I have always dreamed in color, brilliant skies and water and greens. I might be flying on the back of a horse or flying as that horse. My bad dreams are typical: unprepared for something like a test (grades 1-12), a class (university), teaching (standing before students and teaching something I know almost nothing about). For many years I dreamt of running into a friend who committed suicide—so glad to see him and laughing, then screaming and crying. But the good dreams, my favorite dreams are about flying over wild land.

Memory. Change. This post isn’t about dreaming; it’s about landscape.

The forest to the east had just been clear cut when we moved to my family home 44 years ago. The consolation, I told Gary at the time, was that it would be 30 years before it was cut again. That seemed like a long time when I was in my twenties. It was actually longer before it was cut, and even so, I nearly cried when I went up into the hills and found them logged and the ground scraped, so that even the huge old stumps marking my run were gone. Everything was different and mostly dead. I have not run the hills since. When a neighbor advised me a few weeks ago to run the forest, I could not even breathe. Too many new houses, roads opened for development, and of course the people who live in rebuilt houses or new houses on new roads now want any further nearby development stopped.

I get it. I’ve felt that way most of my life. When my parents moved us to Shoreline, north of Seattle, my backyard was five minutes from forest, swamp, and cow pasture. Goats, palomino horses, beehives. All that was gone by the time I graduated from high school.

The other day, the same neighbor who wanted me to run the forest went off on me because I mentioned escaping the weekend crowds to our little condo in Portland. She said people having two homes were “the problem,” angry, she rushed off because we had nearly ruined her morning.

I can’t help feeling the justice in some of what she says. As a class warrior, I am not comfortable with privilege; I recognize that I have it. Two homes? What right does anyone have to two homes?

My community, however, was always about second homes. My great grandaunts bought the property in 1911, built their house with no running water or electricity, and camped under a roof from Memorial Day to Labor Day. My great grandparents, grandparents, great aunts and great uncles, the few cousins, and my mother and her sister and various friends stayed there too, all summer. The outhouse was built over the swampy creek next door. There’s a nightly rental on that land now.

There is a photo of our house, the first one that my grandfather remodeled and later dismantled and rebuilt, showing only forest all around. My personal memory does not go back that far.

From the 1950s I have seen the coast change. I remember before St. Peter the Fisherman church was built, before the houses north and south and east of ours were built. The sewer system is new in my lifetime, and the old power lines with glass insulators are replaced with larger poles. There was only the deli-Post Office on the west side of the highway and the gas station on the east side. Only a handful of houses once lined Shingle Mill, and three oceanfront houses nearest the creek are built on land that did not exist. There was a rock shop and Cold Comfort Farm near there, and these modest buildings have been rebuilt into much larger vacation rental properties. I remember before most of the houses in my community were built, when northernmost “Kent Price Park” was leveled and only a single home built on that quarter-mile stretch that now has a vacation home every fifty feet. When we drove to visit my grandfather and his third wife Genevieve, we always missed the turn off the highway because no houses were visible from the road nearby—the turnoff itself was nearly invisible. Almost all the homes were second homes. The difference now is that most houses are short term rentals and the owners do not spend the summer, and only rarely stay even a week. The houses themselves are massive.

My father liked the new big A-frame house when it was built a mile north in my childhood, but that has recently been replaced by a bigger black house with a butterfly roof. I like it better than the A-frame, though the trendiness of nearly black homes is already wearing thin. As I run along the beach, I can look up to the oceanfront houses that are replacements of older homes and the ones built where there were once only trees. I remember when highway 101 ran through Cannon Beach instead of around it, when the arch at the cape was two arches, and before that when it was still filled with rubble and I could not quite get through. Even recently the shore would be mostly empty except on rare weekends. I recall a student who had graduated in the 1990s visiting in the 2000s and seeing people all over the beach. “What happened?” she exclaimed. The people I meet onshore these days are all newcomers. I can’t blame them for wanting to live here, but I miss the way this part of the coast looked like a wild place, Miss how it used to be. I prefer to look away. Memory and nostalgia.

Gary finds Seattle almost unbearable because it has changed so much since we lived there. I have only recently understood that I feel much the same way about our coastal home.

On my runs I look at where I put my feet, at the shore ahead, and west to the water to the west. I look east only to see the tops of the nearby peaks, birds, the sky. This is a steady presence, what I love. Change… not so much. I try not to look.

The steady line of houses, almost none of them occupied full time, so many of them hosting a stream of tourists—all that development—distresses me. Ultimately, it is all that development and tourism, not the second homes—there were always second homes—that ruins the coast for me. It is not ruined, of course, but for me the change is distressing. It is the primary reason I like running at 6am—the sand is empty except for the occasional local, dog, and tracks of wildlife.

Portland is a city and though I lived here for a time as a child and have spent, cumulatively, a few years here, I do not have an attachment to any wilderness past near our condo. It has not altered much in my lifetime other than the unhomed. (Is that really a more polite word for homeless?) My grandmother’s house on the east edge of the city is ruined—the cherry trees and garage long gone, trees cut, split-level houses where there used to be gardens and forest—and I will not go there again. But our condo is a 1925 Historical Register building surrounded by buildings as old or older. I am sorry the crazy retail store Dazzle is gone but Budd + Huck is in that storefront now. The changes at the coast bother me the way the changes in Seattle bother Gary. We walked those landscapes for all our young lives and they are destroyed. We talked about this shared dismay yesterday, Gary and I, and understand one another better, I think.