“Geography is 4-dimensional” – revisited

In Geography is four-dimensional, Derek Sivers says

Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place – only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when.

From age 6 to 15, I lived in Redding, CA. At my youngest, I wasn’t really aware of it as a place at all. At that age, you only see the tiny sphere that you exist in. But I grew to loathe it and made a massive effort to leave it.

What’s sad is that my opinion has only gotten worse as I get older. Each time I go back, it’s more rundown, more of the population is unhoused and/or suffering addiction. The traffic is terrible, it’s too hot, there’s fire danger. It’s as if an entire city was a rotten strip mall. The list goes on and on.

I can feel the stress in my body and mind, just being there. To be honest, if my parents didn’t live there, I’d never go back. I would do my best to forget the place even existed.

Then we have Portland, OR which felt like home in a way that I can’t fully explain. As a teenager and into my twenties and thirties, it was a place of wonder for me. Green, weird, vibrant. If an artist could be a city. It wasn’t perfect because no place is. There was always crime, teenagers living out of Pioneer Square, and so on. But I always felt the magic. Landing in Boston or driving into Redding, I felt a pit in my stomach. A low-grade stress. Arriving in Portland felt like relief.

The last time we visited in 2021, it felt different. It was so hot and everything was dry and yellow. So many streets were lined with permanent encampments. Trailers without wheels parked on the sidewalk. There had clearly been fires. Every embankment along the freeways was lined with tents. The traffic was unreal, everything was so expensive. It was hard to find that magic. The art felt hidden.

I’m not sure what my point is with all of this. Have the places changed that much? Or have I changed? I suppose it must be both.

What are memories tied to places if they’re not tied to the magnitude of “when”?

I think I’ve been mourning the wrong thing all along.

You can visit a place again. You just can’t visit it then.

Dani Anguiano: She was arrested for holding a protest sign in small-town California: ‘This is a testing ground’. Jenny O’Connell-Nowain was put under house arrest, and her husband, Benjamin, lost his job after they protested at board of supervisors meetings.

#Redding #Shasta #California #Freespeech #government
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/09/fighting-extremism-redding-california