A Homecoming, of Sorts

Huckleberries on the California coast. I’ve picked this patch for decades.

Last week I got to see a great many old friends. Some of them were human.

I spent the week back in Northern California, where I had lived for 19 years. It was the first time since I left that I felt I thoroughly got to re-experience my old haunts; a quick trip there to mushroom hunt last year hit very different.

This time the ghosts held no malice, no power, and even when my eyes would slip into recognizing NorCal’s suede hills and deep green oaks, its aridity and its incessant traffic as “normal,” my brain pumped the brakes: No. Minnesota is normal now. Minnesota is your home. Summer is green, not tan.

Minnesota must have carried over into my demeanor. Over and over I heard the same thing: You seem… different. Quieter. More anchored. Or some version of “still the confident Hank on the inside, but you’re presenting differently.” It’s true. I feel it in my bones. These past two years have been a profound period of growth that has continued — even accelerated — this summer.

I used to chase echoes: Likes, followers, crowd size, book sales, the dopamine hit of messages from readers and friends. Now I listen for the original sound. It comes from within.

I got a chance to do that listening last week both in a grove of wild plums near the American River in Folsom, California, and also on the sides of Mount Vision in Point Reyes. That’s where some of my oldest friends live. A huckleberry patch, a stand of black walnuts. A spot where yerba buena, a mint-like weed that grows only on the California coast, runs wild. The smell of moss in fog, the open Pacific, or the scent of drying chaparral are all perfumes to me. They help me be still. They help me think.

These have always been my happy places, places where I can most clearly hear that original sound and free myself from the sturm und drang of the world. They lift me up more fully than any human can; although a few have come close.

We all need these places.

Maybe it’s the piney woods Up North or in the Rockies or deep in Alabama. Or a quiet cove on a lake or bay. Maybe it’s the windswept prairie, so stark and revealing. I once sat on a hill above the Missouri River near Mandan, North Dakota and watched bees frolic among wild rose and a single prairie turnip for more than an hour without moving, or even being aware of conscious thought.

Visiting my old haunts felt like Nature giving me the same sort of warm hug my human friends did. This came as a mild surprise at first: I had not been a huggy person, and for decades shrank from such contact, to the point where no one would go in for one. On this trip, almost every one of my friends did — men and women who had known me in these earlier times.

I asked one about it. He said it just seemed, I don’t know, like it would be OK now. And he was right. Everyone was so warm and interested and generous. My friend Clark bought all the Miller High Life I could drink one night at The Raven Club where a group of us had gathered. “You don’t pay for beers in my town,” he said.

Patricio, who was with me at the birth of my new book Borderlands, and who wrote its foreword, howled at the moon with me on our last night together. But it wasn’t the sort of howling we’d done in years past. This was hopeful as we talked about plans for the future and trips to be taken and women and friends and family.

Person after person opened up to me during this past week, often in ways I did not expect. Maybe they did because I no longer live there — their secrets are all safely back in St. Paul — but perhaps it’s because I’ve gotten better at listening. Really listening. All week I was slow to give advice, another shift I’ve felt since moving to the Midwest.

When someone confides in me, I no longer feel the need to “fix” their problem, or even offer possible options or solutions, unless that person asks me for them. Sometimes they just want to talk. I am happy to be a shoulder, a safe space. As a person who processes quickly and moves towards my own solutions just as fast, it has taken effort to, well, shut the hell up.

The mesmerizing patterns of a cow parsnip seed head.

It’s Nature that has taught me that.

You don’t fix Nature. Nature is. We are part of it, and when we listen to what she is saying she will always guide us toward happiness and gratitude. When I put myself in her arms without expectation or demand — listen more, talk less — then, when I am truly ready, I find that I can indeed come home again.

So if you ever find yourself wandering back down an old trail, know this: kindness waits there. No maps. No traps. Just the memory of trees and grass and bees and flowers, a certain scent on the wind, and the feel of familiar ground. Steady. Warm.