Hello, friends.
Well, it’s been a hot minute. This is, accordingly, a long one, but if you’re down to put up with it I’d be thrilled. I start out very self-indulgent. I’ll get to the big picture, I promise.
I’m not going to lie: I’ve felt creatively sapped, unable to put together thoughts in a remotely coherent fashion, and also pretty emotionally distant from the subject matter at hand. Ostensibly, I’m writing here about our relationship to the outdoors in the 21st century, but in spite of having the privilege of spending the past few months bouncing around some of the most beautiful places in North America, I just couldn’t. I’d go for a hike in Sedona’s red rocks, or kick my feet up overlooking a canyon in west Texas, or marvel over the way the landscape transforms from prairie to mountain to desert as you drive across New Mexico, and — sure, it was beautiful. But could I find the focus or energy to write about it? Hell, no.
Translating experiences into words is something I’ve always found it relatively easy to do, and so it’s put me in a bit of a funk to know that it just hasn’t been happening lately. But, in all honesty, it’s encompassed more than that frustration. “I feel dead inside” is a cliché. It’s also the kind of oversimplified mental health alarm bell you could expect to see on a Pinterest-optimized graphic of “signs you might need a therapist.” It’s also the easiest way to describe how I’ve been feeling lately, broadly speaking. This summer I was running around a farm barefoot and cut off from almost all human contact, staying up late to see the NEOWISE comet or waking up before dawn to catch an epic sunrise, utterly thrilled by strange projects like foraging in the backyard or trying to identify all the local bird species. I was leaning hard into every advantage of a dreamy, languid East Coast summer that did not expect you to be at industry trade shows or sweltering New York City subway platforms or the Cape Cod wedding of someone who you’ve seen go from green-haired archaeology major to McKinsey middle management over the past 15 years. I had no real obligations or demands to “show up.” And I was absolutely enraptured.
Somewhere in there that went away. I felt out-of-sorts the moment I got back to Brooklyn in August, and from that point on it was more or less a slow slide downhill. I started mindlessly hitting the “order” button on Seamless when two months earlier I’d been making my own tamarind stir-fry sauce. The brain fog set in, as did the irrational and sometimes self-destructive behavior. None of this made sense, because I’m supposed to be okay.
The past year has screwed with us all, but in my mind it shouldn’t have screwed with me all that much. I’m at low risk for COVID, my family’s stayed healthy and I’ve been able to see them regularly, I’ve had secure employment, and I don’t have kids who would need high-stakes Zoom schooling supervision or a partner at whom I would invariably start throwing things if we had to turn a cramped apartment into a workspace. And I was well-positioned to make the best of the pandemic, including but not limited to the fact that I had the opportunity to buy a car, throw my stuff in storage, and drive across the country. This all could have amounted to a Substack in itself, or an artsy photo essay, or postcards to all my friends who were once “back home” but are now, like me, dispersed across the country. It could have been prime, ongoing, vivid creative fuel.
Instead, I just got exhausted and numb. These days in those hours after work that I ought to consider ripe for creativity, I find myself wandering along the Pacific coastline alone, my toes squelching through the sand, watching the sun set over a diorama of surfers and palm trees, and thinking to myself on a loop, “None of this is real.”
Here’s the other problem: This is, ostensibly, a newsletter about the outdoors, and the physical enjoyment thereof. And sometime in the past few months, I realized my body had completely broken down and probably had been that way for years.
And if you left it up to me, every day would be a holiday from real
I guess I should mention that I wound up in Los Angeles. This wasn’t part of the plan with the whole cross-country drive scheme, and in fact, I had a sublet already booked in northern Utah. That didn’t happen. There’s a running gag in old Bugs Bunny cartoons where the eponymous rabbit winds up somewhere he didn’t expect and explains that he “shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”
As for me, I didn’t take that right turn at Flagstaff. I’m not sure how familiar you are with Flagstaff, but it’s a real gem of a city and I’m both surprised and relieved that it isn’t mentioned alongside Asheville and Austin in clickbait lists of Cute Outdoorsy Places Where The Millennials Should Drift. You should visit it sometime. It also has lots of breweries and freight trains and (to my knowledge) is the first place along I-40 where the westbound on-ramp tells you that you’re ultimately headed in the direction of Los Angeles.
I followed the sign to Los Angeles.
The decision to not swing north to Utah was in large part because I’d been planning to set up shop in Ogden for a bit and more or less ski all month, and there was a certain point that I realized that just wasn’t going to happen. My back pain has refused to go away for years and my leg muscles had atrophied to the point that attempting to ski was painful. I was chronically exhausted and getting tired and dizzy even on relatively mild hikes. In choosing to go to LA instead I was calling it quits on an attempt to make the most of a weird year by being as bold and active as possible. If you’re going to take things into the land of bad analogies, I felt like a failure of bipedal hominid evolution, crawling back to the sea. And now I’ve been in Venice Beach for six weeks.
There’s a certain kind of white-collar transplant who ends up in LA, particularly from the East Coast, particularly from New York, and winding up largely in the walkable West Side neighborhoods near the beach. They’re people who simultaneously want to be somewhere laid-back and messy, but as individuals, they want to be fixed. Or, putting it another way, New York is an outwardly orderly city that exalts chaos, and Los Angeles is an outwardly chaotic city that exalts order.
What do I mean here? New York is the kind of place where punctuality is a saintly virtue but where we all secretly love that “sorry I’m late, the subway broke down” is always a worthwhile excuse. We have an entire canon of unwritten but universally known rules about the speed for walking on the sidewalk or the proper way to order a bagel (unless it is a rainbow bagel, in which case you ought to be hauled to The Hague). We wear business formal to the office but then we’re spilling Halal Guys or Chinese takeout or a cheap beer from a Murray Hill faux-dive onto it a few hours later. It’s completely acceptable in New York to be an absolute shitshow if you can figure out how to look good doing it, and in a sense, maybe that’s our mundane collective rebellion against a city that is so vocal about setting the pace and the order and the dialogue and the narrative. It’s the other half of our brains firing up and causing chaos and mayhem and everything that makes New York City so alive.
So, well, Los Angeles. This city, or at least its gentrified west side, is a hot mess. It wakes up every morning in a stranger’s bed where it can see both snow-capped mountains and the waters of the Pacific out of the panoramic windows of the bedroom, and it takes a brief glance and it yawns and doesn’t care and then it passes out again with a glass of celery juice in hand. Nothing works here. A lot of things don’t work in New York either, but everything that goes wrong typically gets confidently and squarely blamed on Bill deBlasio or maybe whoever’s running the MTA. In LA the chaos comes from everywhere and the leadership (both good and bad) from nowhere easy to pin down, given that there are like six hundred different city governments and municipalities and yet they’re all part of the same thing apparently but who knows. The traffic is so bad it can demand that you rearrange your whole schedule, public transportation is famously sparse, and at this point it seems like, depressingly, people in Trendy Neighborhoods™ like mine have completely accepted the existence of the stark and painful income inequality that they have, in part, been fueling. This whole town is going to like, burn down or fall into the sea or something at some point, so I guess some people have given up on trying.
There are no real seasons. A childhood friend from New Jersey who moved to LA and then Mexico told me that the years kind of bleed together because you have so much less of a frame of reference for what time of year something happened in. I think of the Lotus-Eaters from Homer’s Odyssey a lot. When people in LA tell you that spring is coming, they bring up things that would barely merit notice in New York, where the snow melts and then suddenly the trees are dramatically in bloom. But they find their own tiny ways to commemorate those milestones, to somehow attach themselves to cycles of nature in a place where the years bleed together like this. They cling to the idea of seasons. They start to impose order. The Lotus-Eaters start to get antsy and ask whether the lotuses are paleo or keto.
The great reprogramming
Maybe, then, I shouldn’t have been surprised to be surrounded by the message that LA invariably sends to people who seem to have the time or the money: You are broken, too. But unlike this city, your time has come to be fixed. Since arriving in LA, I’ve learned that omega-6s are bad for you and shilajit is good for you and that $11 for a smoothie is a great deal. People go to bed really damned early here! And like, maybe it’s a complex. The folks in LA who are of a certain social class but not quite high enough, who are here in this Eden-punctuated-by-earthquakes, who are aware that their presence here is ethically precarious due to the visibility of longtime residents pushed onto the streets — maybe this is why they want some discipline in their lives in this wildly undisciplined place. It’s beautiful and it feels fake, maybe because it sort of is fake, and I think that freaks people out. They can’t fix it. Or maybe they don’t want to fix it because then they’d have to face hard truths about their own spot in this weird firmament. So they try to fix themselves instead.
Me? I got introduced to a biomechanics specialist. Once a week I go to a small gym inside a light-filled office building in Santa Monica and I spend 90 minutes re-learning how to sit, stand, walk, and eventually run. Allegedly, from years of sitting at a desk and gradually losing the foundation I’d built as an athlete, my spine had become compressed by a full two inches and my shoulders were practically sliding down my back like tectonic plates into a subduction zone. The reason I’m chronically exhausted and in pain, my trainer explains, is that I’ve been unconsciously prioritizing the wrong muscle groups.
The whole experience makes me feel like an android getting debugged and loaded with new software. It’s working, or at least I think it is. I’m sitting up straighter, my back pain is disappearing, my clothes are fitting better despite less exercise rather than more, and every time I go for a walk I feel like I’m getting a Brazilian Butt Lift workout because I’ve been trained to re-engage my glutes. It’s a weird merger of the natural and unnatural because it takes so much intense discipline to bring myself back to a place that, ostensibly, my human body is supposed to be functioning in a more ancient and intentional way.
But walking around Venice Beach you’re surrounded by constant reminders that some things remain unfixable, in spite of — or perhaps because of — humanity’s most valiant attempts. The whole neighborhood, after all, is the remnant of an early 20th-century folly to build an idyllic seaside resort, funded by a New Jersey tobacco fortune of all things. Coastal marshland was drained. There used to be an amusement pier, and a lagoon, and considerably more canals than there are today, and choo choo trains.
This wouldn’t last, of course. By the early 1920s, Prohibition’s onset meant that the resort area was a whole lot less fun, and the allure of automobiles meant that living in a neighborhood where you had to travel around by twee little boats became far less appealing. The town, then separate from Los Angeles, became unmanageable because of the strain of a dense population on its infrastructure. Oh, and then somebody struck oil right off the coast and that seems to have been a bit of a distraction. Most of the canals were filled in, and paved roads were built in their place. This attempt to resculpt the natural world was doomed not by nature itself — it was doomed by some of humanity’s more misguided attempts to negotiate order and chaos within itself.
The unspoken privilege of checking out
Now, lest I sound too negative, I think being here has been good for me, emphasis on “me.” My stress levels have plummeted and my productivity has finally been on the rise, following months of deep depression. The weather is incredible. If I need a mental reset, I can walk to the beach or to the canals. My peers really do treat themselves better here — and I think if I’d stayed in New York I would have accepted that my body and mind were wrecked, because New Yorkers tacitly accept that the city will do that to everyone. So, yes, being in LA has been good for me, but candidly, I don’t think that I’m good for LA. It activates the latent Catholic guilt in a way I never experienced in New York. Joining this class of avocado-toast professionals who populate Abbott Kinney Boulevard in designer sunglasses and camo joggers, monitoring every step of self-improvement on Fitbits or Whoops or Apple Watches, drinking $15 green juices from Erewhon, feels like a devil’s bargain. We get to be the tanned, fit, low-stress professionals we always wanted to be. But at whose expense?
Walk around the Venice Canals and you’ll see colorful signs for liberal activist causes dotting the yards of million-dollar homes, framed by gardens of succulents and banana trees, but you wonder what the residents of those homes have had to do with the fact that the unhoused population that’s visible just about everywhere else in the neighborhood is conspicuously absent from this enclave. How many of us wound up here and found ourselves bobbing in sapphire-blue waters, floating in the sunshine, unwilling to admit what’s swimming around in the depths below? What if something is broken down there, and we can fix it, but we’re too lulled by the water we’re floating in to pay attention?
COVID had barely entered the global lexicon when we started seeing the memes. The memes about how nothing was working anyway and this laid it all bare and gave us the chance for a reset. About how nature was healing because some sheep invaded a medieval town in Spain or something. But, no, humanity was still functioning, and so was its odd and sometimes contentious symbiosis with the natural world. Some of us just had the ability to check out of it.
Maybe these uncomfortable feelings are worse because COVID has meant that those of us whose lives quickly converted to a routine of remote work and cocktails-to-go have become divorced from our own communities and the world that we could potentially help shaping. Opportunities to volunteer in-person were heavily curtailed when the pandemic hit, which meant no more composting shifts at the Red Hook Community Farm or tending to the Governor’s Island chickens. (I highly recommend New York Cares, on that note.) Political activism under lockdown often turned into a game of screaming at one another on Twitter and launching hyperbolic campaigns to kick our elected officials out of office. Pre-COVID, the avocado toast classes couldn’t be bothered to get engaged in local civic affairs and now we’ve suddenly realized we let a bunch of lunatics and sociopaths get elected. We joke about how we’re going to exit COVID unsure of how to wear real pants or high heels or whatever; it is, in a sense, a proxy for the weirdness of not knowing who we want to be or what we want our roles to be in our communities. A lot of us have been asking ourselves the right questions, but our ivory-tower educations and corporate jobs in sunny open offices have never had much incentive to give us the right answers. Nor do many of us care. Thousands of New Yorkers with the means to do so left for upstate. San Franciscans left for Miami. Angelenos left for Texas. Or wherever.
If we’ve learned nothing else: screw the hustle
I have had a lot of anxiety lately that I couldn’t quite articulate, and I think it comes from the fact that the end of the “COVID era” is near and now I find myself subconsciously asking the question, “Will this go away?” Will I suddenly start feeling a new sense of aliveness and enthrallment the first time I’m able to go to a loud, sweaty dance party under the stars — and what happens if I don’t? What happens if the things we’re supposed to be missing so dearly right now end up leaving us no less empty and unfulfilled when we can experience them again? What if we’re still broken? What if there wasn’t anything real to “heal” to? Where is our place in humanity? Where is our place in something bigger than humanity?
I’ve started to think about going back to New York. I’m not sure if I will. That said, I didn’t really set myself up to move out to LA permanently, or to anywhere else for that reason, and it’s unsurprisingly difficult to find short- or medium-term furnished rentals when your sidekick is a fully clawed miniature panther who knows how to open kitchen cabinets. But I also miss New York’s great equalizers. Our favorite foods are cheap and greasy and affordable and everyone likes them and if you don’t we make fun of you. One of the candidates for mayor had to put out a hilariously detailed explanation of why he doesn’t eat bagels, for goodness’ sake.
The first and so far only time I’ve felt any kind of great equalizer as a resident of west LA has been a few days ago, when I drove downtown and walked into Lincoln Park and rolled up my sleeve to get the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine, surrounded by dozens of other people from every background and income level that you can find in this city. It felt great. It felt real. It didn’t feel like the Lotus-Eater life along the canals. I may have hit the road in search of openness, expansiveness, big empty canvases that I could fill with my own story, but I found myself instead craving density, craving mischief, craving the ways that you can poke holes in any semblance of big structured human order. And maybe, on a more selfish level, craving a place where I don’t feel like I’m unquestionably part of the problem but have no real ability to do anything about it.
I can learn something from this experience: New York’s signature hustle is unquestionably toxic, and I hope we can gain a new perspective about that post-COVID. I don’t want the late nights at the office or the bottomless-mimosa brunches after three hours of sleep anymore. This more insidious part of the city’s culture is that when everyone of a certain income level — the ones who should be able to effect change in local politics and other civic affairs — is so wildly overscheduled and exhausted and tend to turn to self-destructiveness, they either voluntarily or accidentally miss out on countless ways to be part of their communities. Among my peers our idea of “doing good” often consists of handing over a few thousand dollars and the contents of our figurative Rolodexes to sit on the host committee of something to benefit, I don’t know, kids in the Bronx or an art museum or endangered squirrels (are there endangered squirrels?) or something.
Being a young-ish professional in New York, you kind of get a pass on being a self-indulgent asshole because it’s understood that you likely have so little time to do much else. In LA, everyone seems to have free time, and a slow pace, and beaming sunshine, and good vibes, but I truly think many of them don’t know what to do with it all in this messy and tragicomically dysfunctional city and so they follow the siren song of CrossFit or Ayurvedic cleanse retreats. But imagine taking that impulse to fix, to improve, and to take it somewhere that it can make a difference. Somewhere that it’s not just my own posture that I can correct, but the big and creaky posture of a city that we all feel we have a hand in holding up.
Maybe that’s a weird admission for someone who vocally bailed on the city in search of unapologetic permissionless quests in the wilderness. But if I’ve learned anything from working with a biomechanics specialist in Santa Monica, it’s that part of being a human navigating the 21st century is to find the weird ways to tap into hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in the places that we don’t expect them, rather than the places that we do expect them. Because there is nature and wildness in every corner of our densest cities, too.
Some of it, even, takes the form of a snowy owl.
If there’s anything I regret missing in New York this winter it’s the experience of huddling together with a crowd of other people in the freezing darkness of Central Park after nightfall, cameras and smartphones in hand, focusing our gaze to try to get a look at a bird that seems to not belong there and yet unquestionably is just as much of a New Yorker as the rest of us. In my mind we hold our breaths behind masks, we forget for a moment just how much absolute bullshit we’ve been through in the past year, and we wait for our collective gasp at the thrilling, electrifying moment when she takes flight.
Stay wild,
Caro
Brilliant piece. I've spent enough time in NYC to have everything you say about that mad place ring true – but I've barely been to LA. Thanks to you I think I've gotten a year's worth of the place's lived experience through a ten minute read.
Best so far! (And Flagstaff is pretty awesome)