I have been living here in this quiet house on Z street for a year and a half. My neighbors, Padraig and Tom, keep chickens and ducks and have been creating a small urban farm that connects to their peri-urban farm at the edge of town. Their birds are always audible and they frequently inhabit the street, my yard, and the slough across our small street.

In front of my house is a one-way street, the slough and its riparian area just past that. Z used to be a two-way street with very little riparian area. But the slough would flood so frequently that the city dug up one half the street and planted trees there. The neighbor across the way (Gary) is a bird watcher and he communicates his bird news across a network of birdies, resulting in bird watchers in my yard. When M was here, he'd say he was "watching bird watchers" as they stood in the yard with telescopic cameras and gleeful smiles at the sighting of another rarity.

M left last May. It was a fateful decision he made for both of us. He maybe didn't like Arcata, which is full of transient youngsters seeking quick fortune and quicker highs from the local economy. My friend Will calls them "nunchuck hippies." Maybe M didn't like HSU, or the thought of a life with me. I am unsure and still struggling to figure out where I fit in this small isolated pocket of California. But I have stayed, now with a somewhat renewed vision of my life as an Arcatan.

I don't know that I'm always happy wherever I go, but I know that it's a possibility. I miss Newfoundland dearly, and I miss Corvallis. If I reach back far enough, I miss living in Kyrgyzstan and living in a campground in Hungary, and living in Korea and living my life with just a backpack for years on end while I took trains across continents to pass the time.

I have been driving a lot to the Mattole Valley in southern Humboldt, a place where orange trees grow alongside salmon streams. Where every driveway has a "NO TRESPASSING" sign and the property is mostly privately-owned, a patchwork of small estates. When I first went to the Mattole, at a meeting, I asked a young man, "what do you do for a living?" and he said "I'm a homesteader" and I inquired after what that meant until another man to my side said, "don't ask people here what they do. They all do the same thing." And I slowly slowly came to be less of a horse's ass and realize that the world of the Mattole is a world dictated by the vicissitudes of the marijuana crop, with equal measures of paranoia and welcome.

My drives to the Mattole have been down roads of towering redwoods, cliche in their grandeur, up to hillsides of oaks and douglas-fir, dotted with greenhouses in the distance. The Mattole Valley clings to the sea on one side, battered and open, with hills and streams protected and secret on the other. The folds of the Mattole are maternal, hiding within her skirts a thousand homes and a thousand dreams. A quiet emerald.