I have, encouragingly, made some recent progress in my struggle both to escape Portland (which is a nice place, but has enough negatives for me personally that I’ll be glad to be gone), and to eventually do work that has more to do with the natural world than computer geekery.
Several months ago, I started telecommuting from home. At the time, I didn’t comment on it here much mainly because I didn’t want to tempt fate. Well, it’s working out quite well, and of course if I’m telecommuting, it really doesn’t matter if I’m physically in the Portland metro area or not. All that matters is that I’m close enough that regular meetings with the boss are feasible.
So I’m moving to the coast, specifically the Long Beach Peninsula, specifically Ilwaco. I evaluated a number of places, and the Long Beach Peninsula is less ruined by tourism than areas on the Oregon Coast which are closer to Portland (more on that later), plus it’s in Washington.
That latter point is a big plus because the two colleges I’m most interested in attending (should I decide to pursue a natural sciences degree) are Evergreen State and Fairhaven, both state schools in Washington, so I’d get in-state tuition if I’m a resident. Both have excised most of the ritualized bullshit that so turns me off from the concept of returning to most colleges. Oregon has nothing like either institution, either public or private.
So I’m sort of in the same situation I was back in 1989, only going the opposite direction. Then, I had never lived in a big city but had wanted to for some time. Now, I haven’t lived in a small town for ages but have realized how little city things I do on a regular basis, and how much I miss being closer to nature. The place I’m renting in Ilwaco is about a mile to the nearest state park, and not much further than that to the nearest old growth forest in that park.
Although I had wanted to make the change I did in 1989, I still did have a little trepidation about it, just like I have a little now. But, so be it: there is no change without risk. I’m renting, not buying, so if I hate it there I can always leave after a year without having to worry about taking a bath with real estate transaction costs.
And score one for small-town housing costs: I’ll be paying less for housing than I have in two decades, yet will have more square feet to my name than I ever had. I’m almost a little off-put by it, in fact; I’m going to have to budget to buy some furniture (used; so I can sell it at little loss if I end up bailing in a year) to fill up the space. That’s a complete turnaround from my normal exercise of trying to figure out how to fit everything in.
Most people will tell you how the two beach towns closest to Portland are so different. Seaside is tacky and commercialized, Cannon Beach is laid-back and tasteful.
So much for the conventional wisdom. As someone who’s just seriously considered (and rejected) both as places to live, I think they’re both fundamentally the same in being ruined by too much tourism.
It’s obvious that Seaside has been compromised by too much tourism: the most cursory of glances at the downtown area will convince one of that. It’s full of the stereotypical trashy beach-town fare.
That wouldn’t be so bad as a resident if you could just ignore it and have a nice home there. Unfortunately, you can’t: Seaside’s tacky trashiness extends to the quality of the housing there. I have never seen apartments as dilapidated and poorly-maintained as those I saw for rent in Seaside.
Cannon Beach is not quite so stereotypical, so it ends up fooling people. Then you realize that you haven’t noticed any gas stations. There’s a very good reason for that: there aren’t any. Anymore, that is: there used to be one, but it got driven out because it was more profitable for boutiques and art galleries (which Cannon Beach has aplenty) to occupy its space. There’s also no pharmacy (there also used to be one, and it suffered a similar fate), and a only a pathetic excuse for a grocery store (more an oversized 7-11; again, there once was a good grocery store in Cannon Beach, but its owners sold the building for a small fortune, left town, and restaurants and galleries now occupy the spot it once did).
That store is revealing. You’d expect, given the character of the place, it to have a good selection of natural and organic items. It doesn’t. And then you notice that the restaurants have almost no vegetarian options on their menus. Then it hits you: despite outward appearances, there’s really very little counterculture there, just a thin veneer of the same. It’s a town for whitebread suburbanites to visit in the summer and pretend they’re more sophisticated than their neighbors who go to Seaside. In other words, Cannon Beach is as ruined by tourism as Seaside is, just in a different way.
Tourism is a big industry on the Long Beach Peninsula, too. It’s just that it’s not so big there that it’s displaced everything else. There’s grocery stores, hardware stores, pharmacies, and gas stations openly coexisting with the motels and tourist traps on the main commercial street of Long Beach. There’s even a nice little organic market that’s made a go of it for decades. Ilwaco isn’t really that touristy at all; it’s on the bay, not on the ocean beach; its mainstay has always been as a fishing port, and it still very much is.
If I hadn’t chosen the Long Beach Peninsula, I would have probably chosen Astoria, which is even a more viable place for non-tourists to live in a regular town. But Washington residency and an ideally-located apartment (on a dead-end street, abutting the forest, with a view and a fireplace) won out.
The blogger whose blog I have followed the longest over the years went through a phase in the early 2000’s when he was tired of living in San Francisco and got increasingly bitter about living someplace he’d rather not be. I’d often be thinking (and sometimes saying aloud) “so leave already!” after reading his writings. Eventually, he did leave. But he ended up wasting a few years of his life feeling resentful about the city he lived in.
I promised I’d never let that happen to me, then I found myself, against my plans, returning to Portland after I had basically written it off as not really the best place for me. First, I didn’t want to leave because it would mean leaving a job too soon (I like to stay at least a year everywhere I work), then because the economy was tanking and I couldn’t find anything else.
Then I lose my job (which was good news; it was increasingly dysfunctional and I was literally on the verge of quitting; being laid off simply meant being able to unexpectedly draw unemployment insurance), and still can’t find anything to replace it. Eventually I find something, but it’s in Portland (sigh). At that point it’s getting very hard not to lapse into that same bitter mental space.
As a result, this was the year that I made up my mind that I will be leaving Portland, no matter what. I was expecting that to mean having to quit my job and moving back north to Seattle (which is not my favorite place, but there’s jobs aplenty there and it suits me better than Portland) with no job on the line. Then this telecommuting opportunity materializes.
And suddenly, I’m no longer having to fight getting trapped in that bitter mental space. I’m leaving before that mindset has developed. It is a good time to leave.
I’m about to move from the sixth worst state for making a living to the second best one.
Though, as the subject of this post mentions, that is mostly irrelevant. My reasons for wanting to be in Washington are mostly personal:
Yes, it will be nice to get a higher effective income should I end up working for a while in the Seattle high tech industry. But even then, it will be nicer yet to get better benefits that also tend to be the rule there (Oregon employers tend to skimp on both, because they assume you’ll put up with substandard compensation because you’re in love with Oregon and can’t stand the idea of living anywhere else).
But even that’s irrelevant compared to the points in the bullet list above. If it were Oregon that offered better-paying jobs with better benefits, I’d still rather live in Washington simply because both the natural environment and the man-made educational one there suit my needs better.
More than one person has expressed this sentiment after learning not that I’m moving to the coast, but just where on the coast I am moving to. Sometimes the puzzlement is expressed instead as “but that’s in (pause) Washington.” The underlying sentiment is the same in either case. Such emotion-based attachment to a political demarcation honestly puzzles me.
Why shouldn’t I want to leave Oregon if rational examination shows it will benefit me? It’s not as if I’m leaving for someplace like, say, Texas or Illinois, which have a natural (and cultural) environment that is radically different from the Pacific Northwest. Moving to the Oregon Coast would entail leaving the big city (and big city culture) as much as moving to the Washington Coast does. The specific part of the Washington Coast I am moving to is significantly closer to Portland than the central or southern Oregon Coast.
Washington and Oregon are, in fact, two states which show how illogically-drawn some state boundaries are. The parts of both that are same side of the Cascades (either west or east) have far more in common with each other than they do with the part of the same state that lies across the mountains.
How both of those split personalities have resolved themselves since statehood is different, but it’s not as if one state is dramatically more progressive or desirable than the other. Yes, Oregon does have better transportation, taxation, and environmental policies than Washington. But Washington has better labor, consumer protection, and education policies.
Both are, in other words, mixed bags. It’s just that Washington’s mix personally suits me discernibly better than Oregon’s.
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