Oh the Places You'll Go

How to find a place for yourself

San Francisco

“It was okay with me. Once again I wanted to get to San Francisco, everybody wants to get to San Francisco, and what for?”

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

I got to San Francisco in July 2019 riding at max speed, 50 mph, in a beat 2000 Jetta my buddy Matt and I found on Craigslist in Boston for $400 that previous October. I was dead broke, having spent all my money, including my starting bonus, on gas and food and a cheap sailboat my friend Finn and I barely got running up in Vancouver the previous month and had to flash sell at a loss after US Customs rejected its shoddy trailer design.

I was so broke and ill-equipped I had spent the previous three days and two nights camping out in the Redwoods with just a tub of peanut butter to keep myself fed as I camped alone in the last-available backpacking spot in Redwoods National Forest. I don’t remember being hungry on that trip, but I do remember seeing some tall trees. And I remembered how I smiled when the Patagonias would give me a double take for carrying the 8-person family tent I borrowed from my dad, all alone.

It was, I believe, a miracle to my aunt that I made it to her place in the San Francisco suburbs in one piece and in good spirits. I felt like I was home, even though I had yet to secure a home. San Francisco was reining down on me and I was ready to set up my life around the city that I knew I could bend to my own imagination.

“None of us have any money, and it doesn’t matter. We were on top of the world.”

- Gary Kamiya, 49 Views of San Francisco (2013)

I lived in the bedroom with roof access in a 4-story white Victorian in the Mission for exactly a year. I got my inspiration from views of pastel Victorians lofting on dry hills. For a month my favorite thing to do was drag friends along in my beater car to check out the best perches in the city at all hours of the day and night. Twin Peaks, Coit Tower, Bernal Heights, Alamo Square, and best of all Marin Headlands. When the car finally died, on a trip down 101 to a talk at Stanford on a stagnant Saturday, it died with grace and momentum enough to carry Jeff, Will, and me to a safe parking spot out in Portola.

From then on, I saw the city mostly on my bike commutes to work. I don’t think I ever looked up directions, and for a while I would take a different route every day. With time, it became impossible to be truly lost on my route to work, and at that moment a routine emerged. On days when I felt a spirit in me I’d take the route through Soma, past the Airbnb headquarters and underneath Salesforce park, whirring through cars and traffic, headphones on, feeling the tempo and temperature of the city instinctively. On days when I just needed to get to work I’d go through the uniform offices and modern apartments in Mission Bay.

My coworker Mason taught me how to walk San Francisco. At lunch at the office we’d take myriad walks, mostly in search of food or headspace or one of the city’s hidden staircases I had never discovered before. He showed me docks on the bay, public walkways above FiDi, and the gardens on the way up to Coit tower.

“Two or three hours' walk will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.”

-Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862)

After work, I’d bike past friends’ apartments or workplaces and stop by for dinner. It seemed everything and everyone was on what I called my critical line through the city — stretching from FiDi where I worked down to the southern part of the Mission between where I lived. Of course, it wasn’t a coincidence that my life seemed to neatly fit on this line, my serendipitous personality and the geography of the city made it so.

When quarantine hit, the world shrunk. It took me some time to notice that part of what I was missing, in addition to the people and relationships I had fallen into, was the places in the city. I would still take walks around my neighborhood, still take weekend runs and bikes to my favorite parks, and still see a select few friends, but these excursions felt like atomized experiences instead of part of the rich networked life world that my previous 7 months in the city had etched. To walk around the city with a non-roommate friend became an event on a calendar requiring multiple sign-offs from virus-concerned roommates on both sides.

There was no question when our lease was up that the six of us on Bryant Street would be splitting up and mostly heading out of town.

New York City

I went east because I knew there would be more action out east. I was half-convinced New York must have COVID herd immunity, and wholly convinced that the friends I had there would be a little more restless. I lived in Murray Hill, in Chinatown, and in Williamsburg for two and a half weeks total.

My life suddenly became a welcome blur of outdoor bars, remembering friends-of-friends names, walking obscene distances, cheap pizza, and expensive drinks. After months of being bored out of my mind, suddenly I had to really schedule my time wisely. I had to think about where things were happening again. Was the restaurant near a City Bike dock, and on the way back between Central Park and Chinatown?

“Who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge”

- Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1955)

What’s great about New York that is often under appreciated is that even in its jungle form the city is navigable by the heuristics of its grid system and the well-defined natural boundaries that are the East and Hudson rivers. As someone that’s never lived in New York but visited every chance I could, when I’m in the city I can feel like I know just enough about where I am to find my way to the next destination. Even imbued with this confidence, I carry enough doubt and hope that I might discover something new along the way.

The energy of the people of New York is unmatched by the people of any other city in America. Most young people in the city moved to the city so that they could live in New York, and people that grew up in the city blanketly acknowledge they were lucky to get in on the city’s secret sauce earlier than the rest of us. Besides all New Yorkers possessing this energy, they’re about as diverse a bunch of people you can expect to find all crowded together.

In San Francisco there exist maybe two or three sub-cultures total, with the information technology startup culture overwhelmingly dominant. In New York, I haven’t reached the bottom of the barrel. There are arts people, finance people, sports people, technology people, academics. There are liberals, conservatives, rich people, poor people, old people, young people. And they’re all such characters. You could probably write a half-decent novel centered around any particular friend group in New York.

In San Francisco everyone wants to live on a hill overlooking the action. In New York, people want to feel, taste, and smell the action. It’s a refreshing way to experience place.

Minneapolis

It was a surprise to pretty much everyone I knew that I was lock-set on spending winter in Minneapolis. It was an even bigger surprise to people that I ended up living in North Minneapolis, an area whose poverty and violence were acute even before the recent recession and the unrest caused by the May 2020 shooting of George Floyd.

It was a very intentional decision. Minneapolis, probably because it’s where I’m from, is the only place in the world where I feel like I can be my ridiculous self without caring what anyone else thinks. Obviously, this has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it’s a place where prestige carries no currency. People are open minded but generally don’t care very much about what you’re up to; they care about who you are. Friends like that will really strengthen your personality. People take you seriously if you say you might quit your job and try to start a company, but they don’t know anyone else who has done that and don’t have any sort of advice to give. You can go down your own rabbit hole for a little while without anyone thinking it’s fanatical.

A Minneapolis winter will also make you think very intentionally about how you want to live your life. Of course, modern technology exists that allows you to go out and find challenges, people, and events that motivate you in the winter — but many people, even native Minnesotans, don’t do this¹. If you want to have a good life in Minneapolis in the winter, you have to be resolute. You have to be intentional. It’s not like New York or San Francisco where you can expect proximity and the party-of-the-week to tell you what to do. I needed that intentionality. I had melted into the medium a bit too much in the past 6 months on the road.

“Self-constancy signifies nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness”
-Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

So I was resolute. I decided quickly that I was going to get into cross country skiing, that I was going to stay the whole winter, that I wasn’t going to cave in and buy a car, and that I was going to live anywhere but with my parents (sorry). Of these resolutions, skiing taught me the most.

I must preface this next section by saying that by no means would I be accepted by those that call themselves serious cross-country skiers. I don’t own my own gear (I borrow my mom’s gear from the 80’s) and have never skied competitively. It’s strange that those two qualifications, ownership and competition, are almost always the markings of a legitimate hobby in America when really they’re so tangential to the concept of a pastime. Since childhood there have been years where I haven’t skied at all and years where it’s been my zen.

From a phenomenological point of view, skiing is a hard drug. You breath hard, you’re suddenly distant from other people, acutely aware of your surroundings. Maybe your face is a bit red. When you’re really in the zone, your mind is focused only on balance and calculating whether your pace needs to slow down or speed up.

Besides the physical high I get from skiing, I loved how mobile it makes me feel in Minneapolis. Since so much of the city is parks, and since it’s not a particularly dense city, it’s possible to ski places as a means of transportation. I tested this out one day and skied 11 miles (would have been 6 by car) down Theodore Wirth Parkway, through the chain of lakes, and to my dad’s house. I arrived 10 minutes before dinner.

And then…

I get asked all the time about where I’m going next, whether I’m going to leave Minneapolis, and which place I like best after trying a few places out. My answer is I don’t know. This isn’t to say that place doesn’t matter —place matters so much more than people think it does, even (and maybe especially) over quarantine. And that’s why I don’t want to give any of these places up.

I think of place a little bit like medication. Feeling stressed out? Head to the West Coast. Bored? Hit New York City. Lost? Go back to Minneapolis. Repeat.

I’ll figure it out someday.

1. it’s a fact of life that most people are boring most of the time