The Myth of Paradise

 

A few days ago I tweeted " I love you Tahiti but I gotta say that coming back to a sunny Portland is no bummer." I instantly lost around 15 followers. I'm not too concerned about losing that many Twitter fans but this made me think about something that I've encountered since I chose to move from Tahiti to Portland, Oregon about three years ago: people want me to live in (or at least revere) "Paradise" because it helps them believe in a better place. 

The chance of any of these people ever packing up their lives and living on an island or even visiting that island on vacation is small at best, but when I say that I currently prefer a US city to their image of vacation land, it's like telling a child there's no such thing as Santa Claus. That tropical island is like Dr Seuss's Solla Saloo "where there never are troubles, at least very few," but like the place in that story, one set of troubles is only replaced by another. This is life, this is planet Earth and I hate to be the one to burst people's bubble but after the glow of first love fades nowhere is perfect unless you have personally achieved some kind of Nirvana.

Here's the thing: wherever you go you will probably have to work to survive and if you grew up in the US, Europe or anywhere else brimming with action it will be hard for you to slow down to the point where gazing at the sea (or road or palm trees in the wind) for a few hours will fulfill your activity needs. Not to say I don't love doing this in theory. Right now as I sit on my deck writing to deadline to the sound of traffic, hanging out and watching hermit crabs make trails in the sand sounds awfully nice but years of this with little else going on? Not at this period of my life, thanks. 

It takes approximately 3.5 hours to drive around Tahiti. Think about that for a minute. Nearly every inch is surrounded by a gorgeous, tepid lagoon and the mountains hold lush plantations of bananas and papayas, as well as tall cascades gushing into crystal clear pools. I love all these places and really I don't tire of them, but over the 15 years I lived there I have been just about everywhere, dozens of times. As much as I enjoy swimming and hiking I am too complicated a person to be able to be happy doing only that, in the same places, over and over again in my free moments in between work (because wherever you go you still need money to survive). Life here in Portland means pubs, restaurant, skiing, beaches, berry picking, varied live music any night of the week and, most importantly, the ability to drive for hours to get to a multitude of other places. Right now this is what I want. Maybe as I get older I'll tire of this and want to settle back down to slow island life but I'm not done with the continent-based lifestyle yet.

Also, your shit is your shit and no matter how balmy the temperatures or blue the lagoon, it will be with you, always. Other people have their shit too and you will have to deal with it anywhere there are other humans. 

Example: Last week I returned to my village, Teahupoo for the first time in 2.5 years. A few years before I left, one of the area's biggest families put up a gate blocking the area's other biggest family from being able to access their homes, land and fishing grounds without paying the first, road-owning family around $375 a piece for gate access. The whole town is in turmoil about this and guess what? After all the time I've been gone nothing has changed other than a few fists have swung. 

On a more personal level, half the village comes into my yard and steals my lemons, a "friend" went in my house when we were gone and stole my kid's bunk bed and a local woman threatened to go in my house and "break everything" because we fired her as a house cleaner when she began working hours we never asked her to and then demanded money from us. None of these things are a big deal on a grand scale but to me they equal out the lonely anonymity of city life. Island problems are more personal and they'll get to you if you don't adopt a very Zen state of mind. Are you ready for your house and property to be communal areas? Do you mind having things you do meld into conversations that get warped into gossip via the "coconut radio?" If so, go try living in Polynesia.

At the end of the day for me, I'm taking a break from both the intensity and calm of island life. It's something I'm not sure anyone who has never lived on an island can understand. Tahiti is a wonderful place that I love with all my heart but for now I need more. If that works against your faith in a perfect world I'm sorry, but I suggest you try meditation.

There's no place like . . .where?

"There's no place like home," but if I had Dorothy's ruby slippers they'd have to take me apart and bring me to several places. I imagine myself more like Great Oz himself fumbling around in a hot air balloon, wondering where I'll land.

When someone asks where you're from, they expect the answer to be a static place, not a long complicated story. So I have a hard time answering the question without a stammer - as I imagine many others do who aren't fixed to a map point. I don't know where home is. I'm not thinking about Kansas

My family and I have lived in Portland for a year and a half, mostly so the kids can go to high school here, and the region still feels foreign to me. Yet this is where we rent a house, where my father lives and where my children are so when people ask me where I'm from during a trip abroad, I'll probably tell them "Portland, Oregon," even though I'm not from there at all.

A few months ago I spent the Christmas holidays down in Marin County, California where both my husband and I grew up. We stayed at my mother in law's 1920s-era house that's set between oak trees and has a view of the feminine silhouette of Mt Tamlpais. This is the house I've come back to as a base for the last 20 years since I met my husband, began traveling and eventually moved to French Polynesia. It's my favorite house in the world but it's not mine and one day my mother in law will sell it and retire.

I can name every little sub-district in Marin County, scarcely have to think when driving anywhere and run into people I know on hiking trails and in supermarkets. Every place here holds a story, like that pasture land named after a horse that my dad used to know as a kid (he grew up in Marin County too); or darker, that stop light that was put up after my friend's little brother was hit by a car there. Marin County is where I'll always feel I'm coming home when I visit to no matter where I actually live. But I haven't lived in Marin County for 20 years and chances are I'll never live there again (not on a travel writer's salary anyway).

The place I've spent the largest chunk of my adult life is French Polynesia where my husband and I own a house that we designed and built, and where my kids grew up. This is home, the family base and the biggest asset in my family's economic hat. It almost hurts renting it out and thinking of other people living there but it would be worse to let it rot and loose the rental income. We will probably move back there someday but I don't know when. Despite how much I love the house, the land, our neighbors and the tropical splendor, we will always be thought of and treated as foreigners in Tahiti and I'm not sure I want to live with that forever. The locals ask me about my "home" in the US, and although they don't mean it badly, they will never see Tahiti as a place I should call my own.

To complicate things more, I lived in England until I was nearly five and that's still where I have the largest concentration of family. I go back regularly and my aunts and uncles have all lived in the same houses since before I was born - right now I could describe each one's pleasant, homey smell. But I can't say I'm from England, my Yankee accent makes me come off as a fake.

So when asked where I'm from I cheat a little and pick the best answer depending on who's asking. "Portland" is the easiest as a conversation stopper (most people outside the US don't know where it is) and "Tahiti" gets me the most street cred particularly in places where it's not cool to be American (less of the world nowadays - thank you Obama). "San Francisco" (near enough to Marin County to work) is my answer when I feel like giving people what they want: something familiar.

I'll admit to feeling a little hip not being able to come up with satisfactory answer to the question "where are you from?" But deeper down I envy the people who can answer in one word without even thinking about it: "Quebec," "Wichita," "Berlin." It would be lovely to be able to have a home, that place where history, family, friends and a house collide without explanation. In my dreams there would be a golden retriever in the yard and veggie garden out back. But for now at least, life feels like a hurricane spinning us around in the air and despite how nice it would be to be on solid ground, Kansas or wherever home is, is about as real as Oz.

Beer & Passion at Beard & Moustache Championships

The crowd is drunk and antsy for the show to start. Then, suddenly, a medium build man makes his way across the room and there's a noticeable drop in the rowdy volume. I know instantly this has to be Jack Passion and, with his lush orange beard tumbling gently to his waist, I now completely understand how he became the two-time world champion bearder in the full natural beard category.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, college students, soccer dads and grandpas are letting their manliness blossom in the form of facial hair. But while ordinary whiskers may be commonplace on the streets, they're nothing compared to the au natural, waxed or styled extravaganzas found at beard and moustache competitions scheduled regularly around the US and the world.

The Stumptown Stash and Beard Collective, Portland Oregon's beard and moustache chapter, started in June 2010. The interest however has been overwhelming. On January 24, 2011 the group hosted the first West Coast Beard and Moustache Championships drawing in competitors from around the state and as far away as Pennsylvania, Texas and California. The event, scheduled at the undesirable hour of 4pm on a Sunday by the folks at the Crystal Ballroom (who expected a poor turn out), saw people lining up around the block for up to two hours, causing the contest start an hour and a half late.

But this wasn't a problem for the competitors for whom beer and enjoying it with their fellow beardsmen is as important as showing up for the event.

Shawn Hasson, a young hopeful from Fresno in Scottish garb and endowed with a several-inch-long curled and waxed moustache tells me, "Really these shows are about meeting and hanging out with other bearded guys."

With a two-year-old moustache he's new to the scene and pays his own way to and from the shows but the fun, he says makes it worth the cost.

Around the ballroom beards are omni-present, from casual scruff and women in stick-on moustaches to the obvious stars with their long or flamboyantly styled facial hair. Many of the professional bearders are dressed in gimmicky costumes. Abe Lincoln is there as well as a garden gnome, several English gents with curled handlebar moustaches, some cowboys, a mafia looking fellow with a thick black moustache and dark glasses and a grey-haired guy in lederhosen and a beard down to his waist. They walk around happily getting their pictures snapped with their fans.

I talk with the mafia-looking guy, Steve Scarpa from Southern California who tells me his bearding career started in 2003 when he was "discovered" by Phil Olsen the president of Beard Team USA in the audience at a beard competition.

"Then there were 30 or 40 members," he tells me. "Now there are a couple hundred. It's exploding."

Scarpa introduces me to Brian Snoderly one of the founders of Stumptown Stash and Beard Collective who happens to be walking by. Snoderly has a manicured beard and moustache, a silver bar through his nose and the biggest "plug" earrings I've ever seen. It ends up Portland's bearding group was started by Crystal Ballroom employees, the venue of the night's contest, and the proceeds will go towards a scholarship fund at Portland State University. But Snoderly tells me, as everyone else has, that the shows are more about camaraderie and beer drinking than anything else.

"Steve Scarpa tattooed the Beard Team USA emblem on my calf last night do you want to see it?" he says pulling up his pant leg.

Just then another bearded man walks by and says "Showing everyone the tip of your penis again are you Brian?"

Much to my surprise, the star of this world, Jack Passion, who brought near-silence to a room of drunk people less than half an hour ago, stops to join our conversation, or possibly to get a glimpse of the end of Brian's penis. As you'd expect from a guy with a long ginger beard, Jack is easy-going and ready to talk with his fans, including me. He dispels the rumors I've heard that he's not competing this year to give other beards a chance and tells me, in what seems a forced breach of his humbleness, that he's "unbeatable." As for beards becoming more fashionable he says that "men love to be appreciated as men," and that from the night's turn-out, the Pacific Northwest has got to be a center of the facial hair fad in America.

But do chicks dig beards? Passion's Facial Hair Handbook website assures that "your beard or moustache will get you laid!" but at least at the West Coast Championships I notice that it does more than that: most competitors are accompanied by their undeniably attractive wives or girlfriends. Yes, there's something about a beard that gives a guy an honest, cuddly dad-vibe, and that's something many women would like to take home for more than the night.

The show starts with the natural beard and moustache competition and as the first contestant prances down the catwalk in a tight 70s shirt, kicking like a Vegas dancer, the crowd cheers as if Katy Perry just walked on stage. Next is a man's man kind-of-guy wearing a baseball cap and a button up blue shirt - he gets a cacophony of hoots from the crowd including a loud yell "Now that's sex!!!"

Once the twenty or so contestants have strutted their stuff the audience yells their favorites to the judges and I start to understand why I saw earplugs on sale by the bar. Following come the Partial Beard, Natural Moustache, Natural Full-Beard, Natural Full-Beard With Styled Moustache and lastly, the Freestyle Beard categories. Some of the contestants just walk the catwalk, perhaps caressing their facial locks, while others get in character by shooting fake guns, playing a toy electric guitar or ripping off their shirts exposing beer guts and tattoos.

The crowd never settles and every contestant gets catcalls and enthusiastic support. But even after the awards ceremony, I have to agree with the beardsmen I spoke to. This isn't an event about winning, it's about growing facial hair, getting appreciated for it and hanging out with other people who understand the pleasure that comes from tending a garden of whiskers. And then of course, there's the beer.

Navigating Ex-pat No-man's Land

To quickly bring you all up to date, I lived in French Polynesia for over 15 years before moving to Portland, OR in the US this last July. It's been our family tradition to spend Christmas and New Years on our Tahitian pearl farm in the remote Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia pretty much for forever, and this year marked both my husband's 40th birthday (January 4th) and our 20 years of togetherness - so despite being broke, we maxed out the credit card and flew to French Polynesia. I guess that's the American way.

If you read my post Masquerading As Americans, you'll see that we didn't exactly feel like we fit in to the US yet. Yeah the cold was a little offsetting but it was the little things, like all our friends being really busy all the time, having too many choices at the grocery store, people writing thank you and Christmas cards and me feeling disorganized and dumb for not having done the same - these details made and still make me feel like an alien in what's supposed to be my country. I don't understand Americans yet - they are really nice and yet totally unavailable. It's a weird mix of 1950s politeness and 1980s it's-all-about-me.

Being back in Tahiti and the Tuamotus over Christmas made me realize that I'm much more at ease in those cultures than in America. This is a little ironic since one of the reason I wanted to move back to the States was because I was tired of always being the "American" and having an accent in French that instantly gives me away. Well now I see that in Tahiti I'm much more the bomb than in the US where I feel sort of kooky. I make an epic poisson cru (see my recipe), can husk a coconut, know all the plants and how to grow them, am not afraid of swimming with sharks and know how to pick out a good French wine from the dodgy selection at the store. I know everyone everywhere, can live in a bikini and I'm immune to mosquito bites. But I'm still the American, not really a part of either culture, but sort of both floating somewhere out in ex-pat no-man's land.

Does this mean I'm moving back to Tahiti? No, not at all. I've never lived in the US in my adult life so I have to give it a shot. If I'm going to be known as "The American" I at least have to know what that means. Plus it's only been six months. I think it will take a few years to adjust and then, we'll see what we want to do from there. The sun will be beckoning us, I think.

Masquerading as Americans: Post-Ex-pat Beginnings

I'm not sure how many of you are aware of this, but two weeks ago my family and I moved to Portland Oregon from Tahiti, French Polynesia. I've been living away from the US for 17 years, my husband Josh has been away for 18 years and my kids have never lived in the US.

The trouble is that while we look and sound American, we have all these weird ticks: my 14 year old daughter is afraid of escalators, my 12 year old son has to ask lots of language question like "what's a hippy?" Josh pretty much goes everywhere shirtless and shoeless (all of us feel confined and uncomfortable in shoes) and I stumble on credit card slide machines, keep trying to bag my own groceries and just generally feel lost.

The pleasant thing about Portland though is that it's OK to be weird. In most cases I just explain to people: "Hey, I'm sorry, I have no idea what I'm doing. I know I seem like an American but I've been living abroad for a long time and a lot has changed."

In most cases people just ask where I've been and then explain whatever it is that I'm lost about whether it's how public libraries work in the Internet age or what Netflicks is - then they ask why I look so cold when it's 75 degrees outside.