The Californian’s Dilemma
It has taken the combination of the pandemic and wildfires to finally propel us out, to break the spell of the Bay Area. During these long pandemic days, I’ve been going for walks with my 17-month-old daughter, circling around and around the four-block radius in South Berkeley where I became a mother. She wears vegan Mary Janes speckled with tiny watermelons and a white sunhat. We have our favorite spots. One is a gray staircase leading up to an old synagogue at the end of our street. We go up and down, her arms raised, hands in mine.
Across the street from the synagogue, there is a house with an overflowing apple tree and a landscaped front garden with smooth, oval-shaped stones. We cross the street, and she sits to pick up one, two, three stones at a time, banging them together to find their music. We creep in through the open gate, and my child picks up the fallen, worm-eaten apples, arranging them in a pile. “Ah!” she squeals. “Yes,” I say, “Apple.”
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A neighbor stops me on the street to say, “I can’t believe your daughter is walking already!” Another says to my husband, “We are loving watching how you are raising your daughter.” Our neighbors have seen us become parents over the past year and a half. One leaves us fresh zucchini and tomatoes and peaches on our doorstep. On the fence between our houses, she places DVDs she recommends, a pair of tiny blue Crocs her granddaughter has outgrown, and Marla Frazee’s book, Boss Baby (“No offense meant!”).
In the last few weeks, however, we have hardly gone outside save for the walks we sneak in when the air quality index readings slink down below 100. We are, once again, in fire season.
For the past several months, my husband and I have been torturously circling around and around the same question: Should we leave? Leave the Bay Area, leave California, and head back to the East Coast? We’d either go to my parents in the rural town in New England where I spent my high school years or to my husband’s childhood home in the Bible Belt, replete with a pool, a ping-pong table, and posters of basketball stars from the Charlotte Hornets circa 1995. For most of our adult lives, we have both been saying — emphatically — versions of the same statement: “I will never live there again.”
Generations of my family have been wanderers, exiles — the Jews on one side, fleeing pogroms, the Scotch-Irish Catholics on the other, fleeing famines. I have never had a narrative of rootedness. Always a nomad, by the time I was 12, I had lived on three different continents. Until recently, “home” conjured my grandparents’ house in Scotland, where my mother grew up and where we lived when I was a child. My grandmother’s paintings adorned its walls, and my grandfather’s intellectual pursuits — the Catholic church, French existentialism, and the appreciation of wine — lined its bookshelves.
Almost 20 years later, “home” became the Bay Area.
Like so many out here, we are both transplants. Jack came first, in 2010, following the Golden State dream. In the early mornings, he ran through the mist in the Berkeley hills, struggled and laughed his way through his first year of teaching, and made exotic discoveries such as kale, nutritional yeast, and composting. I came a year later. I fell in love with the redwood trees and spent a month reading poetry in a cafe before I found a job at a nonprofit. Later, once I left the nonprofit, I spent my mornings writing short stories and my afternoons teaching and tutoring in afterschool programs.
I have never had a narrative of rootedness.
Eventually, we got graduate degrees. Jack studied metacognition and how to foster independent learning for his master’s in education. I received my master’s of fine arts in creative writing and later wrote a novel full of magical realism and overabundant lyricism and very little plot but much attention to the inner life.
Our love story is deeply rooted in the Bay Area. We had our first kiss in Tilden, the sprawling, wooded regional park in the Berkeley hills. Three years later, we got engaged in that same park on a trail where two paths meet and become one, overlooking farmland that was once covered in wildflowers. We were married inside a redwood grove in Oakland and had our daughter five years later, bringing her home to our light-filled two-bedroom, just blocks away from my first apartment here.
Each year for the past four years, in the late summer and early fall, the air quality over the Bay has reached toxic levels. We wear N95 masks whenever we go outside or, like the fall when I was pregnant, N99s. The fires blaze near us — in Napa, in Paradise, in Santa Cruz, to the north and the south. Unlike so many others, we have never evacuated; we have not lost our homes or our lives or any loved ones. Instead, we see sunsets through the haze; my eyes burn; we cough. We purchased an air filter, which now serves as our child’s white noise every night.
We made the decision to leave for the East Coast after a night in which we stood on pieces of paper — one said ‘Stay,’ the other ‘Go’ — placed on the floor of the living room.
In March, we stopped going into other peoples’ houses, stopped hugging our friends. Social distancing became the new normal just as our daughter took her first steps. Still, we touched the leaves on the sidewalk, the long curly tendrils of wisteria, the chalk drawing of a butterfly left by another neighborhood kid. Now, though, we have closed our door to the outside world, and late at night when I cannot sleep, I worry that we are teaching our child to be fearful of people, of the air, of the earth.
“When despair for the world grows in me / And I wake in the night at the least sound/In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free,” says Wendell Berry, one of my favorite poets.
It is hard to rest in the grace of the world when the air above us is filled with smoke, when the fires are raging through the parched earth.
We made the decision to leave for the East Coast after a night in which we stood on pieces of paper — one said “Stay,” the other “Go” — placed on the floor of the living room. We talked about what each possibility felt like in our bodies and our minds and our hearts as we literally stood before our choices.
There have always been reasons to leave the Bay Area: the high cost of housing; the ever-present threat of a big earthquake. There have also, always, been reasons to stay: our beloved friends and community, the diversity of people living in the East Bay, the plethora of hiking trails nearby, the abundance of organic produce at Berkeley Bowl. It has taken the combination of the pandemic and wildfires to finally tip the balance toward leaving, to break the spell of the Bay.
We are going back — back east, back home, backward. We are going to live once again in the context of generations, to be both child and parent at the same time, to have help making meals and cleaning the dishes, to gain a few precious hours each week where we can exercise and work and perhaps have a moment or two alone. We are going so that our daughter can approach her grandparents rather than waving to them through a screen, so she can touch their hands, so they can lift her up and swing her around and kiss her unbelievably kissable cheeks. We are going so she can breathe with ease, so she can walk outside and touch the earth, and — I desperately want to believe — so we can find our hope, once again, on the ground beneath our feet.
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot.
—Wendell Berry
