August 6th: Portland, Pre-Departure

I am sitting on the porch of my parents' house in Portland, drowsy from a sleepless night and waiting for the delivery of my Eurail Pass from one of those jaunty brown UPS employees. I cannot miss it, or I will be landing in Paris $450 poorer with no ticket onward.

More or less tethered to the porch until its delivery, I've been spending my time consuming alternately horrifying and charming articles on the internet, from this fairly thorough compendium of harrowing scenarios that may come true given the current path we're headed down regarding carbon emissions, to this short piece on American's dislike for small talk. This unusual combination gives me the sense that my upcoming tour of European cities will be a glimpse of human history and ingenuity before we're destroyed by plague/famine/toxic air, and also the wisdom not to mention this to any strangers I meet in quaint cafés.

Do you know how to feel strange in your own home?
Look at the ground and wonder
if you need to take your shoes off.

On out-and-back hikes, I'll often fixate on the way that the trailhead serves as a potent marker for what time does to us. We enter the trail, understand that we'll be returning to this point slightly changed by what we saw, what was said, and one another's company. The sheer strangeness of this, to me, is that I never can guess the way it's going to feel once I return to that spot, and every time I feel momentarily blessed by that mystery and its subsequent reveal. Sitting now on this porch, my head still heavy with a night spent combing over what I may have missed in preparation for my departure, I'm trying my best to fathom the change that's coming. It's a good feeling; packages under the tree; some whisper coming down the line to color the outlines in.


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