It's Fun to Dream
I've been dreaming a lot about the town where I spent my college years, which my parents said may as well have been a fantasy place for its lack of resemblance to the real world I would supposedly enter after graduation. I'm referring to the near-idyllic, quaint hippie town of Arcata, California. At that time it had about 16,000 residents, a good proportion of whom lived on the university campus in the middle of a redwood forest.
From the highest point on campus you could see to the southern edge of the town, where it turned into marsh and met the edge of Arcata Bay. To the west, you could see a hazy blue stripe of Pacific Ocean on the horizon just a couple of miles away. Through six years of attending school there, I never stopped being amazed at how close the ocean was.
I spent hours and hours at the beach, sometimes doing homework or hanging out with friends, but mostly watching the waves quietly. I often recreated one of the classic poses in which my parents photographed me as a kid: sitting alone on a rock at the ocean's edge, looking out at the vastness, wrapping a sweatshirt around my knees. When I got my first digital camera, I drove up and down the Humboldt County coast to take photography walks alone. I tried to capture the beautiful spareness of those beaches with their dark gray, rough-hewn rocks and plants made hardy by the constant sea breeze.
That rustic, restless beauty seems to be the thing that pulls my dream self back to Humboldt. It's a recurring dream where my husband and I plan to relocate there from Oregon. The typical scenario, which has played out at least half a dozen times now, starts with us browsing online ads to find a home near the water. Then we either move or take a trip to look at houses. We visit the beach, where I stand still and grin at the blue-green water lapping over my toes. I feel lucky to be able to call this place home again.
But there's always a stressful bit where we try to figure out how to make a living in that sparsely populated county. Arcata and its neighboring midsize city, Eureka, are hours away from any real economic hub. In reality, we would have a hard time finding jobs that would let us afford the inflated cost of living there. The dream version of me usually ends up either working back at the same firm that employed me when I left Arcata in 2008 (which serves a different field than I work in now), or continuing to work remotely for an employer in Oregon and fretting about a forced return to office.
I usually wake up during the stressful part.
It's odd to me that this dream has become so frequent, but it didn't come from nowhere. When I moved away from Arcata, I missed the beach and the redwoods and the small-town vibe. It just didn't have enough opportunity for me as a college graduate who wanted to experience something new. I settled down in Portland and toyed with the thought of returning to Humboldt in retirement.
I took my husband on a trip there in 2018, when I was pregnant with our son. As a person who grew up in the hippie town of Ashland, Oregon, he immediately liked Arcata. I swear that whenever I tell him about my dream, his eyes light up as if moving there has suddenly become a possibility. He's always wanted to live in a less populated area, but he partnered with a woman who is more city mouse than country mouse. I can't truly see myself moving back to such a remote area.
So, then, I'm not sure why these dreams are recurring. It could be a manifestation of stress, like the dream where I need to go back to school to take a remedial class that I didn't know I'd failed. Sometimes a sense of obligation bubbles beneath the dream, like I'm being forced to move back there to finish my college degree.
It might be a product of nostalgia, which I experience a lot as a person who writes and reflects on her own life. My college years were (obviously) significant to me personally. They also happened to occur in one of the most naturally beautiful places in the United States, and in a storybook town. Like my parents said when they visited, it was almost unreal. Arcata was full of students and artists and Victorian buildings and used books and people dancing arhythmically on the plaza among puffs of pot smoke. I was never interested in weed, but I loved to walk downtown from campus and soak up the good life with a chocolate soda from Bon Boniere or a cheeseburger from Stars.
I'm certain it has changed a lot in the eight years since I was last there. If people are being price gouged just to live in ordinary towns throughout the country, then the effect must be multiplied for housing in the coast redwoods of California. It might not be within economic reach to live there again in 25 years.
But it's fun to dream.