have no idea what’s around me, although I suspect it’s a lot of nothing.

I like to imagine it’s a lot of something.

I’ve come to understand that there is so much so-muchness of this state, and of this country by extension. These roads must crisscross forever in this country, in similar ways, in different amounts of repair, I’m sure. So many resources. So many things that we just don’t conceptualize in our everyday life.

Sometimes, the repetition really does feel like something. As I roll through the town of Newman, California I think it’s just another main street, just like all the others I’ve passed through today and just like all the others that fill this country. Two story buildings, a grid, and struggling businesses half-filling storefronts for blocks around. But here, the lights are on. People are strolling the streets. An old theater marquee downtown announces the next showing in somewhat cryptic language: “Sneeky Pete is the word on the street.”

Sometimes, the words just come out, as they do when, suddenly, the Yosemite Highway turns a corner and reveals Lake McClure below me. On a day when I woke on the opposite side of the San Joaquin valley, still uncertain what direction I’d head, I delight in the serendipity that led me to catch this sight. I utter the following into my voice recorder:

It’s the discovery of a lake clearing like this that makes the decisions to take random roads and wander all the more worthwhile, it’s the not knowing what you’ll show up to, it’s the uncertainty of endless miles of empty farmland and repeating grids and the hypnosis of the road to suddenly let it explode in geology and weather and climate and forest and all of it, to see it, to see it fall apart, to see it recreate, to see it evolve and rise from nothingness into somethingness, that’s why uncertainty works.

Later, I have other, similar revelations and as I listen to my tape recorder I find as the journey progresses the utterances become longer, more contemplative, far less about the every detail of what I saw and more about the what I experienced, what I felt. I catch a scent of pine needles as the sun sets while I walk to Lower Yosemite Falls on my very first visit to the national park. Thoughts take shape and I record them minutes later back at my car:

It’s days where the story is everything you see. It’s days where sight takes a back seat to sound and smell, and the way what you hear, and what you smell, and even still what you see changes so rapidly by having and not having people around.

I also contemplate the transformative effects of the road, as I do somewhere between Grass Valley and the once-secessionist settlement of Rough and Ready:

This is like a grand reboot of my brain. Like someone hit the Nintendo that is my body to make it get its picture again (though I know the preferred method of my childhood for fixing an NES was to blow on its connectors). That’s somewhat what I feel. Um. Anyway. Here I am and I probably missed a few turns on my little record, but whatever, that’s part of my journey too, not saying, not remembering to record everything.

Theroux and Friends

“All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission …”

-Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (As cited in Lapham’s Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 3, Summer 2009).

In the depth of winter, while the year is still an infant, I descend into a cave beneath Lava Beds National Monument. My footsteps echo across chilly cavern walls. In half a day at the park I’ve seen all of six or seven people and none for hours.

As I surround myself with quiet and rock, the thought cascading through my head without a name begins to leave its impression. I feel some inkling of what I imagine a walkabout to feel like. I know I am traveling in a car, but when I get out and about, as I have at the Lava Beds, or even when I wander the streets of some small, until-then-unknown-to-me, town, there is some sort of reconnection happening, a thought of the vastness of the world. My place in it is such a tiny part, but it’s just one mechanism, one moving mechanism, not in a hopeless “I feel tiny” way, but in a “this is all so grand” way.

First, I realize how grand and huge California is, and then I ponder the country, and how thoroughly so much there is in this place. Of course, then the how much there is in the world is my next thought, and then I consider the universe, and I find that constant constantness, the immensity of so much to be refreshing in a way. It’s not depressing. I don’t have a sense of ineffectiveness.

I wonder if that is an indication that I am losing some sort of need to have control, to have an impact on the world. Instead, I find myself accepting my impact as it is, at is now. I find myself accepting my place as it is now, that this is me and I will make the connection with the world that I will make with the world.

Though I’m rewriting this now, I was saying this to my tape recorder. One of the things I assure myself of — though it’s less a denial as it might seem if you are reading this — is that I’m not trying to convince myself of anything and I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything. Of course, I know I’m not accurately capturing the definition of a walkabout. It is just a moment’s thought, but one stoking my curiosity.

Anyhow, I wonder whether the challenge for me, or the thought to consider when I finally arrive in Portland, is how to interpret the place, if it will feel like a big rushing city to me (it does). How can I both carry on the sense of peace that I have but also an acceptance of the city as it is and of my place in that city as what it will be, and not feel the need to somehow run to it, to run to this peace, to this sense of calm, to all of this.

I’m not trying to seek an answer to that, I’m just curious.

Meanwhile, I told my tape recorder, I’m very curious about my ability now to get this out here on this recorder without stopping, you know, and wondering what it would be like if I were trying to write these very same thoughts I’m trying to write at this moment, um, or trying to speak at this moment. If I was typing on a typewriter or if I was on a computer or by hand, would it be this stream of consciousness? I doubt it. It would most likely involve backslashes or deletions or scratchouts, depending on the medium I use. But, you know, I am speaking here openly. Then again, I’m speaking here, like on, you know, uncooked, or something, um, and, and, as much as I think I value honesty and openness and just stream of consciousness I do wonder though if, you know, just making a sea of words and thoughts that you haven’t contemplated also doesn’t work, but clearly I’ve been contemplating all of this for days now. Anyhow, that’s that.

I wonder what it is that changed my mood from recording the route to talking and thinking out loud and having ponderous thoughts later in the trip. What was it? Was it that they needed cultivation? Was it that it was more isolated? Was it that they had been cooking? Was it the landscape? Was it fatigue? Was I transitioning slowly in personality?

Sometimes you just roll through downtown. Sometimes you miss the downtowns, diverted by frontage roads and business bypasses while you’re not paying attention. Sometimes you miss entire towns. Sometimes you just don’t get to do everything you want.

Sometimes you speed through stories. Sometimes you forget to tell others. Sometimes you leave out the details. Sometimes you choose to keep them to yourself, simply because they are yours.

When a friend of mine recently wrote about her attempts to chronicle her own recent journey to Africa, she discovered she was:

“disappointed I couldn’t capture in real time all I was seeing and doing, so friends and family could travel vicariously alongside me … But a deeper, larger part of that disappointment came from the worry that without writing about them in a way that was publicly and immediately consumable, those experiences — my experiences — would somehow become more fleeting and less significant, something that could be put away, set aside, forgotten.

So really, it was about me, and my own fears.

And with that realization, the pressure evaporated. I traded my traveling companion‘s sleek MacBook for the solid, hard-bound journal a good friend gave me the day before I left. I was my only audience, the keeper of stories for the sake of memory, with no obligation to enlighten or entertain.”

Likewise, I was my only audience for my journey. I was the only one taking it, and this was the only time in my life I’d ever quite have this experience (though I did need a close friend’s reminder that this was the case, and that I needed to go easy on myself about what I’d write about it and that this was my story, mine to record how I saw fit).

A Sort of Homecoming

I traverse a mile or so of the rainy border between North and Northeast Portland, passing more buildings and more cars, and, presumably, more people than I had in a week on the road. I swing a gray coupe packed to the brim with bedding, boxes and unfolded maps into the last parking space of a former funeral chapel.

Now a pub, the building’s front room is quiet, somewhat eerily so for a Saturday evening here near one of Portland’s hipster hotbeds. I pass the empty bar on my way to a back room, where I find my brother and his wife in a crowd jointly celebrating her and a friend’s birthday. I greet my sister-in-law amidst a crush of mutual friends and beer and food and presents. Hungry and overwhelmed by the activity, I duck out to the main bar with her own brother. We try our luck ordering from a clearly overstretched wait staff, catch up over chocolate stouts, chicken wings and rice bowls until another friend of ours shows up and greets us. She steps close and hugs me warmly.

“Welcome home,” she says, echoing a sentiment others had already expressed to me.

“I told you you’d be back,” this friend continues.

Initially confused, I begin to recall how more than seven years ago, when I first left a temporary stay in Portland, she’d insisted how hard it would be to return to the city. As my memory of the conversation slowly returns I remember how I’d thought then that I wasn’t even certain I would come back. In the years since that first stay I’ve skirted the city, but barely been here, though I’ve really barely been anywhere.

Now, here I am. Home.

But the road, my other home — so often my home — still lingers. It’s not just the car packed to the gills. It’s the sensation that I’m still observing my surroundings. I’m still taking them in. I’m still thinking of how different I feel since I started my trip, how much slower my breathing is, how little I care about where I need to be when and how I’ll get there.

Later, when I leave the pub and pull into a rainy streetscape, the colors of an intersection’s traffic lights splash across my windshield. My radio is tuned to some random station I’d settled on as I drove to the pub earlier in the evening. A pop song about another city scatters through the night and into the corners of my car.

These streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire you.”

As irritating as the repetition of Gotham’s sense of its own centrality may be, I detach myself from the geographical reference and think about how the song itself has bookended my trip. I first heard it in the staticy haze of a distant radio station, the sort of station you only listen to on the road, the kind so lost in static that, no matter what it plays, you strain to hear it struggle through the static, hope for even the most vapid pop to overcome the static and arrive intelligibly into the car, perhaps only because it’s seemingly unattainable.

That first time I heard it, on a dry straightaway stretch of Highway 33 in the Cuyama Valley, at the remotest of corners of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, I heard the song at the first moment of radio alienation. It’s a term I used for that moment I realized I was finally escaping Southern California’s gravitational pull (though not before I’d also hear, for the first mind-baffling time, the utter jaw dropper that is Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex”). I passed a shack referring to itself simply as “The Place” and advertising homemade pies and other homemade food and knew I was far from big lights and any streets but the one I sped across, though I was already starting to feel brand new.

Hello/Goodbye

When I made it to Portland I felt like I was stumbling into town. I knew the journey was over. I rushed around Mt. Hood, unfazed by the snowbanks after days in the Sierras on far smaller, far more remote roads. By then I was exhausted and didn’t really know how I’d enjoy it by myself for half an afternoon, and figured I’d be back soon enough to enjoy the mountain fully. I made one last meandering stop at Smith Rock, but I could see Mt. Hood and knew Portland and the rest of my life was on the other side. For the first time, I felt a bit frazzled, though there had been few calamities during the trip. I never locked myself out. I didn’t get pulled over. I had felt safe and unhurried throughout the trip.

That morning, though, I woke up in Bend at McMennamin’s Old St. Francis School with a strong sense the trip was over, even though I only arrived in Oregon the day before. It didn’t help that I’d lost my wallet (Though a housekeeper found it in my room, despite my numerous searches and additional help from an attentive front desk clerk). Though a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme, it felt so clearly like an indicator of the journey coming to a halt. Feeling a bit strung out from the road, I didn’t very much want to deal with the variety of hassles involved in replacing my wallet’s contents when my home address and other details were as up in the air as I was.

Really though, it was just time to get to Portland even after I had more and more slowly made my way out of California.

Where I set out thinking this trip would allow me to discover the remote parts of a state that I would soon be calling home, I arrived in Portland realizing that the drive was not my discovery of an Oregon new to me. It was a sendoff to California, even if that sendoff included discovering parts of the state that hadn’t been part of my life until this journey. As the world comes back into focus, I realize I have much more time to discover the rest of Oregon. This was my chance to say goodbye to California.

I arrived in Los Angeles late Monday afternoon. As I landed, I watched the sunset turn the Santa Monica Mountains that golden hue they turn in late fall, caught glimpses of the skyscrapers along Wilshire Blvd., marveled at the sheer everywhereness of it all and traced a line from the Hollywood sign down to the corner of Hollywood and Vine, where, nearly a century ago, my great-great-grandfather’s decision to rent a barn on his sprawling ranch to two young filmmakers for $250 a month might have made much of the city’s role as a media mecca possible. The tableau pulled at my heart, one more landing in a city I’ve called home for only a year, but which has been in my blood for five generations.

For years, though, as I hinted in a post last Spring, I’ve danced with another city. Over the past week, the motions became more certain, thanks in part to the energy I tapped into at the We Make the Media Conference at the University of Oregon’s Turnbull Portland Center.

Thoughts about the future raced through my mind as my plane descended. Some of these thoughts are familiar to the world at large. Some are personal. When it comes to Saturday’s conference, I’ve had to take some time to digest, get back home, and prepare my next steps. They include returning to Portland very soon — and more permanently — in part to join the community of mediamakers who emerged at the conference.

Finding Community

I want to reiterate this word “community.” For whatever it’s worth, however hokey it might be dismissed as, I found community on Saturday. In a way I haven’t been able to say for quite some time, I’ve found my people, at least my people for this moment. Perhaps I’m just famished, but I just haven’t found these people in Los Angeles.

I’m emphasizing this for a reason. For all the critiques I have of We Make the Media, and all the many more already so eloquently articulated by other thinkers (Click here for a list of the reflections I’ve found, some of which I’m responding to here), I’m stunned by how, a few days later, I remain invigorated by the event. Like Abraham Hyatt and many others, I left the event quite drained, but now feel energized. Though the event may not have gone in the direction organizers hoped, perhaps it was a success anyhow.

A sort of “sub-organizer” of the event, Hyatt was the first to bring it to my attention. I know, as others do, that he put a great deal of work into both making it happen, as he does in other efforts cultivating Portland’s media community. So I looked to him first for his dissection of what went right and what went wrong at the conference.

Despite my hopefulness, significant concerns emerged. As much as I felt I found community, I was as troubled as others about the limits to the pool from which I could derive that community. As Hyatt admitted, conference organizers may not have made enough of an effort to reach out to community media or to media that “reflected the racial diversity of Portland:”

“We were lucky to have KBOO come on as a sponsor a few days before the conference. But what if that had happened a few weeks before? Who else could we have invited? And how would that dialogue have shaped the planning of the event? If we’re going to create a media organization that breaks out of the old news models, we need to be including people from outside traditional media outlets.”

I don’t think I’ll write much more about this issue right now. Hyatt acknowledges the problem succinctly, and others have addressed racial diversity far more effectively than I may be able to. Please do continue to discuss the topic. I want to be part of a growing, inclusive media community and I want to know how I can work to enable that inclusiveness.

Stopping to breathe

What I do feel comfortable discussing is technology, connectivity, and other forms of inclusiveness. Many have discussed the “Twitter corner” that emerged — largely for reasons of proximity to power outlets and the wi-fi access-granting powers of Suzi Steffen — as if it was a breakaway counter-conference. That’s not entirely true, and I’ll get back to that point.

Early in the day, Steffen complained on Twitter about the lack of a projection of the live Twitter stream that emerged at the event. I agree that a common Twitter hashtag (which, of course, became #wmtm) and information about wi-fi access should have been announced before the event. The digital element of the conference felt like an afterthought, and it’s rather astounding that an effort largely inspired by nonprofit journalism endeavors in Minnesota and San Diego, Web-only endeavors, did not have online elements that didn’t feel like afterthoughts.

That said, I don’t know if I agree with Steffen’s concerns about the lack of a projected twitter stream. Yes, it may have kept the entire crowd informed about the discussion happening online, but I wonder whether this is a great example of how Twitter should be a platform people choose to participate in or not (During an early Twitter exchange about recording and documenting the online discussion and the event in general, Steffen convinced me of the importance of being able to opt-in to or out of the online discussion.

Could one opt out of a projected stream, though? I’m not certain that really would be possible. Perhaps some of my fellow tweeters might argue that’s fine, that it just offers a different way of presenting what’s taking place at the conference and eliminates the tenuous authority we place on anointed speakers. It would change the event’s dynamic. I haven’t been to an event with a live Twitter stream yet, so I’m speaking on conjecture, but I feel the conversation might get too disjointed and too distracted.

It was worrisome enough to me to see how caught up I got in the Twitter stream myself. What would happen if every participant was having fractured, interrupted conversations, if the speaker responded to every tweet, or some of them, or if she didn’t respond to any? How would that affect the event’s dynamic? I think it would become far more than a stream. And again, that’s fine, but I think this is a point where we need to acknowledge that just because we have the ability to discuss and comment and report everything that happens, doesn’t mean that we should.

Sometimes even if we have tools available to us, tools that are incredibly useful in certain contexts, we don’t always have to use them. I have a car. It’s comfortable and it goes quite quickly from point A to B, even taking traffic into consideration. But I’m often much happier, much better served, by reaching my destination on foot, by bike, or via public transportation, specifically because each of those methods offers its own way to experience the journey. While I have the car (and no, not everyone has the luxury to choose), I don’t have to use it every time I leave my house. Just because we have technology doesn’t mean we must use it, and I think that point was missing from discussion at the event, and it’s often missing from our discussion of the “future of journalism.”

During the event,Courtney Sherwood announced on twitter that she was

“Not enough of a multitasker to keep up w/ #wmtm live tweets. I’d rather listen to speakers than read other folks’ summaries and debates.”

I agreed in tweets here and here, in which I argued:

“I think it’s worthy to ask if we should examine this need to cover everything as quickly as possible,”

Sometimes I think we need to stop and breathe, let the world happen, digest it, and report on it when we’re ready, if we’re ready.”

As we fret and flail we risk forgetting about the words we’re stringing together, the information we’re reflecting upon and sharing, and the stories we’re telling. Whether breath on our lips, ink spread across a page, keys hammering into a ribbon or electrons running through a circuit, I’m concerned with how thoughts are captured, contained, altered and disseminated.

This perspective was even acknowledged by a tweet from Portland Phlush during our small network discussion, the same discussion that evolved into talk of an incubator (more on that very soon).

What’s crucial, of course, is that Sherwood opted for herself to disconnect from Twitter, as I noticed many others did as they closed their laptops (for what it’s worth, there were plenty of people on laptops not sitting in the “Twitter corner”).

T.A. Barnhart, decidedly not a journalist, may have said it even better than I could (friends from the Annenberg Specialized Journalism program will recognize this as a far more articulately-worded form of the “different colors of paper” argument I often made last year):

“In the end, my real work is no different than an opinion writer of a century ago: reading, thinking, writing, responding, and then more of the same. I get books from the library, bookstores — and Amazon. I read newspapers and magazines — online. I correspond with friends, politicals, colleagues, etc — via email, Twitter, websites and even by phone and in person. I write notes on paper, and I write notes on my laptop, which is not really functionally any different than typing up a few pages of notes and storing in a manilla folder. I use print-outs to proof longer drafts. And I publish online, although I have begun the process of creating an actual book.”

Despite my reservations about the projection of a twitter stream, about the distraction they might cause, I know something else. These sorts of thoughts, these backchannels have existed in one form or another since as long as there have been conferences, really since as long as we’ve had the ability to communicate (see my article here about how scientists at USC are exploring the crucial role of backchannels in interpersonal communication).

Though i agree with Hyatt that the resistance to technology by some of the core organizers was disappointing, I differ with his claim that “technology is journalism.” I’m left wondering, “how so?” He mentions code and reporting tools and new ideas, but I don’t see how at least the first two are anything more than tools. Yes, new technology does open up new opportunities, but those opportunities are absolutely dependent upon what one does with the technology, what stories one tells, what messages one delivers. New technology still requires vision, tenacity, creativity and curiosity.

False divisions

Unlike Hyatt, I don’t agree that “the corner” had no outreach or communication with the rest of the groups offering proposals at the conference. One of the misconceptions about “the corner” that has now been widely challenged on other blogs was that we were participating in an us-vs-them mentality. I think the fact I delivered via Twitter and this very Web site my own statements above about resisting the need to constantly stream information suggests that technology can be used in many ways. Technology by its simple existence as technology does not necessarily alter what’s told.

Anyhow, I grew to enjoy “the corner,” despite my dabbling with slow journalism, precisely because it was welcoming, inviting, and open to divergent perspectives and challenges. Though it didn’t emerge from there, I don’t think the idea of a content-neutral incubator that would serve as a physical and virtual space for journalists took off among this crowd because we saw it as a radical alternative to the other proposals. Instead, it succeeded because we perceive it as a space where journalists of all forms, in all mediums, with all opinions about where journalism should go and how it could be defined could find a place to work. It is by nature encompassing. Such a space would be what we make of it, not what it makes of us, and it would cater to the evolving, changing needs of independent freelancers (or, with a nod to Michelle Rafter, entrepreneurial journalists).

As Jen Willis — who participated in the same small group I did — put it

“Even in our break-out sessions — I was in one about smaller, online networking groups — the ideas and comments floated in Twitter were often better, more focused and more forward-thinking than what was happening ‘verbally.’”

Indeed. We were so caught up with process and rules and confusion over what we were supposed to be doing in that room that those of us who had an idea of what should be done, or at least what we wanted to see, didn’t wait for it to happen. We took to Twitter to begin developing our own future and to further articulate many of the ideas that would, eventually, form the basis for the incubator proposal.

There really has been a false dichotomy set up between an “old guard” and young technophiles in some of the responses to the event. Responding to (and defending) the event was Ron Buel, who, disappointingly perpetuated the idea that there were two camps at the event (Buel’s commentary is also available on OurPDX):

“The Old White Guys who believe in traditional journalistic values – thinking, reporting, open-mindedness, ethics, that kind of old-fashioned thing – and technology-hip independent young journalists twittering away as the discussion ensued, even though it is they, not the Old White Guys, who will make the new reality of journalism happen in the digital age, or not.”

This statement saddened me. Before the conference I enjoyed engaging both Buel and Barry Johnson on the discussion papers they prepared. Though I was critical at times, I welcomed the effort they put into the event’s preparation and wish more people had become involved in the pre-event discussion. Such involvement — which might have required better publicity and outreach before the event — might have prevented some of the aimlessness and confusion at the day’s outset.

Nevertheless, Buel’s statement highlights exactly the attitudes frustrating to many journalists and conference participants. Categorizing us as either protectors of “traditional journalistic values” or “technology-hip independent young journalists twittering away” illustrates the core misunderstanding of our own industry. We are not either/or. We weren’t at the conference and we aren’t in life. We are not either relics of the past or dreamers of the future. We are far more fluid than we have been cast, and I think Buel’s doing so shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the very people he wanted to involve at this conference. Moreover, he takes far too many assumptions into his piece. Why does he continue to insist that we “are not worried about what will happen to our democracy?”

<>Again, the proposed incubator offers an example of just how concerned we are about democracy and the quality of our journalism. We are proposing a space where we can cultivate professional skills, nurture community, constantly improve and respect individual independence and diversity simultaneously.

Buel instead dismisses the incubator as a “neat” idea. Actually, it’s more than a neat idea. It’s also not wholly unrelated to championing “traditional values” and it is not unworkable. What we are discussing is setting up a space to develop core strengths among journalists of all stripes. We have concrete plans for next steps, just as do the other two work groups Buel claims are filled with old folks (though I think each is more broadly supported than he characterizes, as the incubator is as well).

It wasn’t just the old guard (to use a characterization I just rejected) who created this false dichotomy. Many of the tech savvy participants did as well, though I think there may be issues of muddled communication here (and perhaps with Buel and Steve Smith and others who were more resistant to the Twitter corner too). For example, Steve Woodward describes a “cultural gulf” in his discussion of the “futures – plural – of journalism.” I agree with Michael Anderson, who responded in Woodward’s comments area, arguing that despite the overall quality of Woodward’s “we should all be cautious of the stiffening narrative that the Young Twittering Turks have some monolithic point of view as a group.”

Continuing the discussion

These sorts of discussions — not just the event itself, but the chatter in blogs reflecting on the event, and in their comments sections, and on impromptu listservs and in “the corner” — should be happening everywhere. They very well may be. As far as I can tell, they are not happening here in Los Angeles, despite the presence of countless, passionate, hungry journalistic minds. Sure, Annenberg hosts a number of speakers and events related to the future of journalism, and similar events take place across the city, especially thanks to the efforts of the Society of Professional Journalists’ local chapter, the Los Angeles Press Club and other groups (JellyLAand, to a lesser extent, Blankspaces andWhereMMM are working to change the way professionals collaborate and work with one another).

Though I’ve certainly found passionate journalists here, I can’t think of a consistent group, an energized core. Those events that do bring journalists together feel more like pits of desperate networking, reflecting an L.A. attitude I’d normally dismiss as mythology. I haven’t felt a part of something more interested in promoting the community and the field of journalism than individual career fates perhaps since I was at Annenberg. Even there, those of us who cared had to fight against the passionless vapidity of marketing ourselves, of style over substance, of figuring out how to sell our product instead of cultivating the product we hoped to sell.

But I haven’t found the core, creative passion that electrified the air at WMTM. Again, maybe I’m not looking in the right places, but I can’t feel it happening. Instead, we watch grudge matches (Though insightful, well-argued grudge matches)debating what happened to the LA Weeklyand fret about the seemingly perpetual implosion of the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps I’m just heartbroken I can’t get a foothold in a city that means so, so much to me. Nevertheless, as much as I worry about L.A., I’m so excited about the possibilities in Portland.

Again, I turn to Jen Willis:

“We came together as professionals interested not only in creating content, but in helping to craft and guide how that content is delivered. I’d like to think we showed up because we’re proactive and optimistic, and because we honestly give a damn about what’s happening (and not happening) in the media today.”

Really, there are possibilities. It’s silly that some people were disappointed that the conference didn’t reach concrete conclusions. No one should have expected the event to save journalism in Portland or elsewhere, though that seems to have been the attitude of some (though certainly not all) of those critiquing the conference. In any event, something was accomplished. Though there was a tremendous amount of wasted time and frustrating breakdowns in communication, the energy that emerged behind the concept of a news incubator is encouraging. I’m disappointed I can’t make it right back to Portland next week for the Digital Journalism Portland/SPJ social hour to be part of the first next steps in making it happen.

Other reflections on We Make the Media

For more nuts and bolts breakdowns of the conference, different perspectives on its implications, and other thoughts about the direction of journalism and the media in Portland, please read these other blogs, listed in no particular order (my apologies to those I’ve left out, but this is what I’ve seen so far). I highly recommend reading the comments on these posts too, as they are incredibly insightful. Oh, and please comment on this piece too!

• Still A Newspaperman » Blog Archive » “We Make the Media” in Portland
• Still A Newspaperman » Blog Archive » Seeking a better term than ‘hobby journalist.’
• WMTM followup: A Portland journalism incubator, and more | WordCount
• My views on WeMakeTheMedia event – after the hangover | Joe Wilson
• We Made The Media: What went right — and wrong | abrahamhyatt.com
• 360 Convos: Building a new model may require listening
• Steve Woodward: The futures — plural — of journalism | Nozzl Media, Inc.
• Will the touch tablet save professional journalism? « Mastering Multimedia
• Transcript for #wmtm – What the Hashtag?!
• The Next Journalist: We Make the Media
• What I think happened at #wmtm (We Make the Media conference) « ran dum thots
• civics21.org: on cities and citizenship in the 21st century
• We Make the Media « Reporting 1 Blog
• Update: ‘We Make The Media,’ but who’s ‘we?’ | Oregon Media Central

It’s late, but I know the way it would look in the sunlight, the circuit boards stretching between the foothills and the sea, the life filling every crevice. But I am somewhat comforted by these thoughts. They distract from the sensation of my ears recalibrating to the shifting pressure through our descent.

Where I previously pondered how nothing spurs the familiarity I feel arriving in Portland, I suddenly realize I could say, looking at this ocean of electroluminescence, that nothing could ever recreate or replace Los Angeles. In ways I never realize until these final moments marveling as the city spreads across the horizon as far as can be imagined, it seems unconstrained and inimitable.

I am convinced in this moment that the city is limitless, recreating itself as it crawls across the landscape. Too many discount it as a disjointed whole lacking some maturity shared by the world’s great destinations. But it is only here, it is only this sea of stories crashing upon each other, glittering from the ripples in the water. As the waves draw near I know I am here, only here, perhaps realizing only further that home means far less than a mindset. It is just another constructed identity.

Later, on the Fly Away, even in the dark, even among the all-male handful of riders, I reconnect with Los Angeles. The creaking, vibrating bus brings me back, even though I can see little out the windows as we drive up the Harbor freeway in the middle of the night. My thoughts earlier may have landed in Portland, but now I am taking off to this next step, to a broader sensation, to travel, to movement, to a world outside my doors and beyond my routine.

Maybe i spoke too soon about home, about how it is defined, about what I’ve internalized. Perhaps when I discussed the comfort of Portland I was more right than I thought about what it meant to be home, that it wasn’t a place or time, just a sensation, a way of life, a way of knowing that all other moments spread out from this one, here.

I wrote this piece more than a week ago, still longing wistfully for Portland but certain upon taking off through the streets of L.A. there was more to learn about the city that beckoned my entire life. How could I now desire Portland when I knew I had barely scratched L.A.’s surface?

I struggled publishing any of this, as the week evolved and I tumbled back into my consciousness and fumbled through my everyday, trying to make sense of it, not knowing how any of these cities I stumble through fit together. I struggled with this split feeling, the sensation that all too often I feel these days, that leaves me paralyzed, not sure how to take off. The deep split. Do I try to bridge these chasms, learn to live on one side, or remain forever at the edge, contemplating a leap?

This matters to me because I struggle with what this site might become and what it could be. I am studying journalism and practicing it, and yet I have no energy left for it here, where I declare myself to the world. Likewise, I use the name of my father’s column, but I’ve yet to really capture the essence of what he did with it, or even attempt to. I keep pondering who is out there, hungry for information and reading this, judging and deciding to either follow what I have to say or take off, never to return again, because I have yet again said little of substance and produced little of the environmental and science and cultural reporting I’ve promised, and, instead, have sunk into this same self-absorbed pondering of urban choices, these private splits that I should resolve before the public gets involved, yet this is my lens, this is my now.

That said, get a taste of some of my previous reporting by visiting my clips page.