Farewell Bend
By: Alla Zarifyan
Tags: Politics, Travel, Society, Self, Election 2020

By August, civil unrest had mostly settled, and my spirits improved. As weird as it may sound, I got pretty used to the pandemic. I found a groove, created new routines, and gave up on the idea that my son will go to school in person any time soon. We started planning short local trips. Life seemed almost normal.

Then, the wildfires flared up. I came home one evening to the acrid smell of smoke and endless alerts on my phone. Soon, it was clear that we had to evacuate right away. So we threw things into the car and drove to our friends’ house in the middle of the night. The newly found order had not lasted long.

After bouncing around friends’ houses for a week, we decided to head north to Oregon (that was before it went up in flames as well). At least we would have some fun while waiting for the evacuation order to lift.

Oregon has been my happy place ever since I first visited it in 2012. The following year, I moved to Portland. Nowhere else do I feel as naturally at home as I do in Oregon. I loved Portland while I lived there, and I liked Bend when I visited a few years ago. This time, however, I fell in love with Bend as soon as I parked my car in its cozy downtown.

I loved everything about it: its rugged exterior, its unique Oregonian quirkiness, the seriousness of its culinary adventures. It was just so me. I even loved its original, romantic name — Farewell Bend. The Deschutes River runs through the town, forming vast sweeping bends. This was the last landmark that the pioneers saw as they traveled through the early settlement.

As I watched the Cascade mountains illuminated by the setting sun, I had the same feeling as I did in the Portland rose garden years earlier — that I cannot be unhappy among such beauty. “I really want to live here,” I thought, finally admitting that at least a part of me wanted to settle somewhere familiar.

I have trouble staying rooted in one place for too long. Over the past few months, I felt particularly unsettled because I was mentally already somewhere else, but physically unable to get there. Now, the fires and the forced evacuation took it to another level. I just wanted to pick a place already and stay put. This one would be so easy too: no visas, no foreign languages, no need to figure out the most basic routines from scratch.

A few weeks earlier, I spoke with a friend who was already living in Europe and deciding whether to move to another city. “You know,” she said at some point, “I’d really rather go back home to New York, but I cannot.” She is one of several American citizens I know who moved abroad in the last couple of years. Some got a job, others were looking for something new, and at least a couple decided that given their health issues, it would be more practical to live with the European healthcare system.

In Bend, I acutely understood the yearning for something familiar rather than something new. However, I do not think I can make that decision now. At the very least, I need to see how the elections will turn out. Don’t get me wrong — things won’t magically fix themselves the second Biden is elected. He may be a pretty mediocre president, but at least he will be the 46th president rather than the first dictator of the United States. I shudder every time there is a mention of the current president (or one of his offspring) somehow finagling their way to the third term of the Trump presidency. Think that it’s unlikely? Think back to 2016 and then consider how many unlikely events have taken place since then.

I may want to live in a typical Oregon bungalow, ride my bike on the countless trails near the town, and kayak on the river. It is endlessly sad for me that it may no longer be a choice. I keep questioning whether this may be the farewell bend in American politics. We can still see the country that we used to live in, but the current of events may be carrying us into some frightening unchartered territory.