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I grew up in one place that we almost never left, a small town in Eastern Kentucky where everyone knows you, your family, and all the stories you try to deny or celebrate. I found it impossible to forge my own identity there, and by the time I reached 18 I was desperate for a new start. I wanted to figure out exactly who this “John Wright” person was and what-all the world had to offer him.

I moved, in the summer of 1997, to Lexington to attend college at the University of Kentucky. Lexington’s suburban sprawl seemed markedly urban to me back then, and within a year I had settled into a comfortable routine. I was making my own way with work at a local department store and I engaged my life at the University fully. I also began to have a small group of friends, and to date and screw with some abandon. I was growing up, but by the time I finished college I was coming to see how limited my options were in that town. I couldn’t, then, figure out how to be more than a sales clerk with an English degree, and as my friends settled down into the comfortable routines of adulthood I felt left out. The need for travel and adventure was still strong in me.

So, in the August of 2002 I left Kentucky for Chicago. There I attended graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I couldn’t afford to go to school there, nor could I afford to live in Chicago on any part-time income that I made, so I quickly cashed in on the good credit I had earned while in college. Life became a flurry of art gallery openings, performance art events, concerts, dancing, drinking, talking, late night meals at diners—all compliments of Mastercard, Visa, and Citibank.

When the party ended I found myself in a low-paying job with creditors expecting payback for the last two years of abandon. I quietly buckled down, began to budget, and watched as my graduate school friends scattered to the wind. Only a few stayed in the city, and I saw them from time to time though we were never again as wild, carefree, and cynically idealistic as we were in graduate school. The time to be an adult was really upon us.

My adult life in Chicago was not “bad”, but there were parts of me I buried in order to live in the city. I had to make peace with the fact that the manicured lake front was the best excuse for “nature” that I had. I had to make peace with the noise and the bustle, and the long endless months of bitterly cold winter. I fell into the anonymity of the city. I still tried to write, but found myself without material much of the time. I was surrounded by every form of distraction, an endless wave of guys willing to fuck but not date, and I was beginning to form some new friendships to take the place of all the people who had moved away. But life in Chicago was not the life that I had imagined, and I gave myself two years to figure out what I wanted to do next.

At the end of that first year, when I had finally made peace with being alone—with living on my own, and with casual dating, I met a hot lanky dork named Brandon. Within a week I was virtually living in his apartment, and a year later we moved in together. That guy, of course, is my husband now and not long after we got together I adopted the “Heckman” as my writer’s name. Thus I became “John Heckman Wright.”

I met Brandon in his first week back in Chicago after a few years away. He told me “I moved back here to die. I don’t ever want to leave this city.” I knew I could never settle in Chicago for the long haul, but this relationship was more comfortable and familiar than any I had known. He was an offbeat and quirky guy with a snarky sense of humor, big ambition, and willing to be trained in the sack. I couldn’t let this one go.

So, I dug in. I moved jobs a couple of times and finally landed in a place I could rest in comfortably for a few years. I was making an adult income for the first time in my life, and I had new friends who had slowly accumulated over the years. As we moved into our third year together in Chicago, though, I was growing increasingly tired of the city. Despite our respectable combined incomes we were always broke. The cost of living in the city and repaying my student debt seemed to take everything, and though we were surrounded by distractions engaging in them took so much effort and energy that we seldom did. The city was also toxic for us. As we began to age we came to realize that we’re both slow, contemplative men. We savor life, and the breakneck pace of the city didn’t allow us that time for contemplation. Add in the grey snow and the smog, aggressive yuppies and disenfanchised ghettos, and you have a city that was killing our souls.

In June of 2008 we sold or got rid of most of our belongings and moved the rest cross country to Portland, Oregon. After the suffocation of Chicago, Portland felt like a dream. Here were mountains and an ocean, rich city parks, and rolling country sides. The city is quaint, if hard loved, and affordable. We believed that our new life here would be all the things we wanted it to be, that we could finally focus on health and happiness and that within a few years we’d be re-established and doing fine.

Then, in September of 2008 the floor fell out from under us. The nation’s economy took a noise dive and, aside from Michigan, no place seems to have been hit harder than Oregon. The “official” unemployment rate here has stuck to around 15-18% for much of the last two years. Unofficial unemployment is far higher. Anecdotally, few people we know here have full-time work, and everyone seems to be struggling to make ends meet.

As much as we love this city, the economic reality of living here is hard. Over the course of the last two years I’ve sent out well into the hundreds of resumes. I’ve checked in with temp agencies and scoured every job site the region has to offer. I’ve had a few interviews, but none that led anywhere. The one that seemed to have promise strung me along for seven months and then didn’t bother to tell me when the job had fallen through. Meanwhile, my husband has continued to labor in a job that pays well but is ultimately unrewarding and misaligned to his character and interests. All this time, I’ve been stuck at home faced only with my uncertainty about the future and anxious about this situation I never imagined we’d be in.

This spring I finally lined up some teaching work at a local community college, and though the pay will not match what I made in Chicago it may be enough to relieve some of the pressure for a while. Portland has been a devil’s bargain. We love this place. We love the land and the DIY aesthetic of so many people here. We love that the words “sustainable” and “composting” are on everyone’s tongues. But, beware, Portland is not the utopia that so many hipsters and the New York Times would have you believe. At it’s core Portland is a deeply dysfunctional city in a deeply poor state. Local high schools are closing because of a budget short fall and the best solution that anyone can come up with is opening a new casino to pay for education. Downtown, California moneyed people who have moved here in the last decade walk past lines outside shelters that stretch around the block. I’ve heard people describe the homeless here as “harmless” and even “quaint.” It takes a considerable effort of willed cognitive dissonance to assert that Portland is a progressive utopia.

There are no jobs in Oregon, yet the influx of young hipsters and professionals keep coming. With each new immigrant, the gap between the “ideal” and the “real” Portland continues to widen. These are hard times, and if the rest of the country is experiencing a recession, then the unemployment and foreclosure rates in Portland certainly indicate a great depression.

The city of Portland, and the Oregonian does not want you to believe this, of course. It’s critical to the city’s inflated housing market and wrong-headed schemes (such as undertaking millions of dollars in biking infrastructure while cutting basic services like education, parks, and sewage maintenance) to portray this place as the next “it” city. Seattle had it’s boom in the 90’s, and by sheer force of will Portland believes that its time is due.

So, there has been some heartbreak about the reality of our situation here in Oregon, while at the same time we have discovered some of the last wilderness that remains in the lower 48. We’ve hiked mountains and taken walks that stretch for hours on the smooth and rocky beach. I’ve watched sunsets over the ocean and seen the purple mountains of the Cascade range in the moonlight with no one around for miles. There has been much to love, despite the hardships.

And while all of this has happened I have found myself in a state of change. Dormant, both socially and professionally, but changing in my core. The distractions of a materialist culture, the candy of pop culture, the poison of processed food, have all lost their hold on me and I find myself emerging as a Naturalist, someone who only wants to live peacefully with nature and to do good work for myself and other people. It’s been a radical time in my life, and what I’ve found is that radical times sometimes mean owning up to radical changes that have to happen.

In the last year I have lost two very dear friends. Both were women I would have counted as among my very best friends. One seemed unable to be friends with me after I learned to stand up for myself. The other has withdrawn into such an extreme isolation that a very simple misunderstanding drove us permanently apart. At the same time I have been increasingly isolated. Our tight budget has kept me from traveling back to Chicago and Kentucky to see my friends and family. When my friends talk to me they can tell that I have changed, but since I haven’t been able to invest in face-to-face time with them they don’t quite know what to make of me.

It’s difficult to be at this stage in life and to feel like the whole scenario is starting over. People are coming and going as they do with age. All of this would perhaps be more manageable if I had my own life here in Portland—if I were meeting more people and making new connections but our economic situation has kept us conservative in our outings.

So life in Portland is hard and often lonely. There are competing forces at work for the soul of this place—a spirit of well intended idealism vs. the hard reality of a blue collar state whose jobs have been gutted on the world stage of the free market. Will Portland survive these times, yes. But will the city that emerges at the end of this recession be a global example of smart urban planning and conservation, or will it be a skeleton of that city that resembles something closer to Detroit. Only time will tell. And only time will tell how my partner and I weather this transition. Sometimes it feels like there is no place we would rather be—that the seismic changes happening in our world will be best weathered here. Other times it feels like we need to leave as quickly as possible. Either way, it’s hard to see the City of Roses through rose colored glasses these days. Much like a tumultuous relationship, we seem to be at a turning point—do we stay and fight or do we walk away?

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David Markson is not a novelist most people know, but for anyone who loves contemporary fiction he is certainly worth checking out. His novel This is Not a Novel completely shook my understanding of what a novel could be when I read it in 2003. My first aborted manuscript was even, in hindsight, an homage to Markson. There’s an obituary in the New York Times that I’ve linked to below:

David Markson, whose wry, elliptical novels probing the scattered mind of the artist and the unruly craft of making art were frequently called postmodern and experimental and almost always surprisingly engaging and underappreciated, died Friday in his Greenwich Village apartment. He was 82.

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As is often the case, most of these photos are by my handsome and talented husband, Brandon Heckman, so I can’t take credit for them.

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