Why I Moved to the High Desert, and What I Didn't Expect to Miss

Grew up on the west side of the state, Willamette Valley, the actually-green part everyone pictures when they think of Oregon, gray sky more days than not and rain that isn’t dramatic, it’s just always sort of there, background noise you stop hearing. Moved out to Bend for the job about eight years ago, before the game group, before most of what this site is actually about, and I still think about the drive over the pass the day I moved as a kind of hard cutoff between two different versions of where I live.

The high desert side is genuinely a different climate, not just a different town. Dry enough that I had to relearn how my own skin worked the first winter, actual mountains visible from most of the city instead of hills, that particular quality of light you get at altitude where everything looks slightly more in focus than it has any right to. I took up hiking almost by accident the first summer, mostly because the trailheads were suddenly thirty minutes away instead of a weekend trip, and it’s stuck as a habit even though it doesn’t come up much on a site about games and books.

What surprised me, and I mean actually surprised me, not the performed kind of surprise people do in essays like this, is what I ended up missing. Not the job I left, not the friends I’d mostly lost touch with anyway. The rain specifically, and more specifically the sound of rain on the kind of composite roofing everyone out west seems to have, versus whatever’s on my place here that just doesn’t make the same sound. I didn’t know that was a sound I’d internalized as “home” until it was gone and I noticed the absence on the first Bend winter, snow instead of rain, silent in a way that felt wrong for months before it started feeling normal.

Dave’s from here originally, grew up on this side of the mountains, and he still doesn’t fully get what I mean when I bring this up, which I think is just how it goes, you don’t notice the specific texture of a place you never left. Marcus moved here even more recently than I did and has a whole different list of things he misses that don’t overlap with mine at all.

I don’t regret the move, not even close, the trailheads alone were worth it and the job’s been good to me. But it’s an odd kind of homesickness, missing a sound instead of a person or a place you could actually go back to. You can drive back to the Willamette Valley in three hours. You can’t drive back to what a specific roof sounded like when you were twenty-six and didn’t know yet that you’d remember it.