Screen doors slumbered, sedans snoozed, spaniels snored. Subwoofers sat silent. Trucks denied their evening driveway idles. Cell phone blathering had long ceased or else faded toward a swallowing ether. Dinner dishes washed, dried, and shelved. Homework finished and the little ones off to bed. Crickets deigned to elicit a peep. Empty windless deserts; slipper-shod ghosts tiptoeing tenderly across silken sands. A veritable sonic void—dropped pins would have cleaved the night air as erupting ordnances.
It was quiet.
We had been driving for about nine hours. Our compact sedan leading a two-vehicle caravan with the moving truck bringing up the rear. Taking the southern-most exit toward Eugene, we drove past the community college campus, crept through a heavy damp mist, and finally rumbled to a stop at a corner residence—our new Oregon home. We backed the rented U-Haul into the driveway, parked the car at the curb, and killed the ignitions. Standing in front of the house, preparing to ferry our possessions inside we both noticed the silence.
“It’s probably late so we better be quiet while we move stuff so we don’t upset the neighbors.”
“Right.”
I checked the time: it was a little shy of 7 p.m. We both chuckled—wow.
Of course, the cities and suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area are bustling, boisterous, and endlessly awake. Of course, we knew large cities were louder than smaller ones. But, of course, everything is relative. A Saturday evening in Eugene was maybe a 4 a.m. Wednesday in Oakland.
My soon-to-be wife had lived her entire life in California, solely in metropolitan areas. I too had spent the vast majority of my time in the Golden State—in urban locales, suburban settings, as well as out in the sticks. But the Bay Area was perpetually overpriced, BART rides were growing grosser by the day, a dead body rested two blocks from the front door of my south Berkeley studio, and there was zero parking in North Beach on a Friday night in the city. The luster was dimming.
Deciding to exit the Bay Area we tossed around a variety of ideas, but kept landing back on Oregon. Thus, I applied to numerous jobs in the Beaver State with nearly all of my resumes emailed to Portland-area employers.
Circa 2012, Portland, Oregon was where “young people went to retire.” Everyone was a DJ, coffee shops competed for hipster street cred, commuting to the office via bicycle was mandatory, microbreweries were the city’s sanctioned religion, only organic-biodynamic-vegan food was approved for consumption, and the tech sector was blossoming. As Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein broadcast to the world: “The dream of the ‘90s is alive in Portland.”
I applied to one organization with an office in Eugene instead of Portland. They hired me.
Thus, on a chilly February night in 2013 we quietly unloaded the moving truck, trying our best not to cause a ruckus. We had been in town a mere half hour, but it was already obvious that Eugene was very different than the Bay Area.
In the coming years we would learn the ins and outs of Eugene: the nuances of weather patterns, where to find a decent burrito, the politics of the dog park, who was starting at linebacker this year for the Ducks, and how to combat the Willamette Valley’s seasonal grass seed allergies. And we would learn to embrace the silence.