Unpacking My Life

Unpacking My Life

George McCarthy

I’m staring at the river.
I’m watching the water move under the Burnside Bridge, and I’m thinking about my life.
This area reminds me of where I was born, the water and the sounds of streetcars, and how my life, the length of it, is rising up in my mind and heart for recognition.
I came here almost ten years ago, driving a truck with everything I own from one side of the country to the other, leaving South Carolina where so many people were burning leaves that I drove in a smoking haze through North Carolina and into the mountains of Virginia with thick rolling fog tucked under the bridges and spreading out so that it was like driving through the sky.
In the flatness of five states, from wide open streets across the plain to the snarl and congestion of Indiana, the hard-boned cold of Iowa, and the endless length of Nebraska, I lived a second life in Nebraska through the rain and snow, and in the futures of the West, large rock formations like buildings, the Great Lake and Boise scattered at the heart of the mountains.
Early in the morning, crossing the Oregon border in a deep snowstorm on the winter solstice, such beauty everywhere, but the snow gave way to high winds and torrential rain that I practically crash-landed in the Dalles.
And here I am next to the river now, the river I’ve walked over thousands of times and the bridge I’ve slept under.
My life did change, but not the way I wanted.
I became homeless and the brutality and misery drove me deep into myself for protection.
I looked through my eyes the way you would look through windows.
I slept in shelters, an abandoned treehouse, a small cave under bridges.
My life had always been difficult, painful.
I suffered collapses, breakdowns, abuse.
I just kept walking until the misery just contracted to a small point and blew me apart.
I was disoriented, confused, I was numb, so dissociated from reality and life that I watched it from a deep distance of within, and time passed.
My whole life, as I moved from place to place, I was always packing things into banana boxes.
I dragged them far over New York and Florida, South Carolina, always living in a state of stress and poverty.
So many of my things I didn’t even unpack.
I have boxes going back decades that I haven’t peeked into since I was young.
And I kept myself tightly locked down inside the way I kept the rest of my life, stuck in these boxes.
I stored things in these boxes for safekeeping, for the day when this landscape of panic and fear would recede within, and I could be me in real time and not deep inside watching, storing experience away like food for the winter.
So separate from yourself and your life that you want to reach your hand out.
One night I was walking in the rain near the riverside.
I was feeling wretched.
As I made my way through the misty air, I saw a sight so strange, I swore I imagined it.
It looked like a huge pancake spreading across the cobblestone street.
I walked over and couldn’t believe it.
Rain was pouring into a dumpster of flour, and the mixture was flowing out of the bottom and spreading across the street.
It was like a miracle. I walked into the center of it and looked around.
My life had been so regimented and miserable.
I worked every day and donated plasma twice a week until I fainted in the parking lot.
It was barely a breath of space to think or understand, and I had collapsed.
But I stood there on this pancake, and I realized I reached my arms out for help and deliverance from my pain and confusion.
I needed something like this so badly, something to just focus my attention and bring me together.
It was like a revelation and like walking into a Dr. Seuss book at the same time, and it felt like the world was reaching out.
There were no quick solutions, but I kept moving forward, keeping my mind on my life.
And then there was COVID and the fear on lockdowns, and I would stare down empty streets at the middle of the week, and more hiding, covering your face, staying far apart, worrying about what creatures may or may not be living in the air.
All the chaos and unreason was forcing me to try to be the eye of the storm in my life, to count on myself and everything else that was shifting and vertiginous.
Now as this has receded and I’ve been able to think, for all the words that have been spinning around in my head, I’ve dropped down where I can see them, and to have the time to start climbing out of myself, I realized that it’s time, that it’s really time for me to be here, to experience life now, to open those decade-old books, to reach in and pull out the life that I buried deep inside there, to unfold out of myself like origami.
I am unpacking my life.

Published 2025 as part of The Old Town Crier at the Futel installation in front of Street Roots.

Supported by a Portland Arts Project grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and the Arts Access Fund.