Sewing Seeds

The long and the short of it is this: after six years together and 10+ in Portland, my wife Cory and I were ready for a change. We were entering that phase in our lives where we were wanting to put down permanent roots and start a family, and though we were uncertain about where exactly we wanted to be in terms of locale, we were both on the same page in knowing that we didn’t want to be in the city anymore. I come from a small town in North Carolina, and Cory from the smaller city of Salem, Oregon, and we were both looking to transition into a simpler, less hectic and more harmonic lifestyle, which we were convinced the sirens, strip clubs, and skinny-jeaned hordes of Portland just weren’t going to provide.

So we made a list of what we wanted: smaller town, bigger house we could eventually toss a couple rugrats into, on a workable-sized plot of land that we could develop towards a more sustainable existence. We weren’t trying to eschew society or go off the grid – anyone who knows either one of us knows that we could live without cable television and Netflix about as well as we could without oxygen and clean water – we just wanted to be able to trim the excesses in our lives, hone what it meant to provide for ourselves, and get to look at something besides our neighbor’s front porch when we stepped outside. And sure, there was a dash of curmudgeonly hermit in our motivation, but only a dash and exclusively on my part, another thing which shouldn’t surprise anyone even remotely acquainted with me.

List in hand, we started exploring. For a while we were sure we were going to move to Astoria, Oregon, home of The Goonies (which was, for my part at least, a good 90% of the motivation). Then it was going to be McMinnville in the fertile crescent of Oregon wine country. Or somewhere on Washington’s Olympic Penninsula, Gig Harbor maybe, or Port Townsend. For a good bit we entertained the idea of Anacortes, Washington on Fidalgo Island in the picturesque Puget Sound. And then, only 10 months ago, Cory took a daytrip with her friend Ellen to Hood River, Oregon, in the Columbia River Gorge. I can still remember the look in those bottomless blue eyes and the excitement in her voice when she returned that night and asked if I had ever been. I hadn’t, not really. I’d driven through the Gorge ten years ago when I moved to Oregon but hadn’t been back since. I barely left my neighborhood in Portland, let alone the city. That’s the dash of hermit to which I referred. Anyway, Cory was smitten and thought we should check it out as soon as possible. I agreed, but secretly I wasn’t feeling it. I was looking for that big change, that drastic leap. The Gorge was too close to Portland, I thought, it was inside the same cultural bubble and wouldn’t be like moving away as much as it would be moving to the suburbs, but I’m smart enough to know that when my wife makes a suggestion, it’s not really a suggestion, so the very next weekend we went out to Hood River.

Any reservation I had, any hesitancy I was feeling, any resistance I was ready to offer, I forgot all about it the second we got outside city limits. 

On the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge, facing west.

The Columbia River carves between Oregon and Washington leaving in its wake some of the most breathtaking scenery the U.S. has to offer. The deep blue water, the stoic and formidable mountains of the Cascade Range, the carpeted foothills and farmland and sweeping panoramas that stretch for dozens of miles in every beautifully bucolic direction – you wouldn’t believe there was a major metropolitan area just out of sight, but sure enough there it was not a quarter-hour out of town. We didn’t even do much that first day. We grabbed a couple Kolsches over lunch at Double Mountain Brewery and then we sat by the river watching the swimmers and stand-up paddleboarders, the windsurfers and sunbathers, the dogs drifting by on boogie boards and the gaggle of children splashing happily in the gently undulating river current. We didn’t talk much, we just sat there soaking in the environment, seeing if there was a place for us here. I think we would have set up camp right then and there if it had been an option. We didn’t know much about the area, but we knew how it made us feel – contented, appreciative, inspired, to name just a few lofty and vague sentiments – and that trumped any logistics we’d need to learn. What was for certain, by the time we got home that night, our collective mind was made. Next stop, Hood River.

But of course, it didn’t work like that.

We kept visiting weekend after weekend, each trip only further reinforcing our decision, and we started making actual plans. We’d have to put our house in Portland on the market, and there were a handful of things – repairs and whatnot – that would have to be done before that, so casually we started taking small steps towards the bigger goal. We gave ourselves 10 months to move, figuring we’d put the house up in May 2015 and be in the Gorge for the start of summer.

Now, Cory and I as a couple are many things, the least among them patient. We moved in together six weeks after we started dating, got married about a year after that, and bought the first house we looked at in Portland, which we loved for five wonderful years. We’re impulsive, to put it politely, ‘rash,’ if you’re feeling cynical, but our impulses have always served us well, so we tend not to question them. Rather, when they say ‘jump,’ we don’t even ask ‘how high,’ we just go. So around December, we started looking into jobs. Not looking to apply, just sort of gauging the field, seeing what we were up against. I’m a writer by night – formerly of horrible shark movies and currently of little-read novels – and a retail clerk by day, so work for me wouldn’t be too hard to come by, but Cory is a highly-skilled administrative professional who used to work in finance, so we wanted to make sure she could find something commensurate with her Swiss-Army-like skillset. And that’s when the anvil fell on the fast forward button.

Second week of December, Cory found a job listing in Bingen, Washington – a 90-second bridge crossing from Hood River – that was right up her alley, a real once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunity. It was months ahead of schedule, but considering it had taken multiple interviews over a good period of time to land her last job, she nor I saw any harm in submitting her application, if only to get her readjusted to interviewing after six years. The third week of December, Cory interviewed for the job. Two days after that, on December 19^th of last year, Cory was offered the job. I wasn’t just blowing smoke about her Swiss-Army-like skillset.

So there we were. Cory had a job. That started in a month. We didn’t hit the ground running, we hit it rolling and not entirely in control. That period is a blur, at least to me, of repairmen and realtors and inspectors and more realtors, and oh yeah the holidays, and boxes pilling up in corners little by little until the piles weren’t so little anymore, and wondering where exactly we were going to move them. Our house in Portland sold – I kid you not – about 10 hours after it went on the market, which was awesome, but which also set a very real and very near deadline. In searching for new homes, we really wanted to stretch our dollar as far as we possibly could. Just a little bit of research revealed Hood River was not the place to do that, especially if we wanted an acre or two as well. So we shifted our thoughts to the Washington side of the Gorge, that while not as Main-Street cute and tourist-attractive as Hood River, still satisfied, if not further satisfied, everything we were hoping to gain by moving. For much, much less (and no income tax). A few frantic weekends of searching the small communities up and down the Washington side of the River, and we stumbled across a log home in Lyle, a census-designated place of about 500 souls 15 minutes from Cory’s job in Bingen and the community of White Salmon to the west, and the same distance from The Dalles in Oregon to the east. The place was really too good to be true, and the entire time we were waiting to close I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it never did. Our luck was compounding, we were on a roll. Another check in the pro category for impulsivity. 

Lyle sits just past The Twin Bridges where the Klickitat River joins the Columbia

Two months to the day after Cory’s initial job interview, we closed on our house in Portland and closed on the log home in Lyle, a full three months ahead of our original schedule. And so far it’s been everything we’d hoped. We’re on two acres overlooking the Klickitat River Valley and Mt. Adams in the distance. Our water comes from a well and our heating comes from a wood stove aptly named the Blaze King. Give us time, and the rest of the electricity will come from roof-mounted solar panels.

Our commutes – I found work in an antiques store right next door to Cory’s office – are the same length they were in Portland, but instead of sitting in stop-and-go traffic taking in the smoggy sights of city life, we’re now zipping along the Columbia River past cliffside waterfalls and picture-perfect lakes beneath sculptures of stone and grassy hills rolling beneath the bright and wide blue sky. There are stars at night and birdsong at dawn, wild turkey and deer in the yard and locally-raised pork in the freezer. We haven’t even seen a fast food restaurant in two months, but we see osprey chicks and bald eagles on a regular basis. We’re going out less and staying in more, enjoying each other and taking care of our lovely new home. The change is more than enormous, it’s all-encompassing and ongoing.

So...much...mowing...

Current plans have us in the midst of setting up a massive garden and prepping for a small orchard of apples, pears and cherries, with additional plans – months away or years, depending on which one of us you ask – to add a greenhouse for year-round gardening, chickens for eggs, a goat or two, and even a couple of beehives if both of us can get over our massive dislike of being stung.

Which brings us to this blog. This is where we aim to document the experience of our shifting lifestyle, complete with posts about gardening, food canning and preserving, cooking, hiking, wildlife, local culture and this gorgeous area (pun absolutely intended) into which we’ve blindly cast ourselves.

To be clear, we’re not positing ourselves as experts of anything – hence in part the blog title, Country-ish – we’re not offering advice or instruction, and we’re not preaching a lifestyle or seeking to convert anyone to anything. We’re the same people we’ve always been, just wanting to live a little simpler, a little more responsibly, and a little less dependently. Our only aim in these virtual pages is to document this exciting time in our lives and maybe show the kids we hope to have how we made their home. You will not be asked to buy our homemade soap. You will not be solicited to donate to our goat de-budding Kickstarter. You will not be forced to listen to tracks from our inevitable washboard/jug duo. You might get hit with an ad for my novel. Just being honest.

So check in every now and again and see how things are going, what worked and what was a massive failure, and watch us learn from our no doubt copious mistakes. Next post comes this weekend: Saturday is Planting Day!

Cory & Perry