Oregon was burning. It was the end of summer running into fall, and wildfires had taken over much of the forests surrounding Portland. Each morning people would wake up to see their cars covered in a coat of ash. The horizon looked like a permanent sunset, with a red and orange glow coloring the outline of the hills.
My friend Peter told me about the fires when he visited me the same year. He said it was like Cormac McCarthyâs The Road, which we had both read two years ago in college. Every evening after class I used to go back to my small, leaky house in Southwest Portland and pour our dried goods into different jars. Depending on my mood, I would decide whether we needed the beans or the oatmeal when we would inevitably have to run awayâwhether the couscous or the rice would be the safer grain.
We were still years away from the fires, but the more I read, the more I was convinced that we would soon have to run. I dreamed of fires every night, and talked incessantly to my roommates about them. It became a joke between usâthat sooner or later we would grab the jars of food I kept on a bookshelf in the kitchen and load up the shopping cart that was abandoned in our front yard.
The fires, said Peter, were most alarming because no one was alarmed. People brushed ash off their windows in the morning and rescheduled hiking trips. Everyone adapted their lives for them, like frogs in hot water.
I had only really seen fires of this magnitude once before, even though I grew up in California. The summer when I was 20, my mom and I drove from Portland to San Jose. We spent a night in Ashland and stayed at the Holiday Inn. We were there during the annual Shakespeare festival in the beginning of August, and had tickets to see Antony and Cleopatra. We had dinner at a restaurant that served me wine, and then walked down to the small center of town, coughing from the ash in the air.Â
The theater was outside, and at the beginning of the show, the stage manager came out to tell the audience that, for the safety of the actors, they might have to shut down the performance midway. The ushers all had masks on their faces, and some of the audience members had tied scarves over their mouths and noses.
I have read many descriptions of fire that talk about its power and wildnessâthese qualities meant to liken it to an animal ruggedness, a spiritual closeness weâre expected to share with our greatest evolutionary tool. But that night I spent in Ashland, the only word that came to mind was oppressive. As my mom and I left the show early to go back to our hotel room, I felt as if the smoke in the air was suffocating me.
A year later, I met someone who remembered the fires too, a boy from Ashland with curly hair and feet that pointed out when he walked. We met at a bonfire where I had to ask him his name over and over again, and he helped me crush forgotten beer cans with the heels of our feet.
We went to the coast on one of our first dates, and missed the sunset. We lugged a tarp out to the beach and sat with it folded around us like a tent, drinking wine. Eventually, we gave up on the tarp and sat out in the rain, both of us laughing hysterically. When we walked back to the car, the bottom of the paper bag I was carrying the wine in collapsed, and the bottle shattered at my feet. I looked up to see him smiling, and felt for the first time what it was like to find a home in another person.
We spent all our time together after that night, staying up late with a sort of hunger to be around each other. It made me tired in my classes, but I was so happy I felt like I could burst. He was kind and smart and sweet, and even when I slept next to him I dreamed about him. It was with him that I saw Oregon the way most people see it: the lush green that stretches on beyond belief. We went to rivers and hot springs and up and around mountains, and he’d make up the origin stories of those we didn’t already know. When I think of him now, I prefer this image: swimming or laughing in some faraway place where we could have been the only people in the world.
I think he always knew I didnât want to stay in Oregon, the same way I always knew it too. The week that he and I drove down to Ashland was only a few weeks after he had told me that long distance was not an option for himâthat if I wasnât going to stay in Portland, he didnât want me at all. We took separate cars down the highway, and I counted the mountains he had pointed out to me months ago, the ones I will only ever know by the names he made up for them.
His Ashland was different. We stayed at his parentsâ house in the woods, isolated from everyone else. There was no fire, but instead rain and wind. We left our windows open at night and slept under layers of blankets, holding onto each other tightly enough to insulate us against the impending future.
We jumped in the cold lake and had our first real fight, and one night while we sat in his living room I decided that I would stay. I would stay wherever he was. No job or place could replace this personâthis person who I loved more than I ever thought possible, this person who I would have given any piece of myself for.
A few weeks later, he clarified to me that it wasnât just about distance. He didnât want me no matter where I was. I was too much of a burden; I took up too much of his life. He had only wanted me for a length of time, and that time was up.
I left Portland in the middle of the night, without telling anyone. I packed my things and duct-taped my bumper to the front of my car, and made it to California just as the sun was rising. I cried until I laughed, and then I cried harder.
In the end, I didnât need to pack the dried beans or the oatmeal, because in my version of apocalypse, these things were plentiful as the road to California is studded with convenience stores. The absence that I felt, the thing that precluded my survival, was a person. My person, who I had left behind without explaining where I was going or why.
It took me months, but in the end I made it to New York. Thatâs where Peter told me about the fires that had been raging since I left, in a small bar on Houston Street. He was in New York to see a girl, a girl who he had brought to the bar with him. They clung to each other that night, sitting across from me as if offering a glimpse into the life I had left behind.
I donât think we were happy in the end. I donât know if there is a way to be happy once you know the person you love is going to leave you. We adjusted ourselves to a new normal after we decided to break up, and when I look back in time I see a split, as if there were two different relationships that I was a part of. Though, the strange thing is that even when I miss him so much that it physically pains me, even when I have to lock myself in the bathroom while my body spasms from grief months later, there is a strange sense of pride that followed me to New York. There are never any nights when I donât miss him, but there are also never any nights when I wish I had stayed. And even though I hug myself when I lie in bed and pretend my arms are his, this feeling of pride has yet to go away.
I have spent a long time trying to understand if the fires and the end of my love are correlated.
I want to see them as some sort of vindicationâthat the landscape of my home is now as scarred and gnarled as I am. And yet I cannot seem to make sense of it.
I do not believe in randomness, but I do believe that things can lack meaning. Perhaps things happen, not because they were meant to or because they had to, but only because they did. And perhaps, while I sit in a small bar and Peter tells me about the summer when Oregon was burning, it is enough for things to have happened, only because they did.