There’s something idyllically impossible about Ashland, Oregon. The population rests somewhere around 20,000 people, nestled in the Rogue Valley just south of Medford, a meeting of Portland hip and Mayberry quaint (with some Twin Peaks thrown in for good measure.) The vertex of the town is lined with boutiques, restaurants, and bookstores of all sorts, nary a chain store save for a Starbucks well-hidden in plain sight.

In the very early stages of brainstorming my trip, all the way back in the winter, I was sitting in Whisk one evening, looking at a map and making a list of possible destinations. Of all the stops written in scrawly handwriting on notebook paper in front of me---San Francisco, Sedona, New Orleans---a neighbor of mine pointed to Ashland and said “dude, go there.” Obviously, there are many places I didn’t make it to on this round. When the plans for the music festival fell apart, however, I remembered that moment; looked at the Amtrak map I was given, and though it requires thru service on a shuttle, I knew Ashland was going to happen.

On the phone with my sweet pal Danielle, I walk through the downtown area, flipping back and forth between brainstorming a birthday trip and describing my surroundings to her. In at least every other city, we’ve held conversations like this. When I was in New Orleans, our chatter was accompanied by 30 minutes of whistle music emanating from a steamboat on the Mississippi; a level of maddeningly surreal circumstances that will probably now haunt me for the rest of my days. (To understand why, watch this.) Here, I liken the town to Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow, the setting of the television series which was a beacon of mindless escape for much of my teenage years. It possesses the same, I dunno, charm? I hate using that word, but here it seems apt. Ashland, as I have come to experience it, is a flowery, tranquil place for a person such as myself to haunt.

I stay at The Ashland Hostel, which is located just a couple blocks north of the main downtown activity. The lodge is run by Syd and Annie, two remarkably lovely women who have turned the century-old house, which has a long history as a hostel, into a neat, welcoming environment for travelers to chill out. Their rules are very clear: no alcohol or smoking, no shoes indoors, only allow yourself access in the door. Such guidelines have allowed the house to maintain a very clean, safe and respectful space on all fronts, both for the guests and the house itself. Because of the low-key wavelength on which this operates, I feel absolutely no problem turning in for bed at 7:30 the evening I arrive, the first good night’s sleep I’ve had since New York.

I spend the next two and a half days with no plans. The point of coming to Ashland seems to be a break from the rough-and-tumble glory of adventure that has been so much of this trip. I sit on many a park bench, drinking coffee and eating frozen yogurt; I sprawl out in the grass of Lithia Park and talk to the trees. Because of its proximity to the Pacific Crest Trail, I think about Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which I read last autumn, and liken her story to my own in some ways. I mean, I’m not hiking thirteen miles a day with a crazy-heavy pack and mourning my dead mother while nursing myself off of heroin; but I am looking back on the life I’ve lived so far, while trying to shed some layers and undo some of the chips on my shoulders it has given me.  As much as I really wanted to see the PCT, I never could find any concrete directions about where to do this from the many hiking websites I dug through. The second day I’m here, I ask Siri to take me to Siskiyou mountain park. Siri takes me three steep uphill miles into a residential area and tries to coax me down a creepy private road.

“Your destination is in .4 miles,” she tells me. I look at the warning signs posted. I’ve already jumped past one. I’m almost out of water. Given how this has gone so far, I’m doubting that my end destination will offer any more. I whimp out and turn around, instead exploring a back trail on a hillside that runs along a creek. Towards its end, I lean back into the path and listen; two deer approach and the knot of loneliness that I’ve been carrying around lately lessens as the three of us sit and be the untamed, silent creatures we are.

Before I voyage to Portland, I have a night layover in Klamath Falls, Oregon. K-Falls, as it is referred to by the train conductors, is a town seemingly left behind by both God and the rest of the world, sprawled across summer-dried Oregon land, on the edge of a lake that for some reason attracts pelicans. A scratch into the bench at the train stop reads “Welcome to Nowhere.” I check into the Maverick Motel, relieved to have a bed and shower to myself for the evening. Around eleven, I dress myself to go for a walk and look at the evening’s promised “Blue Moon.” No sooner do I open my door than I step into a giant cloud of green bugs, covering the entirety of my door and seemingly painted on the fluorescent lights. Inevitably, when I return they’ve taken residence in the room.

I debate with myself about how necessary it is to kill these bugs---seemingly harmless, yet all over the room and really into crawling on my bare skin as I ready myself for sleep. In the rooms next to me, I hear couples argue and a dog whimper as I take a wad of toilet paper to the places in closest proximity to the bed and wipe away dozens. There is an odd poetry in the extermination of all of these tiny lives at the hand of my own; I feel guilt, even though these bugs likely live fairly short existences and will be killed by housekeeping the next morning anyhow. As I go to sleep, the radio clock next to the bed flickers on and off for brief moments of uninvited, eerie static.

The next day I arrive in blistering Portland heat in the early evening. I love Portland for so many things; the way it seems to encapsulate the best of humanity in an otherworldly urban setting the most. I emphasize “the best of humanity” in the way that despite (because of?) its incredibly diverse set of citizens, by and large people are incredibly kind; while the presence of Northwest-Nice is a reality, it isn’t an overcompensation for underlying harshness or snobbery like in other places. Here, people sleep freely and undisturbed under bridges and along the river, minding their own business, the suggestion being that if you allow folks to take care of themselves outside of the rulebook, opting to treat them like the fellow humans they are, then your need to fear or ostracize them proves itself to be unnecessary. Portland, for its reputation as being dorky and weird hipster heaven, is a place that is in fact breaking the rules of what happens in much of the rest of the country. The people here matter to the city. The proof lies in the efficiency of the transport system, the presence of safety officers with pink hair, the air that breathes incredibly clean.

One day whilst here, I go outside into the morning and start walking, and never really stop. I wander from the neighborhood near the convention center through the downtown core, the Pearl District, up into the northeast neighborhood, back downtown. Over the course of five hours or so, I develop hearty callouses on my feet and listen to Death Cab For Cutie’s “Kintsugi.” In the early afternoon, while sitting on a bench, I strike up a conversation with a boy my age, exchanging notes on big cities and gushing about the wonderful place we are in. He invites me for a drink in a dive bar playing episodes of Adam West’s “Batman.” The bartender makes my greyhound with gin. The boy and I share rich conversation until I begin to feel tired and return to my Airbnb.

Though I spent the better part of four days in Portland, I’m going to be honest in that writing about it in more depth would spoil some things for me. Portland has become my backdoor to myself in a sense, recently. It’s a place I go to heal myself and feel free, whether that be sadly or happily so. It’s the perfect arena for a human to experience their own inherent anonymity and be smiled at for it. I was turning a street corner once in the early morning, and a fellow walking towards me scuffled in both directions, unsure of where to walk so we didn’t collide. As I passed, he said “I’m sorry! Have a great day!” It holds a grace to it in that way, no matter how odd it may seem to the rest of us.

As I near the end of my trip and try to mentally prepare myself to return home, I haven’t spent much time reflecting on what I’ve done. Instead of trying to categorize it and organize myself and feel sad about it ending, I prefer instead to let the flurries of my experiences pass through my thoughts as proof that, as my friend the noted poet Mark Anderson once told me, “Life is bigger than a coconut.” I think that’s what I left to discover in the first place without realizing; to unplug from the ways I hurt about being alive itself, to let go of somethings related to such. I heard over and over again how “brave” people thought I was being. I have only ever seen it as a manifestation of my greedy lust to feel the thunder of every moment. Traveling has brought a lot of that home to me after a long absence and I can’t imagine that my recent practice of picking up and going when I need to is slowing down anytime soon.

If you’ve been reading this journal from the beginning, thank you. And if you have ever felt any jealousy or awe at the things I’ve described, I’ll tell you what I tell everyone else: Go. Find a way.

Be open, be patient, be curious, be cautious, but do not let anything stop you once you have made the decision.

Even when you’re crying in a park in New Orleans on the phone with your mom, or terrifyingly hungry in New York, yelling at customer sales agents on the phone in Houston, or tired and puking during a layover in Raleigh, keep going.

Allow the speed of motion as you cover an entire country by railroad be your home for a while. Or your car, if you’re into that.

Because once you’re going, it becomes life, and much bigger than a coconut indeed.