The beginning (where to begin)

The weather app on my phone told me it was 80°F (27°C), a typical temperature for an early summer’s day. Upstairs in my small apartment on the rural outskirts of Healdsburg, California, I was sitting on my bed, computer on my lap, and sweating. It was 31 January 2015. Deepest winter. I snapped.

“I can’t take this any more!” I cried at the empty room. “Too much! Enough! I have to get out of this place.”

I have always hated the heat. As a child growing up in rural Maunu, New Zealand, in summertime, the season of tropical cyclones, mosquitoes whined in my bedroom window, tormenting me into a furniture-climbing, wall-slapping game of chase. On those still, dense summer nights I climbed silently out the window to ease myself into the paddling pool on the lawn below, excited by the adrenalin of disobedience. Under the stars I sat in the cool water, gazing at the familiar scene so thrillingly altered — the lawn whose open, knowable swath ended at the lines of trees, the rows of kiwifruit vines, the rough ground beyond. Occasionally I swivelled my gaze to Mum and Dad’s open bedroom window a couple of metres along the wall from mine, alert for my cue to scramble quickly back inside.

On the nights when the tropical cyclones danced violently with the shelterbelt trees that protected the kiwifruit that were half our livelihood, I slept as little as when the mosquitoes danced in my room, when the humidity pressed so close I wanted to reach my arms up, push it away, whisper angrily at it to go back out over the ocean where it belonged. On summer nights, I didn’t sleep.

I gave myself three summers in a row once, semi-inadvertently. I had been away from New Zealand for over a year, which at 23 years of age seemed like a long time, and I wanted to go home for my dad’s fiftieth birthday. Dad’s birthday is in early October, springtime in New Zealand, and I was living in California. At the end of the relentless California summer I went home to New Zealand, stayed six months, and then went back to California (not the original plan, but that’s another story). Three consecutive summers. A hell that seared me so deeply, the scarring is still vivid almost thirty years later as I write this.

I had never intended to come to California, let alone the United States, but on that midwinter’s day in January 2015 here I had been for twenty years. I knew how I had ended up here — the compelling reason that had brought me — but why had I stayed? For so long?

Why am I still here? I asked myself. I will go somewhere cool where the skies aren’t relentlessly, burningly blue for five consecutive months of every year. The Pacific Northwest. There were mountains and trees (which, admittedly, there also were in northern California) and — this was the crux — there were actually clouds in the sky from May to September. And sometimes those clouds leaked cool water. I would go there, I resolved. The infamous Pacific Northwest drizzle might become a bit wearing, but I would deal with that. Anything was easier to deal with than eternal heat.

For the next fortnight I trawled Google, looking up apartment rental prices, regions and neighbourhoods that might suit me, climatic averages, and similar essential pieces of information. The results weren’t encouraging. In the last few years Portland and, especially, Seattle had become trendy and popular. Rental rates were high, the selection thin.

I sat back from my computer, discouraged, and admitted to myself what I had known all along. I  didn’t really want to move to the Pacific Northwest. It was an act of desperation because I had to get out of California and that was the only place I could think of that might suit me, or at least be tolerable.

I mentally scanned the US searching for other possibilities. Suddenly a thought rocked me like a California earthquake. Why was I staying in the United States? I didn’t have to be here. In fact I had never ‘had’ to be here. And now I was truly independent because my work was fully ‘digital’ — all I needed was an electricity supply and an internet connection. I could live anywhere I wanted!

So where did I want to live?