Six eighty four

Sometimes when I'm in Utah I like to visit places that were important to me when I lived there. Most of these are outdoor places – certain canyons, rivers, hotsprings, mountainsides and desert places I would go to when I needed to empty out my mind and let my soul re-emerge. I would ride my bike out to the end of the levy in the snow and take pictures of the sun shining through six-inch-thick plates of ice that stood all piled up on their edges like a gigantic traffic jam, where the waves had pushed the whole frozen surface of the lake up against the broken concrete of the levy. In the summer I would ride out over the mud flats, drawing giant picture and patterns in the mud with the tires of my bike, or sit on the rocks where the river poured into the lake and stare out across the water. In stormy weather you couldn't see the other side, and I would imagine a whole ocean out there, with other countries beyond it where everything was clean and quiet and beautiful and made sense. On the east side of the valley sometimes I would hike up to a certain large rock, half a mile in and a hundred yards up the side of a certain canyon, to sit on its smooth gray surface in the quiet, watching the empty black branches of a certain tree moving against the clean white snow. Sometimes birds would come. Whatever else was going on in my life, it was always quiet there.

I had a very comforting sort of vision of my grandmother there once. She said, "You're not alone. We're all right here, and life is shorter than you think."

Most of those special places are gone now, or ruined. People have cluttered up the west shore of the lake with houses and roads and streetlights. They've also built houses all around the mouth of that canyon so that you can't hike up into it anymore without climbing over people's fences. When I go to Utah now I stay with my parents, who live on the opposite end of the valley, and I rarely go down into my old neighborhoods anymore. I don't want to see what's happened to them since I've been gone. I like remembering them the way they were.

This last trip, though, I did drive by two of my old houses: the one I renovated and lived in for five years before moving back out to California, and the one in this picture. This is the first house I ever lived in on my own. All together, I think I only spent about two years in it – maybe not even that long – but in my memory it feels like I lived there forever.

We drove past it on our way to an exhibit at the BYU museum because I wanted to show it to Mr. A. I held my breath for the last block before we got to it, suddenly terrified that it would be gone – I didn't want the image of another ugly apartment building in my head. But the house is still there. Some things about it have changed – the big tree that used to shade the front yard has been cut down, and the place where I planted my first garden (the first garden that was really, totally, and exclusively mine) is now paved with asphalt. In place of the irises and roses I rescued and tried to take care is a handful of battered crocuses that are just starting to stick their noses out.

I knew it was kind of a bold move, but I couldn't help walking up closer to the porch – I wanted to take a picture of the door, for Julie. While I was standing there the woman who lives there now came walking around the corner of the house, and we spent several minutes chatting about the place. She loves it, too, and was glad to learn a little of its history. She told me the same guy still owns it, though possibly not for much longer – it's only a block from campus, and people are always wanting to buy the property and build something else there. Thinking of that makes me want to never drive by there again.

Anyway – for now it's still there, and I'm glad I got to see it. I spent so many hours sitting in the sun on that porch, reading or talking with friends or just watching people walk by. I spent a lot of time feeling alone in that house, too – a lot of time being alone – it was the first house where I ever lived by myself. It was the first time in my life I ever had the freedom to hermitize and hibernate and hide from the world the way I'd always wanted to.

The blue flowered bedroom I had there (which I know from a less recent visit has now been painted over, urgh) is, to this day, the best bedroom I've ever had. I loved to sit in the open doorway into the back yard in the morning, drinking mint tea and listening to Joni Mitchell and the Roches and writing in my journal and dreaming about how my life was going to be.

Sometimes I wonder how things might have been different if I'd felt secure enough to accept more attention and direction – or to ask for it – from people who knew more about how the world works than I did. Looking back on it, I think I really had no idea at all what I was doing, or what I was capable of doing. It's only in the last few years that I'm starting to get clear on all that.

Hm. I don't like thinking back on those times, suddenly. It makes me feel sad and lonely, like I missed out on something that will never come again. The funny thing is that even at the time, I felt that way.

I started out with the idea of writing a detailed memoir of that house, but now I don't feel like finishing it. Maybe another day. It might be interesting to write down everything I can remember about the life I lived there, and then compare it with what I actually wrote about my life at the time. When I've done this kind of exercise before, I've always been amazed – remembering only my supposed confusion and conflict in certain situations and relationships, for example – to see how extremely clear I usually was about what was really going on.

Insight is the easy part. What takes courage is making the leap from insight to action.