My family recently celebrated four years in the Pacific Northwest after leaving Texas.  My husband and our son had lived there their whole lives, and I had lived there for more than 40 years.  Our nephew was born there.  We had deep roots that required quite a bit of excavation in order to get ourselves moved.  I detail the preparation and the week-long drive in this post, so I won’t belabor all of that here.  Needless to say, it was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever been through, and I am never moving cross-country again.

While my husband was able to feel the splendor of this new, green paradise we lived in right away, it took a lot longer for me for a variety of reasons.  I was so fried from the effort of moving and all that it entailed that I fell flat on my proverbial face almost immediately upon arriving, and I did not get back up for two months.  Many of our belongings could not be unpacked because there was no furniture, such as bookshelves, to put them on or in.

I was also still recovering from a long (and extremely unpleasant) mental episode I refer to as The Madness, which meant that I was not firing on all thrusters just yet, both because of the episode itself, as well as the medications to treat it.  Consequently, I was a bit of a lump for about the first three years that we were here, which was extremely frustrating for me.  Here I was, finally living in Paradise by my standards, and I couldn’t feel the incredible beauty of the place.  The snow-capped hills, burbling clear streams and rivers, vast forests, and the Pacific Ocean had virtually no effect on me, and I knew that wasn’t right.

Finally, some medication tweaks over the last year-and-a-half have remedied that problem, and my neurotransmitters seem to be allowing me to actually feel again, instead of suppressing my emotions.  I felt like a two-dimensional, translucent gray ghost living in a four-dimensional world of opaque, vivid color that I couldn’t interact with.  Now that issue is taken care of, and I’m finally really noticing where I live now, which means I can now, at long last, realize the fact that I live here now and never have to go back to Texas.

For quite some time after moving here, I grappled with the nagging fear that something would happen to make us have to go back.  It was completely irrational, but I couldn’t get rid of that feeling.  After a while, I realized I was suffering from refugee mentality, because that’s what we were, in essence: political refugees.  While we had desired to move to the Northwest since we had visited over 20 years previous, for a variety of reasons, it wasn’t until political life in Texas, and therefore cultural and social life, became hostile to the point of threatening our freedom and even the lives of our children.

Our kids are transgender, and when the state began issuing a variety of completely illegal edicts regarding the handling of transgender minors and their parents, that was the thing that really lit a fire under our asses to get the fuck out of Dodge, NOW.  Violence against transgender people didn’t help things.  We were already aimed at this general area and had made a spreadsheet of pros and cons regarding moving, and there were nothing but cons to staying and only pros to leaving.  Most of what we had stayed there for had slowly dissipated over the years as Republican policies and greed slowly eroded the culture of the city and the artists and musicians moved away.  It was like watching an old friend slowly die of cancer.  So we left for a place that more closely resembled what we once had and was a better place to be in about a dozen different ways.

One of the things that we were excited about was having access to legal cannabis.  Both my husband and I use cannabis medicinally for different reasons.  Most of Texas has fairly draconian laws regarding cannabis.  Outside of Austin, where less than an ounce of cannabis has been unofficially decriminalized, it’s not uncommon for people to wind up in jail for possession of tiny amounts of weed or even a seed (unsurprisingly, most of these people are Black).

So it was with excitement that we made our first trip to a dispensary.  Not only was I unprepared for the veritable cornucopia of cannabis products available for legal purchase, I was also unprepared for the level of anxiety the visit induced.  Despite the legality, I found myself scared to ask questions and wanted to leave as soon as I could.  It wasn’t until later that I realized it was a trauma reaction to being a cannabis user in Texas for so long.  From carefully plotting driving routes to avoid ‘bad’ counties with heavy penalties, to carefully packaging the weed so it wouldn’t smell and carefully hiding it in case of getting pulled over, to having to use carefully disguised language in the smoke shops, i.e. ‘water pipe’ instead of ‘bong’, with a sticker that said ‘for tobacco use only’.

It was all such a grotesque farce, and now we didn’t have to deal with that anymore, so I was confused at first by my anxious reaction.  Slowly over the ensuing months, I became more comfortable with the experience of legally purchasing cannabis and driving around with it without having to worry about getting in trouble if I was pulled over.  The shift was remarkable, and I was shocked at the depths to which I had been psychologically affected by being a cannabis user in a state with such severe penalties for such a relatively innocuous substance.  It took months to fully shed the Drug War paranoia that came with living in Texas.

Then there was the political, social, and cultural shift that came with moving to the PNW from Texas.  It was like night and day.  Anyone who pays attention to the news knows  that Texas has become a hotbed for the worst kinds of anti-humanitarian policies anywhere in our country.  Anyone who isn’t a rich white Christian good-old-boy with big boots, a big belt buckle, and “all hat, no cattle” isn’t even considered to be human there.  Conversely, where we live now runs the state with the concerns of the citizens in mind, not the politicians who represent them.  I would have a hard time making a list of the many progressive policies we enjoy, now that we live on the so-called ‘Left Coast’.  Our state actually tries to take care of its citizens, not throw them under the bus at every opportunity.

Once again, it  took at least a year or so to get used to living in a progressive state rather than a deeply conservative one.  We may as well have moved to a different country that happens to speak the same language.  This effect is amplified by the almost polar opposition in natural appearance between Texas and the Pacific Northwest.  I call Texas the Australia of the United States, because that’s what it is.  With the exception of the Gulf Coast, which is very moist, most of the state is very hot and dry, with more rain near the coast and the least in the Panhandle, which only receives 12” of rain per year.  The entire state is inhabited by wildlife, big and small, that wants to kill you or at least scare you to death.  The heat ranges from something with the quality of breathing through a hot, wet sponge along the coast to wildfire-inducing, searing droughts and heat waves in the Hill Country and Plains.  Don’t forget the springtime softball-sized hail, power-killing straight-line winds, deadly lightning, tornadoes, and hurricanes.

Conversely, the Pacific Northwest is so green, it’s hard to believe.  Not just one shade of green, either: ALL of the shades of green, and when it rains, which it does quite a bit, everything gets more green.  And it’s green almost all year long, with the exception of high summer when grasses go dormant.  Flowers bloom from the end of February with the arrival of the daffodils on through November when the passionflowers bloom.  

While growing food in Texas requires a great deal of expense and effort to keep everything alive and healthy in the dry heat, the environment here is so conducive to growing things that dozens of crops are grown here from April to October, much of it fruit, and cold weather vegetables can grow year-round.  I never bought fruit in Texas because it tasted terrible.  Now I know why: it has to be plucked at least a week before its ripe and then shipped, while everything here is only a day or less away from where it was grown.  Fruit here is ambrosial.

Environmentally I’ve traded the severe weather of Texas for weather that is much milder, generally speaking, with the exception of wintertime windstorms that blow in off  the Pacific and the occasional bout of snow or ice.  Sometimes there are short heat waves that are over in less than a week.  Weather in Texas is governed by eastbound fronts colliding with warm Gulf moisture and shifting centers of barometric pressure, whereas weather here is 100% governed by the massive Pacific Ocean and the eastbound systems that move across it.  I also have new environmental threats to consider now, chiefly in the form of forest fires, which I monitor like hurricanes, but also earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, thanks to our eastern-most position on the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Thankfully the latter two are far rarer than the annual fires, although everyone in the Northwest talks about “The Big One”: the imminent (geologically speaking) popping of the megathrust fault between the San Juan de Fuca Plate and the North American Plate, which lies not far off the Northwestern coast in the United States.  The last time this fault had a major quake was in 1700, and it sent a deadly tsunami all the way across the Pacific to Japan.  Northwest Indian tribes continue to tell stories about that earthquake more than 300 years later.

Earthquakes tend not to give much, if any, warning before they occur, but volcanoes are different.  The entire Cascade Volcanic Arc, which runs from northern California to southern British Columbia, is monitored by the US Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcanic Observatory in Vancouver, WA, located not far from Mt. St. Helens, the last volcano to erupt in the Northwest.  Volcanoes begin rumbling with activity sometimes years before they erupt, and they give off signals weeks beforehand that warn of an imminent eruption.  Plus, the nearest volcano to where we live is about 120 miles away, which means that, in the unlikely event of an eruption, our biggest threats would probably be ashfall, depending on the wind, and possibly lahars (volcanic mudflows down rivers post-eruption).

It’s taken four years, but I finally feel like I don’t have to go back to Texas and that I actually live here.  When I go out, I look around and really see where I live and think, “wow, do I really live here now?”  I can really feel the wind in the trees and the water flowing down the streams and rivers.  I’m not entirely sure what has enabled the feeling of this place to finally penetrate, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.  I just want to enjoy it and make the most of it.