The Why of It

What we left: Our garden in Santa Fe

What we gained: Our garden in Beacon

It's been a busy few weeks. Not that people are waiting with bated breath for my next posting, but still. I will today, finally, try to answer the "Why did you move from Santa Fe to Beacon?" question. 

About six months before we decided to leave Santa Fe, another friend of ours moved to North Carolina, quite suddenly. He got a lot of "why?'s" and, being a well-prepared, organized type, had his response at the ready for when he announced his planned departure: "Because it's wet, it's green, and it's where I grew up." Huh. Yeah, can't really argue with that. He said it with such conviction and finality that there wasn't much room for discussion or dissuasion. We all just nodded, bemusedly agreeing. 

So when we decided to move, remembering this clever ploy, I suggested that we, too, should have a sound-bite response that summed it all up. We never did. The nearest we've come is "to be close to NYC but not in NYC," and "to be closer to family," both of which are certainly true, but there's much more to it than that. But to put it into some neat, tidy explanation? Nope. Maybe that's just the way we both are. 

So here are some more of the reasons, as I see it:

1. Adventure: I think that J and I are both adventure-seekers. We like a challenge, or at least the idea of a challenge. This house turned out to be far more of a challenge than we intended, but that's what happens sometimes. That's another chapter. 

2. Career: J, as an artist, felt he had reached a sort of "glass ceiling" in Santa Fe, which has a great art community but can get to feeling pretty limited, career-wise. It's hard - not impossible, but hard - to be taken seriously as a contemporary artist if you're based in Santa Fe. Sure, SF and surrounds has some very famous artists (Bruce Nauman, Susan Rotherberg, Richard Tuttle, Fred Hammersly, Agnes Martin before she died) but they didn't make a name for themselves from NM, they moved there after they were famous, when they could live wherever and still carry on being famous. So there was that feeling for J of wanting to be closer to, or even in, a real art center. And for most artists, that's New York. Even with all the talk of L.A. being the next art center, NY not being "where it's at" anymore, blah blah blah, ask almost any artist where s/he would go to really take their career to the next level if money/family/etc. were no object, and most will say "New York City." That's just the way it is, or at least was back in 2005, or at least that's how we saw it.

And for me, too, though I was doing okay as a self-employed landscape designer and had a good thing going as a part-time lecturer at the University of New Mexico that might have blossomed into something else had I stuck it out (in which case we would have had to move to Albuquerque because driving 120 miles a day five days a week was not how I wanted to live my life), I felt like in another three years or so, if not before, I would be "done" with New Mexico. That was a long sentence. I was channeling Thomas Mann. My epiphany came one day when I was looking at ASLA's online job postings, something I did now and then, and there was a listing for a well-known firm in NYC whose work I really respected. All of the sudden, I thought, "Wow, I could work there." And if not there, then somewhere else in New York. Why not? I'd done a brief stint at the City of Berkeley and knew I didn't want a government job; I'd worked for two landscape architecture firms in Santa Fe as the sole employee, which was good but not altogether satisfying; I was doing the self-employed landscape designer thing (still working towards being a registered landscape architect), and that was o.k. but kind of lonely and limited; I was doing the UNM thing and was pretty sure I didn't want to be a full-time academic; I had even tried some freelance writing and knew that wasn't for me, either; the last unexplored territory, it seemed, was to work in a big landscape architecture firm. Not much opportunity for that in or near Santa Fe. In New York I could work for a diversified firm that did public projects and private commercial and residential projects (rooftop gardens! cool!) in a stimulating, challenging environment where I would really be forced to earn my chops, etc. It could be really great to have that experience. If I hated it, I hated it, but at least I would have tried it and learned a lot in the process, gained great experience, and have something impressive on my resume. That day, I said to J, who had been suggesting off and on moving to NYC ever since we met in 2001 and who had always been met with my resistance, "maybe we should move to New York city." I'd like to say he fell off his chair or spat out his soup or something dramatic, but I think his response was more subued than that, a kind of quietly incredulous "really?"

3. Family: My parents live in CT, and almost all of my extended family is also on the east coast. J's parents both lived in England. Getting to both places, but especially to England, from Santa Fe was a major ordeal. Perhaps it would be better to be closer to both of our families. 

4. To live somewhere more sustainable: Santa Fe seemed, in many ways, unsustainable from an environmental perspective. You're in a city in the desert, where not that many people should be but where too many people are, using up precious water, spending a lot of fuel getting goods to and from port cities...I could go on but I'm even boring myself at this point. But suffice it to say, we were tired of constantly thinking about and feeling guilty for how much water we were using (which wasn't much, relatively, but still); showering with buckets that we then emptied out onto the perennials; spending hours each week draining the rain barrels and dealing with the water-wise but antiquated irrigation system...and so on. Plus, Santa Fe is 7,500 feet above sea level, and we convinced ourselves that living at a lower elevation was better for our health as well.

There are other reasons, too, but like I said, I'm bored and so probably boring, too. Now I know why I've been putting this post off!  Maybe I'll write sometime about why Beacon instead of Brooklyn or NYC, which were in the running when we made that trip in March of '05. And maybe not. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm writing this blog for me, not for some audience who will be upset if I don't fill in all the details. So from now on I'm just going to talk about what I want to talk about, post the pictures I want to post, and enjoy telling the story the way I want to tell it, holes and all.