My Love of the Pacific Coast Runs Deep

I didn’t realize how much a landscape could feel like home until I lived away from it.

I spent nearly thirty years in Western Washington, surrounded by mountains, evergreens, rocky beaches, moss, ferns, rain, and the gray-green-blue palette of the Pacific Northwest. For most of my life, I thought of those things as ordinary—the backdrop of childhood and daily life. I didn’t understand how deeply they had shaped me until I moved away.

A year or two after moving to Florida, I had an eye-opening moment. Until then, I had said I missed home in the casual way people often do when they move away: I missed family, familiar places, favorite foods (a very special grocery store called "Central Market" most of all) and the comfort of knowing how things worked. But suddenly, I understood that what I was feeling was more than ordinary nostalgia.

I was homesick.

I missed the landscape itself. I missed the cold ocean water that was rich with life, the forests thick with ferns and moss, the mountains born from the sea floor to the West and fire to the East, the rain that was the soft tip-tap-tip-tap soundtrack to my life, the rocky shorelines with endless nooks and crannies to search for sea life, and the unique colors and textures of the Pacific Northwest. I missed the feeling of understanding a place without having to study it first. I knew how the air smelled before rain, how the tide pools changed with the seasons, what kinds of plants grew beneath the trees, and how the landscape fit together.

When the Landscape Raises You

Some of my earliest memories involve the beaches of the Puget Sound. My mom and I walked along misty shores on Rocky Point in Bremerton, WA while she taught me shapes by drawing in wet sand with driftwood. As I got older, I searched eelgrass for marine life, turned over rocks for crabs, inspected dock pilings for barnacles, and waited for especially low tides to reveal sunflower sea stars.

Later, I explored the forests, rivers, mountains, lakes, and rugged coastline of the Olympic Peninsula. Those places made me feel peaceful and curious.

I didn’t think of this as environmental education. It was just childhood. Looking back, though, I realize the landscape was teaching me to pay attention: What lives under that rock? Why does this grow here? Where is the water going? What changes when the tide goes out?

Long before I knew words like ecology or watershed, I was learning to look for relationships.

California Has Always Had My Heart

I first visited family in the Bay Area when I was six, and I remember looking at the landscape with wide-eyed wonder. That feeling never really changed.

As a teenager, I wanted to attend college in California and dreamed about marine biology. Life went another direction, but the fascination stayed.

Northern and Central California still stir something in me. The redwoods, rocky intertidal ecosystems, mountains, marine environments, watersheds, dramatic geology, and ecological diversity feel both familiar and entirely different from the Pacific Northwest landscape that raised me. When I visit California, I feel absolute awe at the endless natural beauty and never feel like I have enough time to explore it. Every time I visit, I feel like I am home. 

Appreciation No Longer Feels Like Enough

My relationship with nature has always been intuitive. I love being outside, gardening, composting, growing things, and caring for animals and habitat. But love and appreciation no longer feel like enough. 

I want to understand the places I love - recognize their relationships, patterns, histories, and needs. I don’t simply want to admire beautiful places, I want to become useful to them.

That realization is one of the strongest reasons I’m returning to school for Environmental Studies. It is also the reason that I want to do my studies and start my career in California. 

Maybe We Carry Places With Us

Homesickness has taught me something about belonging.

For a long time, I thought missing home meant missing a particular location. Now I understand that it can also mean yearning for the landscape that shaped your instincts, your curiosity, and your understanding of the world.

Maybe places become part of our identity so gradually that we don't realize how deeply they have influenced us until we're far away. Perhaps that's why returning feels so powerful. Those landscapes remind me of a version of myself that has always been there: curious, observant, muddy, probably cold, and delighted to find something alive beneath a rock.

I'm beginning to understand that I don't simply miss the Pacific Coast. I miss the person I am when I'm there.