Halfway Homegoing: travelling across US/Canada since August

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Since mid-August, I've been travelling cross-continental, US-Canada, mobile dwelling; and mostly around Toronto since late September. As in early 2024, the opportunity arose to speak at the annual YIMBY ("pro-housing movement" / Yes In My Backyard) conference — this time, with a promised honorarium, modest for sure, but for me, ample pretext to set full sail indefinitely. As Huckleberry Finn said, in parting, I reckoned it was time to "light out for the Territory," to road-trip coast to coast; and to points beyond.

This time, instead of barreling through the US Mountain West to Austin, Texas—then some months there and in Colorado, New Mexico, etc—I headed north right out of the country.

First I sojourned for two weeks on the Olympic Peninsula, for a gig looking after a trailer home and it's dog, in a clearing amid unbelievably towering Douglas Fir trees. I spent seemingly most of the time just sitting and marveling at those singular trees, and bonding with my new best canine friend Shorty Bee.

Then I stopped in Seattle, overnighting bang-smack central in the booming Capitol Hill district. This, I found strikingly easy to do via the ad-hoc smartphone-bookable parking schemes that seem to ultra-efficiently broker all and every leftover hour or square meter in this packed, bustling area.

Then I spent some days in gleaming Vancouver, BC, then drove up the Fraser River and Thompson Rivers valleys into the Columbia Mountains and Canadian Rockies, through Banff. Then back down on the other side of the Rockies to Calgary, Alberta—another immigrant boomtown, that ranks with Vancouver and Toronto as three out of six of the world's fastest growth-rate cities.

Around then this reverie amid natural and demographic splendor crashed into the realization that the YIMBYtown conference was by then just a few days away in New Haven CONNECTICUT, a mere continent or 2500 miles away.

So the serene sailing turned into a cannonball run: southern Alberta, Montana, South Dakota, Wisconsin, were almost all a blur, punctuated by odd vivid stops rolling into some recommended breakfast spot and experiencing, say, Sioux Falls, South Dakota for a few hours with great wonderment is if having stepped out of a UFO to stretch my legs.

One morning in there, as if waking from a groggy many-days' fever, I rolled into a crystalline Chicago early AM and breakfasted sitting streetside at the purported "first stop on Route 66," Lou Mitchell's diner, which I found to be entirely satisfying and solid fare, on top of a solid marketing game, the whole package.

Then I had the perhaps most surreal and blissful moment of the trip so far: stopping at the gorgeous Indiana Dunes National Park, and inset Century of Progress Architectural District, five preserved futurist-showcase houses from Chicago's 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition. I swam in these views of futures past, also in an impossibly turquoise and Caribbean-looking Lake Michigan, next to near tropically lush, towering vegetation, somehow just outside Chicago.

Another day or two of sleepless blur followed until I rolled into New Haven—the scene of vivid lost years of my youth, bright college years turned dark, which began to swim up in memory momentously. I arrive and went directly into my panel event, "Why YIMBYs Should Care About Homelessness, and How They Can Help." At which I gave my presentation, "How Homelessness Can Help the YIMBY/Pro-Housing Movement."

Soon after YIMBYtown wrapped up, I headed for the border again, crossed into Canada at Niagara Falls, picked up my friend after her political party's conference there, and rolled on into Toronto. TO, "the Six": in recent years, the fastest-growing metro area in the western hemisphere; so I figured, a reasonable prospect for at least tolerating/ignoring me for a bit.

Of this more in later installments, but let me just pause to explain, the post/chapter title, "Halfway Homegoing" It refers to the strange and personally apt fact that the distance (as the crow flies) from Portland, Oregon, where I started these travels, to NYC—where I was aiming for and might get to yet, and also lived for a fair 1/3 of my life — is quite precisely half of the distance from Portland back to London, UK. Where I grew up from the age of six months until around ten.

Although I was born in Portland, London was the only home/birth city I knew, until well along in life. Since I never became much rooted in Portland, and in adulthood mainly have lived elsewhere, I've long felt and quoted the line from Rumi: "My soul was born elsewhere, and I intend to end up there."

I got halfway back there, for 15 wondrous years living NYC. Since I've been in the SF Bay Areaz and Portland, now nomadic and mobile-dwelling for years, looking to take this eccentric orbit back to that old and still going strong First City of the World.

Whenever I travel anywhere now, in fact even consider doing so, I set up and thematically name a document to gather all materials related to it — a "trip book." It may be to start with or only ever, mundane notings of driving routes and architecture landmarks and foodie spots, whatnot, but it might also gather whatever poetry and art sticks to it along the way; and get reworked over and over into something I think of as, on its way to a book, in its dreams at least.

A key part of every trip now for me is the naming of it. Sometimes I happen upon the long-term name beforehand, sometimes during, sometimes after. This time I chose "Halfway Homegoing" as guiding theme sometime around when I first crossed into Canada in B.C.

One hopes, and I tend to experience, that the name/theme unfurls in time, comes to mean multiple things. In this case, as I've mulled "Halfway Homegoing" the original literal meaning of halfway from Portland back to London, has backgrounded. Foregrounded now, is a sense of it as a sort of ideal nomadic and adaptive state of being: always halfway home.

Halfway home is, the idea goes, where one really wants to be, in truth usually actually is. To be never entirely unembarked, and never fully there — because living is moving,

This recalls a favorite quote: "Our hearts are restless ["Inquietum Cor nostrum"] until they rest in you, Lord." From the beginning of St. Augustine's Confessions

["Inquietum Cor nostrum donec requiescat in te"]. The homes we speak of, that are available to us, ordinarily… is that all that we aim to get to? is anything on this earth a true home, or is any state on earth ultimately an imperfect waystation? as saints and philosophers have suggested since time immemorial. So let us respect the restless heart.

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