How to Find Your Somewhere: A Comprehensive Tutorial

Avra Saslow

This is a survival guide. For the purposes of popular majority,

I am safely assuming (this was written to appeal to an audience
strictly composed of non-astronauts) that your extant time is
limited to the bubble of the atmosphere. Granted, this limits your
possibilities slightly.1
It is best that you soon accept this limitation. It is the first
thing that you will need to understand to find your place. Own
your restriction, unravel it and wear it as a cape. Please dont be
discouraged; it is an insignia of possibility. As composer Igor
Stravinsky once said, The more constraints one imposes, the
more one frees one's self of the chains ...the arbitrariness of the
constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. Look
around you, this planet in particular offers a wide variety of
possibilities; the ground itself bursts with delicious, life-
accommodating potential. You have many routes to wander as
you seek your individual somewhere.
The second thing you must understand: Dont be
disappointed if your place is not the quintessential paradise I
suspect you are envisioning. There are some corners of the earth
that are lovely not in the curves of their horizons or the hues of
their skylines, but in the way that they unexpectedly sneak up
behind you and seize your body with nostalgia.
And in the case that somebody tells you your place cant be
a City Market parking lot and that you should instead choose
Mount Everest or the coast of the Redlands or a coffee shop along
the Seine then tell them courteously to fuck off, because water
doesnt have to be a pretentious milky-turquoise to be striking.
Now listen: you belong somewhere, somewhere belongs to you.
By the time your skin slacks off your skeleton, by the time the
posts of your deathbed become lifelines, by the time your pulses
1 To, by the nearest approximation, 0% of the universe.
tide finally evens, you will be knotted to every molecule of
somewhere. Full money-back guarantee.
You may be wondering what my own place is. After all, how
am I capable of giving advice? The answer is that I am not, not at
all. In fact, I havent even decided on one place myself. I have
visited 4 out of 195 countries and have a hopelessly immobilizing
GPS dependency. There is no catch. Im not qualified. But because
you are wondering:

THE AUTHORS OVERWHELMINGLY CLICH LIST OF THEIR TOP

FOUR PLACES, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
A small cabin in Silverton, Colorado, which lives in the
colossal shadows of the San Juan Mountains, that possesses
a curious quality that makes you believe you are the last
human for miles.
A dirt turnaround near the cemetery entrance of my
hometown, on which one can perform a seven-point turn in a
small vehicle to view the town from above. Its especially
lovely at night, when you are never 100% sure that there is a
solid mountain side or just empty darkness between your
tires and the ghostly neon fingers of run-down hotels
beneath you.
Campsite A at Murphys Hogsback in the White Rim, in which
there is a large rock in the middle of the campsite, shaped
extraordinarily similarly to a giant mushroom. If you find
yourself on top of the rock, hiding out from the responsibility
of cleaning camp dishes, you can find yourself overlooking
the absolute vastness and nothingness and immensity of
Americas great desert, something which is an undeniable
thrill.
An orange cliff at Navajo Reservoir. If you jump off of it when
the sun is behind you, you can watch as your shadow and
your body smash into each other on the water like the
symmetrical design of a kaleidoscope.
 These places all have a subtle and profound connection, being
that you can locate all of them 2 on a map. However, this is but a
facet of the possible interpretations of place. If you want to go in
an abstract direction you could say that sitting at a desk is your
place, biking is your place, painting is your place. The religious
type may prefer a spiritual place, a state of mind, if you will. A
place could be coordinate numbers, or in relation to something or
somebody else, temporarily. The band Edward Sharpe and the
Magnetic Zeroes eloquently provides another example: Home is
wherever Im with you. Your place can be lost or standing up
or earth. You could say that your sense of place is yourself.
Physically, everything inside your skin. You are a moving
landmark. More important perhaps, than the differences in
cognitive abilities between a human and a tree is that a tree is
bound unconditionally to its birthplace.
However, I am afraid it is not in my job description (or aptitude) to
find you a soul mate or guide you to a state of mental
enlightenment. I promise only a map destination, although if
youre lucky these additional perquisites might appear as a bonus.
Understand, also, that places change and evolve. Urban
skylines are fiddled with like games of Tetris. Alleyway canyons
slowly erode to accommodate a rivers twisty path. What a
wonderful thing change can be, with never a gap in evolution,
never a pause in orbit. But also tragic. Devastatingly so. The
valleys are dotted with oil rigs to feed light to the cities and
towns. The river in the canyon that broke through solid rock is
now being divided into straws, straight into pipes that go to
reservoirs and plumbing taps. I urge you, dear client, to be selfish.
This applies to you particularly if your place is rural. Clutch places
tightly and let no company persuade you to loosen your grip.
Not just your own place, but all, because if it isnt yours,
chances are it is somebody elses, and all places have value. As

2 More or less
Dr. Seuss writes, I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for
the trees for the trees have no tongues.
The trees are in danger. And of course it is important to stop
deforestation and oil fracking and pollution because it is the right
thing to do. Of course nature has value unto itself.
Theoretically.
But as a narcissistic human, this fact matters infinitely less
than the fact that places are one of the largest sources of
happiness for this race. For the good and sanity of all people, we
must protect our places. We must protect our happiness from
ourselves.
It is nice, of course, to have paper and the ghostly illuminating
lights of phones and laptops and kindles and IPads and IPods and
televisions. It is quite convenient to have cold refrigerators and
hot water and a gas station on every block. The paper this is
printed on was once alive, but I printed it anyway. Without nature,
however, these things wouldnt exist. At this rate, they wont. We
should not condemn progress in the name of saving the
environment, nor can we crush places in nature in the name of
scientific advances. One should not be sacrificed for the other. We
must preserve what we cannot live without.

First you must travel. Be careful on this step because most

people dont do it right. Youll see many places and you can
appreciate all of them, but you will only be compatible with a
handful. You should travel until the map in your dashboard glove
compartment is inked indigo with spider-webbed constellations of
road trip routes. Travel deeply and without hesitation. If you go to
Paris there is nothing wrong with visiting the Eiffel Tower or the
Louvre or the Arc de Triomphe, but these things alone only scrape
the surface. Dont be content with two-dimensionally tasting only
a sugar-coated and counterfeit view of the city. Take left turns
until you find a block free from souvenir shops and pursue only
the dimmest restaurants that hide folded in side streets or off
alleyways3. These are the only places where you will be able to
find anything real.
Travel everywhere and anywhere until you are too homesick
to function, until you ache for a place above the rest. Then go
there without apology.
A bit of advice:
1. Take your time.
2. Dont force the process.
3. Dont worry about choosing wrongly. (Being wrong is
actually more likely than not.) Instead:
3.5 Have the courage and motivation to start over
again. And again.
4. Be patient.
5. Visit your old places.
6. Dont stop traveling. You need it like water; even the most
assured of us are plagued with an unadulterated condition of
terminal wanderlust.
(It is not sad if somebody lives in one place the entirety of their
lives. It is sad if somebody does this without seeing more.)
Once youre tied to somewhere, let the roots of that place
grow around and into you. Allow your skin to soak up the air until
you can taste the saltwater on your tongue or feel the numbing of
the icy wind that has taken refuge in the rims of your finger prints
even when you are asleep.
This place will understand your most intimate intricacies. It is
a place where time is a distant planet, lured out of its abstract
eclipse only to subtly sketch the changing seasons. Its your
happy place.
A note on the pursuit of happiness: Countless grueling
studies have been administered to attempt to discover
something about this elusive concept. In my professional
opinion, happiness is enormously overrated. The key to

3 This is probably questionable advice. A bit of discomfort in new places in normal,

but use good judgment, for the love of God; I dont want to get sued.
 happiness is- and I am going to put this bluntly- to stop
trying.
Happiness is almost entirely composed of tissue paper and
glass. If you put any weight into it, it will shatter into a
paradoxical puzzle piece that requires years of fiddling with
the fractured remains to achieve any kind of structure again.
Stop tossing anvils onto your happiness by obsessing over it.
Accept that there will always be days when you cant
function because a terribly dismal epiphany has been
haphazardly dropped onto your shoulders. Its a side effect
of a condition known as Homo sapien; the only known
treatment is an immediate dosage of chamomile tea.
Now I have quite the array of options for you, my client.
There are tens of thousands of mountains, if you like those,
with every color of forest. There are cities that taste like thick
wool jackets and smog and bread and paint and shampoo and
cigarette butts and bricks. There are valleys where the blue sky is
so unbelievably vast that I am sure I can see it wrap halfway
across the world, and at night I feel like the weight of the stars will
crack the sky like ice. There are languages that are profoundly
beautiful to behold, and you dont need to understand the
vocabulary and conjugation and rules of grammar to listen to it
being spoken for hours. There are rainforests, where the moss
ocean can ripple and split into one hundred colors and a tangle of
wings without warning. There are underground catacombs and
abandoned infrastructure with boarded windows. There is a ferris
wheel in the decaying city of Pripyat whose carriages have never
stopped eerily revolving in the stale and toxic breeze.
I can do no more for you now, my dear client. Find your
place, and never let it go.