In a lower division class I took for American studies in college, we spent a couple weeks learning and reading about the frontier mentality; the American instinct to travel West and tame everything in one’s path. As part of our lesson, we read the journal of an explorer in Yosemite who compared the vast mountains, valleys, and redwoods to the grandest cathedrals one could dream of.

The lesson drawn from this at my liberal university was negative. Americans, at this time synonymous with white men, needed so much to control everything that they compare a natural landscape to a manufactured structure. Nothing so great could just exist; it had to be built.

Two weeks ago, my girlfriend and I packed up her Prius and headed North, from our shitty, overpriced apartment and entry-level retail jobs ­­in Santa Cruz, CA to a moderately nicer, reasonably-priced apartment and indefinite unemployment in Portland, OR. We’d saved enough for about three months, and spent about a month’s worth of that on the kind of stuff you never realize you need — a dish rack, a shower curtain, a new corkscrew to use in the days before our old one showed up in the mail.

Everyone asked us, of course, why Portland? The answer was two-fold. The practical adults we’re allegedly growing into needed to live somewhere with cheaper rent and more job opportunities. The happy-go-lucky college students we so recently were just wanted to live somewhere with lots of record stores and food carts. Neither of us particularly like rain, but not living somewhere because of rain is a bit like not dating a girl because of her hair color, isn’t it? It’s a bit of a stretch, even in terms of aesthetics.

On the way up, we stopped and camped for a night at Lake Siskiyou, near the border separating our old state from our new one. The lake was gorgeous, the kind of gorgeous that you can look right past on a postcard because it’s too perfect, but that gives you a kind of visual high in real life. As dusk fell, I think we both started feeling the kind of low-level anxiety that a separation from technology can bring about these days. But then we drank warm Sierra Nevada and played our own bastardized version of Gin Rummy until the stars came out, and all I could think of was that passage I’d read about the Northern California wilderness being like a cathedral.

I was much younger when I read that, but I was also more confident. A bachelor’s degree in American studies and an aversion to busywork won’t get your very far at 22, which shouldn’t have surprised me, but still did. I suppose I could say the part of me that writes poetry was a lot more surprised than the part of me that writes news articles. Moving to a bigger city will hopefully help me get somewhere, or at least give me enough hope to run on for the next couple years. But I’ll probably never realize all the things I dream of becoming.

But that should be okay. Looking at the stars and mountains and forest is supposed to make a person feel pleasantly insignificant; cocky explorers saw nothing but a building. Maybe I have to stop looking at myself as something to be built, and start looking at my life like a landscape. A landscape that stretches out in all directions, and North is just the way I happened to go this time.