Some random musings about myself:
I'm 35 years old, and in many ways I feel behind a lot of my peers. I
feel like I am surrounded by people who had their lives figured out at a
young age. I feel like I am surrounded by people who knew what they
wanted when they graduated from college and then they went out in got
it.
That's not to say that I didn't know what I wanted at all. I had a lot of ideas. I had/have a lot of interests. I just didn't know where I was going or how to get there.
It's interesting to me, that as we grow up, we are taught by the people around us - parents, teachers, society - and we grow to trust these people. While that trust isn't necessarily a bad thing, it stands to reason that it IS a very biased thing. We are taught to be who these people think we should be. We aren't taught to be who we want to be.
I went away to college in North Carolina and was hit with a major culture shock when I arrived. In a place just 10 hours away from where I grew up, I learned that my way of life wasn't the only way of life out there. Looking back, it seems like that should have been obvious to me...but it wasn't at the time. My family traveled fairly often as I was growing up, but we always traveled to the same places. I spent most of my childhood summers and winters going to Vermont. We usually took an annual trip to Washington DC. We took a few trips to Ohio to visit family and one trip to Disney World when I was 8. There were a few other random places scattered in there but aside from one trip to Texas to visit family, when I first got to college, I had never been away from the East Coast.
I'm not unintelligent. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that people lived many different lifestyles. I knew that the entire world didn't live as I did. But to see that knowledge was very eye opening for me.
My first real taste of people living differently than me, and growing up differently than me was when I went to visit my college boyfriend in Virginia over the summer one year. I knew that he had grown up in a small town. He had told me that his town had a population of 500 people. I had also grown up in a "small" town. My town had close to 30,000 in it. Clearly, what was small to me wasn't small to him.
I don't know what I was expecting to see when I got to his house. I went there with no expectations. I was simply excited to see him after being away from each other for several weeks.
I remember the drive down though. It was the first time I had ever seen the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was the first time I had ever driven through the Shenandoah Valley. I was in awe of the beauty that was surrounding me on the interstate. When I got to his house, I was really surprised. He lived in an old pre-Civil War house in a very small farming community. To unscramble all of the thoughts that ran though my head would take forever, but the gist of my thoughts were "wow I had no idea that people lived like this." By "like this", I mean that I was surprised that people lived outside of the stereotypical suburbia that I had grown up in. Again, this is something that should have seemed obvious to me, but it wasn't. I think I had always looked at people like him from a distance and thought they were weird farm kids or strange country people. I guess it just never occurred to me that someone just as normal as me, could grow up in a place so different than me. I was also surprised that this kind of lifestyle existed only 6 hours away from where I had grown up. I had driven through Virginia many times over the years (by myself and with family), but we always drove through the more populated, city areas of the state.
Fast forward to 5 years after college.
I got married to a Navy pilot and that is when my biggest travel adventures happened. We started out living in South Texas. That was culture shock #2 for me. We then moved to Jacksonville, Florida. This one wasn't a culture shock for me. For some reason, there are a lot of people from New Jersey in Florida and a lot of people from Florida in New Jersey. Plus, we were in a huge populated area. Between the people and the general lifestyle, nothing seemed abnormal about this place to me. The worst thing for me was the weather. I like having seasons and Florida is clearly lacking in that area.
After Florida we moved clear across the country to Washington state, which resulted in culture shock #3 for me.
Following that, we moved back to Texas and ended up divorced a few years later. Texas is where I am currently still living.
Throughout all of this moving, various opportunities for travel presented themselves. Cross country moves resulted in taking 3 weeks to truly enjoy every place we were driving through. Pre-deployment and post-deployment leave, and miscellaneous leave resulted in trips to places like Alaska, the Yukon Territory, Hawaii and the Canadian Rockies. During the first 25 years of my life I had only seen the states on the East Coast, and briefly Texas and California (England and France are mixed in there too). Then suddenly during the next 7 years I managed to see a large portion of Canada and ended up seeing all but 5 of the 50 states (I'm currently down to all but 4 of the states). All of this travel was really an eye opener for me. It was amazing to be able to really get out to see the country. While there are a lot of things about my past that I wish I could change, these experiences are things that I would never, ever choose to change.
So why am I writing all of this? Because as I said at the beginning of this post, it has taken me a long time to figure out who I really am. For most of my life I identified myself as a Jersey Girl. And for what its worth, I still do. Old habits die hard. But its only been over the past few months that I have come to realize that who I always thought I was, isn't who I really am. Yet, somehow deep down, I think I always knew this.
I identify as a Jersey Girl because its what I know. New Jersey is where I spent the majority of my life. Its where I was born and where I was raised. Life there was normal to me because its the only life that I really knew. I just assumed that I would always live the way that I was raised. It never really crossed my mind that I could or would live any differently.
Yet, the past few years have been an awakening of sorts for me. Personal reflection has let me delve into myself a bit and figure out what I really want in life. And here's the thing: I love the Jersey Shore. I always will. It will always be home to me. When Hurricane Sandy tore into the place that I loved so much, several years ago, I was devastated and continue to feel that pain. That area will always be a part of me and I'll never be able to look at it in a negative way.
But do I want to live there again? No. Absolutely not.
This past summer my fiance Ross, and I took a 6 week road trip to look at several potential businesses to buy. We searched out potential locations prior to starting the trip, but it wasn't until we were about 1/3 of the way into the trip when we realized that we had inadvertently been following the Appalachian Mountains all the way up. Without intentionally doing it, we had only chosen to look at places that were in the mountains, or near the mountains on the East Coast. We visited 23 different properties on our trip. We quickly ruled out several places and then put a lot of thought into the remaining ones.
Since this will be a business that we hope to run for a long time, we started really thinking about where we wanted to live and how we wanted to live.
For me, I really wanted to make sure that I chose the right place. Years of moving to places that I couldn't chose, due to being married to a guy in the military, made me want to really have a say in where I move to next.
So what do I like? Thinking back throughout my whole life, I reached the conclusion that the Jersey Shore is surprisingly NOT where I feel most a home. Suburbia (in anywhere America) is not where I feel at home. The shore/ocean is not a place that I enjoy very much. The places where I feel the most mentally alive are comprised of 3 things: history, space, and color.
To delve into those 3 things a bit more:
History has always been something that is important to me. That's proven by my degree in History. The American South is where I find the most fascinating history, but really, history in general makes me happy and holds my attention.
Space is something that I need, and I've only come to realize this recently. I am tired of living next to obnoxious people. I'm tired of apartments. I'm tired of houses with small yards and nosy neighbors. I want land. I want land to spread myself out on with gardens and animals and I want to use that land the way I want to. Not the way a neighborhood tells me that I have to.
Color is referring to the general look of the land. Washington state is a beautiful place filled with green trees and all kinds of vegetation and beautiful mountain scenery and I ended up loving it there. Texas, on the other hand, is a brown, flat dessert. I have never felt truly happy in Texas. I've complained about the brown color, endless flat land, lack of trees and the color green, for years now.
When I think back to the places where I have felt the most comfortable throughout my entire life - really think back, I surprised myself a bit with the epiphany I had. I've never truly been comfortable in suburbia. Sure, in high school, a good friend and I used to always talk about getting out of that town and doing something great with our lives, but when I said I wanted to get out, I simply meant that I wanted to go somewhere new. And "new" doesn't necessarily mean "different". I didn't know at that time, that what I really wanted was something different.
So where have I felt the most comfortable? Memories are wonderful things. And the happiest childhood memories I could recall came from 3 places:
First: Vermont. My aunt lived in a very small town when I was a little kid, and we visited her at least twice a year. She lived at the top of a hill that was on the back of a mountain. As I got a little older, she moved to an even more remote location - basically the top of her own mountain. I loved the time that I spent in Vermont. I loved her small town life. I loved that the second town that she lived in still utilized a one room schoolhouse. I loved how pretty the mountains were in Vermont. My favorite day trip when visiting her, was to the small town of Weston, which to this day, isn't even written on some maps! I used to make fun of her for living in the middle of nowhere, but that never stopped me from loving the time that I spent up there. At the time, I felt like she lived on some foreign planet. Now, I just see it as a wonderful, different way to live.
Second: Historic Houses. Two childhood memories that I can recall clearly involve old historic houses. When I was in elementary school I had a friend who lived in an old 200 year old house in town. It was right on the bay, had a widow's walk and was supposedly haunted. I thought this house was the coolest place ever. I was in second grade, yet I still appreciated the history of this house. I even remember a sleepover party where all of the other girls wanted to play games, and I just wanted to explore the house. The second memory is my dad's cousin's house in Ohio. When I was 10 we went on a trip to see some extended family, and my cousin had just bought a "new" house. It was a pre-Civil War era farmhouse, that is listed on the National Historic Register. The sad thing (to me) is that he bought it only for the land that came with it. He wanted to own his own farm, so he bought one. The history of the house didn't interest him at all, but this place fascinated me! Even as a 10 year old I found it so discouraging that he didn't even know the history of the house, and he didn't care. After a week of exploring the house and the old barn that came with it, I decided then and there that I would restore an old house one day. I decided that at 10 years old and I haven't changed my mind yet. Restoring an old historic house is still something on my bucket list.
Third: Camp. I started going to a sleep away girl scout camp when I was 11 years old. It was up in the mountains of northwestern New Jersey and it was absolutely beautiful up there. I was a camper there until I was 15 and then at age 16, I started working as a counselor there. When I was 19, I spent my last summer there, but it was only my last because I needed a summer job that paid more. If I had a choice, I would have worked there forever. Being up in those mountains, at that camp, and canoeing on the Delaware River as part of one of the camp's programs, was something that I loved and something that I have always treasured and will continue to treasure for the rest of my life. I felt at peace up there. I loved being secluded from the "real world" for several weeks each summer. One thing that keeps popping into my head right now is a campfire song that we used to sing. It's called Moon on the Meadow and one of the lines is "People in cities don't understand, falling in love with the land." Even as a camper there, that line always stood out to me because its the truth. We always sang the song at the last night campfire of each session and that line always brought tears to my eyes, even as a kid. I always identified myself as a city person, yet THAT line, and my emotional reaction to that line, shows me now, that I'm not a city person. I thought that I was, but cities aren't where I feel the most at home. Mountains give me that feeling instead.
Aside from childhood, some of my most recent favorite memories (i.e. "places where I felt the most comfortable") include, Olympic National Park in Washington state, The Columbia River Gorge between Washington and Oregon, the view of Mt Baker that I could see daily from my home on Whidbey Island in Washington, the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Canadian Rockies, Alaska, driving the Alaska Highway in the Yukon Territory and seeing the beautiful mountain views, driving the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia, Yosemite National Park...and so on. Basically mountains and land is where I feel comfortable and mentally happy. I don't feel that way in the middle of a city.
The irony here is that Ross and I have settled on a location that we are currently in negotiations with to purchase. And where is it? Right back in the same area where I had my first taste of "the rest of the world". Its in a small town in Virginia, right down the road from where that old boyfriend used to live. We even found our perfect house (pre-Civil War in need of restoration), right on his old street. While the house is unlikely to work out, the business is looking promising right now.
I've been pondering this situation because in a way, I feel like I've come full circle in this "finding myself" game. I used to make fun of him when we were together. I don't recall ever making fun of the area that he introduced me too. I loved the history of the area and I loved the mountains and the valley area, and if my memories are correct, I always told him that. But I definitely picked on him for being a "country boy". I never picked on him to be intentionally mean, but I definitely mocked his small town, country lifestyle. I never imagined that I would want to live that way. Yet here I am, about 13 years after college, about to close a real estate deal in that exact same location that I once thought I could never live in. If you had talked to me a year ago, 5 years ago or 10 years ago, I never would have imagined that I might be living there one day. The truth is that traveling has opened my eyes to who I really am. I don't know if I would have reached these conclusions without so much traveling. In the end, I'll still be fairly close to "home". I like the East Coast better than the West Coast and I probably always will. But the city girl that I once was? It turns out that she never existed in the first place.
Some pictures of my adventures:
Devil's Tower, Wyoming
Badlands National Park, South Dakota
Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park
Highest Point on a drive through the Beartooth Mountains in Montana and Wyoming
Marymere Falls in Olympic National Park, Washington state
Some standard Washington driftwood on 3rd Beach in LaPush
Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in Mt. Vernon, Washington state
Mt. St. Helens
Sunset over the Columbia River Gorge - between Oregon and Washington
Multnomah Falls in Oregon
Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies - in April
Cascades National Park in Washington state
Tunnel Mountain in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
Lake Agnes - high above Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies
view of Mt Rainer from Whidbey Island, Washington
The Yukon Territory
The other side of the Yukon Territory - I took pictures of both signs because the first one is where I entered the territory, but the second one has beautiful snowy mountains behind it.
A lynx that we saw on the side of the road while we drove through the Yukon Territory
A frozen lake outside of Anchorage, Alaska
The Arctic Circle - off the Dalton Highway in Alaska
Crater Lake National Park, Oregon
view from Anacortes - just north of Whidbey Island, Washington
inside an old burned out tree in Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia
Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah
Long House, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
A day hike on Mt Rainer
Mt Rainer, Washington
Third Beach, La Push, Washington
Deception Pass, Whidbey Island, Washington
Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, Alaska
Kluane National Park, Yukon Territory, Canada
The Grand Canyon
Stanislaus National Forest, California
