Los Angeles was suffocating me. This suffocation was not the product of the city’s notoriously noxious air quality, but when Lily suggested we go to Oregon for the weekend, the promise of breaths filtered by evergreen trees was enticing. My suffocation came, in fact, from the restrictions of urban life. In the city, there are so many people and so many ways one is expected to please them. I have to dress well, all the time. I have to be doing something, all the time. Ideally, to the city, I’m doing all of the things, all of the time, all at the same time. I’m expected to be online, all the time. Responsive. Restless. I wanted nothing more than to get off the grid. At some point, I turned my phone off, cutting the cord between me and the world, and the things the world demanded of me.
The drive up to Oregon was the freedom I longed for. See, there is no grid between cities, only in them. At least, that’s what I told myself. On the highway, there are no rules. Only generous speed limits, leniently enforced. Missing are the skyscrapers and the suit-wearing folks who inhabit them. For most of my road trip, I could almost trick myself into thinking there were no people existing in the stretch of emptiness between start and end, between city and other city. Of course, this couldn’t be true, and I was reminded of that whenever I stopped for gas or food, and demanded something of the world, of this world.
After a long 16 hours of driving, the scenes outside my car window faded from bucolic back to urban. We’d reached a destination: Eugene, Oregon. Our borrowed home was a box-shaped cottage, painted blue with white windows and nestled on emerald green grass. It was glimmering and moist thanks to Oregon rain. Past the front door, a welcome mat perks itself up at me from down on the floor. Its bristled face is so bright and clean, I’m hesitant to step on it.
The place is spotless, but not too spotless. It’s got the type of effortless charm that could only be achieved by putting in enormous amounts of effort. It felt palatial, even in its coziness. I realize eventually, that the home is an art gallery: curated like a museum, and yet there is something I am being sold.
In the first corner of the room stands a tall wooden bookcase artisanally built from aged mahogany. The bookcase is a boastful thing. Unlike the cupboards and the closets, the bookcase insists on telling you what it holds, without you bothering to ask. The names of mostly old white men are lined up beside each other in neat rows on its top shelves: Faulkner next to Kerouac next to Bukowski next to Joyce, next to Delillo. On the second shelf, a record player, shiny and new. Probably built in the last year. Under the record player, a quieter, shyer shelf whispered its humble music collection The names of African American musicians, leaning against one another, chipping away from the spines of distressed jazz record sleeves: Duke Elingt__ next to Nin_ Sim___ next to Otis Red____ next to Nat King Cole.
There is no television. Instead, large windows let in overcast light and are speckled in decorative beads of water dancing about from the torrent outside. Sitting low and seductive in the diffuse light, a mid-century modern couch. Its pillows take to a sunken posture, as if the couch were sitting in its own smooth maroon leather, inviting me to do the same. Against almost every wall, sits or hangs some piece of verdant shrubbery. First, stood out the Fiddle Leaf Fig tree in the second corner of the room. Its leaves were bright green and took the form of inverted hearts on their stems. Second was the luscious Monstera plant. Perched in a white ceramic pot, the Monstera held out an abundance of leaves. Most of them were a deep green color with porous holes in them like swiss cheese, to indicate their maturity. Some of the leaves, however, were just beginning to sprout, colored in a pale virgin green, wrapped tight, just ready to unfurl.
Though I don’t quite know what I came here for, I know it was for something foreign, and this space is all too familiar. It follows every design rule rigidly, religiously. The aesthetic bibles– Kinfolk, Architectural Digest, Dwell Magazine– spread out loudly like commandments on the coffee table, made of a reclaimed wood with copper accents. Perhaps made of the same tree, or from wood reclaimed around the same time, the dining table stood powerfully against a backdrop of exposed brick. The table was adorned with white flowers in a tall, sleek vase, and it was hedged by four white Eames chairs, squared out perfectly on every edge.
I feel at home here, and thus, I feel betrayed. The promise of travel is to get away from one’s home, and maybe for me, to get away from oneself. I should have known better. On AirBnB’s website, most offerings look the same. Hosts all follow the same design etiquette, decorating their homes with our demands in mind. Hell, it’s in their very ad copy: “With Airbnb, you're no longer a traveler, you're home.”