Eternal Horizons
There was a time when emigrating to Portugal seemed impossible. The Portuguese Consulate in San Francisco was shuttered, as was much of the world in the first six months of the pandemic. It seemed for a time as if the two years of planning and research—the closing down of our home in California, giving away everything that would not be packed up in a few suitcases—might all be for naught. Eventually the Consulate reopened, visa applications were exchanged, airline tickets purchased, and one day at 4:30 am, we locked the door to our apartment for the last time. The next afternoon we were opening the door of an apartment in Coimbra—opening a door to a home in Portugal for the first time. When asked now if I plan to return to the United States it seems unimaginable that I could do so—unimaginable that I could abandon the strange and beautiful journey I am on.
Last year I watched a television series filmed in Pennsylvania—a state I lived in, off and on, for thirteen years, and as I watched it I was reminded how desperately I wanted to get out of Pennsylvania as a teenager—and how some days I felt as if I never would; felt I would never be able to visit all the places I dreamed of seeing; felt I would never have the chance to live in Portugal or to explore the south of France or the Pyrenees; would never taste the salty waves of the Mediterranean or learn how to harvest olives or conjugate verbs in Portuguese or Italian. As I watched the autumn mountains, the winding roads and small towns of Pennsylvania on the television screen, I felt simultaneously the familiar sense of affection and claustrophobia I had felt in high school.
Why is it something as simple as boarding a plane or a train and moving from one place to another should seem beyond reach? Humans, after all, have been moving great distances since before the advent of the wheel—since before we were human. Movement, it would seem, is in our DNA—as are curiosity and exploration. There is an inborn curiosity to know what lies on the other side of the mountain, the river or the sea. The eternal horizon of the prairies where I spent my early childhood seemed so vast I could hardly comprehend how simple it was to cross them, even as I had done so several times. Growing up surrounded by a sea of grass and grain was perhaps the beginning of a sense of wanderlust I have never been able to shake. What else is out there?
The first time we saw mountains, my brother, sisters and I thought they were the ocean, stretched out where the rolling hills of Ohio run abruptly into the Allegheny Mountains. I lived thirteen years in and around the Appalachians and thought I knew mountains until I lived in the Sierras, and then, later, the Rockies, whose unfathomable majesty, whose impossible peaks soar two miles and more into the thin, brilliant air—the dark sky after the sun has gone down so full of stars, seemingly so close it feels as if one could reach out and caress the Milky Way as it glides overhead every night. I am still astounded every time I touch down at Eppley Airfield on the banks the muddy Missouri River, and make the hour long trip across the plains of Nebraska to visit my family. I am older and taller than I was when I was growing up there, but the prairie is just as vast as it was then—its horizons still eternal.
When I was eighteen I stood on top of Mt. Killington in Vermont, gazing out over New England, and in the distance, Québec—the shadows of passing clouds moving over the lush, green landscape, the world spread out below me—all things possible. I was young and in Vermont as part of a theater company and the world was opening to me as it does for many who are young and hungry for life—the impossibilities of adolescence giving way to the discoveries of coming of age. The future happens in real-time and it seems everything we dream ought to be ours because we dream it. It seems something great is waiting around every corner, and we are only minutes away from destiny—everything we want just waiting to be claimed. Now I stand twenty-two years later, watching the shadows of clouds in the littoral of central Portugal—the fog lifting from the valley below, the honey glow of golden hour on the stone walls and fading blue shutters of a cottage surrounded by orange trees—and the world is still large and calling to be discovered. All things are still possible, though I know they are not waiting to be claimed—they must be earned, and when earned, cherished, for all things are brief, and all our discoveries in life—precious.