Joy Has More Than One Address

"One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."

— Henry Miller

Anyone who knows me well knows that Paris is just about my favorite place in the world. The energy, the history, the beauty on every corner, the way a single glass of champagne seems to lift the whole evening. So I surprised myself this summer by falling for a high desert town in Oregon that has, on paper, nothing in common with Paris.

Bend is the opposite of Paris in almost every way I can think of. And yet.

Both have a river running straight through the middle of town, and in both, people cannot wait to get in it. In Paris, they drift along the Seine on boats with music and a glass of something cold. In Ben, they float down the Deschutes on inner tubes and paddleboards with a beer and a bag of pretzels, hundreds of them at once, bumping into each other and striking up conversations with total strangers. Both cities have streets that follow no grid and no logic and no apparent concern for whether you ever find your way out. Both have their own idea of fashion, their own shops the locals swear by. Both are full of people who walk and bike everywhere, and somehow all seem to be in remarkable shape. Both are full of people who are genuinely happy to talk to you, which, in the case of Paris, runs against its entire reputation.

I spent a whole afternoon this summer paddling up the Deschutes for the sole purpose of floating back down it, which tells you something about how seriously the people here take their leisure. Somewhere in the middle of that river, wedged between a family on a giant inflatable swan and a man balancing a cooler on an innertube, I started laughing at myself. I had traveled across an ocean more than once for the feeling I was having right there in Oregon, for free, in a rented paddleboard.

It made me think about how much time we spend deciding which things belong together and which things do not. We sort the whole world this way. Paris is elegant, so it goes in one column. A desert town in Oregon goes in another. We do the same thing with people. We meet someone and take quick inventory of everything that makes them different from us, and we file them accordingly, and we move on, certain we have nothing in common.

We are almost always wrong about that.

The truth is that the woman floating past me on the swan and the couple I watched share a bottle of wine on the banks of the Seine want more or less the same things. To be somewhere beautiful. To laugh with the people they love. To feel, for an afternoon, like life is good and there is nowhere else they need to be. The scenery changes. The beer becomes champagne, the pretzels become a baguette, the inner tube becomes a bateau-mouche sliding past the lights of the city. Underneath all of it, the wanting is identical.

I think we would be gentler with each other if we noticed this more often. So much of what divides us is just packaging, the local costume, the accent, the column we filed someone into before we ever really looked. Spend enough time paying attention and the sameness underneath starts to show itself everywhere, in a French café and an Oregon river and in people who, on paper, share nothing at all.

Bend and Paris will never be the same place. That was never the point. The point is that I found the same joy in both, and I very nearly missed it in one of them because I had already decided where that kind of joy was allowed to live.

I am watching for it everywhere now. On the Seine, on the Deschutes, and in every person I was tempted to file too quickly into the wrong column.