October 30, 2020
Thirty years ago, while on a scholarship for screenwriting at the National Endowment for the Arts that I thought it would take me straight to the Star Door in Hollywood, I met, instead, a kindred spirit.
It was a month long program in Squaw Valley during those hot sizzling summer months in central California. She had long flowing raven black hair and deep dark brown eyes that shined out and burned into my soul. Perhaps there’s something in the DNA of people that makes their brilliance shine despite the turbulence that might be happening in their lives.
To come to the month long workshop she had to leave behind her two small girls, aged three and four. The father was a top Hollywood lawyer with a serious drug habit. One morning after their usual breakfast together eating buttered toast and drinking black coffee, he left her and his children and never came back….
I sighed…. As I drove along the Oregon coast on the 101, I inhaled the salty sea air and let my eyes, sore and reddened from the many California fires, drift across the wide ocean and blue sky. The total exhaustion of my fast paced life of ‘chronic doing’ had made it impossible for me to go on. I needed a break and I was going the way of my kindred spirit.
It had been another tumultuous fifteen years—another divorce, my father’s sudden, but peaceful death and the caregiving for my mother until the cancer spread and took her. My friend with the long flowing raven black hair and deep dark brown eyes and I somehow did not correspond with each other. “Maybe we won’t recognize each other,” I muttered, looking into the rear view mirror and seeing my roots that hadn’t been dyed since the shutdown.
She had gone to Port Townsend with an old flame before her marriage to the Hollywood charmer. “You’ll never guess what I just did.… I bought a Victorian house in Port Townsend”, she said out of the blue. At the time, even though she asked me to move there, I was devastated. Sponsored by a very rich prominent socialite, we had grand plans to open up our offices in Beverly Hills and be Hollywood producers of our very own creations.
However the strain of her failing marriage and the responsibility of being a single parent carried her to her breaking point. Moving away from the hectic lifestyle of Southern California she abandoned our Hollywood dream. Strangely, thirty years later, I was driving along the same windy road up the Oregon coast to the Washington Puget Sound’s sunny side to find a place from the maddening crowd.
“It was the best thing for her to do…,” I said out loud as we drove through the Pacific Northwest’s Temperate Rain Forest. My dog’s white ears perked up and she smiled out the window, smelling the fresh moist fragrance of evergreens that were still green and not charred to blackened charcoal like the forests we had driven through in California.
Finally, we reached Port Townsend’s gentle sloping hillside of quaint Victorian homes hemmed by water on three sides, I felt like I was coming home. Maybe it’s the placid Puget Sound ’s gently lapping, or maybe the light shimmering down through the gray moody sky scape. It didn’t matter, but it did all matter—I had made a life changing decision to move off the grid.
It seems like the COVID 19 pandemic will test us more. But, I feel I have moved on to a happier place.