PORTLAND, OR → SEATTLE, WA
JULY 2025
Shot on Film (35mm, 120 Holga, Polaroid 600)
A REFLECTION
Fifteen years ago, I was a sophomore in high school. The world looked different back then - I didn’t have an iPhone or an Instagram account, I always had my iPod on me, and I had never been paid for my photography. Everything in my life felt deeply mundane, but I tried my hardest to find inspiration where I could. I followed people on Flickr, I created a Tumblr blog, I convinced my mom to let me use her old film camera to take shitty still-life photos around the house. But the most important thing that happened to me that year, was becoming friends with a girl in my creative writing class who rode my bus.
My Laura.
I feel like the whole internet knows about us, if only because I never shut up about her. She’s the coolest person I’ve ever met, and every day (even now) I am amazed that she thinks I’m pretty cool too. I’ve written so many pieces about her, photographed her endlessly over the years, blabbed about her on every social media account I’ve ever had. She changed me when I was a teenager, and she’s still changing me in my thirties.
So anyway, we met in class. We crafted a friendship around writing novels, sharing mix CDs, and messaging on Facebook after school. And somewhere along the way, we became Us. The more we talked, the more we dreamed. And one day, amidst visions of us publishing books and moving to the big city and becoming new people, we told ourselves that we would see the pacific northwest together.
For a while there, it wasn’t serious. We both would wistfully dream of Oregon and talk about the forests of Washington like they were magic kingdoms, fantasy places we’d never get to see in person. We’d reblog photos on Tumblr, pin things to our Pinterest boards, stalk people on Flickr who were living our dream. But we had no money, and life didn’t exist past age eighteen.
By the time we finished college, the dream felt even further away. Trips cost money, and neither of us were making very much of it, and even if we could afford it, neither of us could get enough time off work to get out there. I felt like I was watching the dream die before my eyes. We stopped mentioning it, especially when the pandemic started. I gave up on the dream quietly, hoping that in another life, we had so much fun. I didn’t tell Laura, but I was devastated.
And then, as life tends to do, everything changed.
Or rather, I think both of us got so fed up with everything that we brought the dream back to life and committed to making it happen. Because screw it, the world is a mess and we don’t really have a lot of money, but we deserve this! We rarely spend time together as it is, and if we do see each other, it’s never just us. When we turned thirty, we pulled the trigger and committed.
And now, on the other side of the dream that consumed us for so many years, I can happily say that it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. And it only happened because of that girl who rode my bus.
The hardest part about being an adult is that you have to plan your own trip itineraries. You’re the one who needs to find lodging, you’re the one who has to decide if you get the extra “insurance” on the rental car, you’re the one who decides how long you stay in one place. Since we’d been dreaming about this for so long, we decided we wanted to build a trip that’s a little bit of everything. When we told people what we were doing, they were polite and excited, but a lot of them gave us wide-eyed looks of confusion. Oh, that’s interesting.
We decided to start in Portland and spend the week road-tripping up the coast, ending in Seattle. Mostly we’d spend a night in one place and then two in another, and so on. In the end, we drove 684 miles. (I rode passenger princess because I’m not the safest driver.) And we managed to hit a wide array of tourist attractions and hidden gems. But mostly we just got to spend time together. And we took about a billion photos.
To the TSA agents who hate to see me coming, I’m so sorry. Yes, I did need to bring fifteen rolls of film and three packs of Polaroids. They were worth all the trouble, I promise.
Even though the views were amazing, and we ate some of the best food I’ve ever had, and I could spend the rest of my life driving through the forests of Olympic, the best part of all of it was getting to be fifteen again. Scream-singing along to the songs we put on our mix CDs, talking about the same memes we laughed at in the 2010s, falling into a rhythm that only exists between two people who grew up together as awkward teens. So much has changed since we first dreamed up this trip, but our hearts remain the same.
Although truthfully, if I travelled back in time and showed these photos to my high-school self? She would’ve burst into flames on the spot.
— JULY 2025
Here’s to pocket bunnies, 10PM sunsets, blankets and robes and sweatshirts and layers, the Milky Way, judging peoples’ clothes, the Running of the Bikes, cancelled ferries, COVID scares and DayQuil and face masks, frozen (and refrozen) peas, Tillamook™️, hundreds of trips to the bathroom, cutting across two lanes of traffic for coffee, 65º and sunny, frybread (and more frybread), salmonberries and huckleberries and marionberry pie, WOIMS.
Here’s to metal…in your lUNGS, spidow man, goop and spittlebugs and moss and evil forests, foster successes, relearning figure eight knots with iPhone chargers, singing Astoria at the top of our lungs, that guy who checked us in to CB with his random earring and weird vibe, getting covered in sand at the beach, grocery shopping in small towns, trying to figure out how one machine could (or I guess could not) wash and dry clothes, running to see the first sunset at Cannon Beach.
Here’s to our matching Climb sweatshirts, every single gay person who made us coffee, sprinting away from the falls we barely saw so we could go eat pie in Twin Peaks, bent boxes and Native American art, that one video essay about the DEH movie, reversing into parking spots, listening to Virgin for the first time driving into the sunset, South Bend and North Bend, your VERY FIRST CAMPFIRE, The Almighty Binder, choosing our Pee Pee experience, that preacher Josh and that guy from Chicago.
Here’s to the World’s Largest Sitka Spruce, foxgloves and lilacs and lavender, overexposed Polaroids, Humdinger and Humptulip, all six of my cameras (and 15 rolls of film), colored doors and colored houses and colored flowers, the stretchiest grilled cheese from that random diner in Oregon, unions (that seem okay to me I guess?), our Official Scent Aqua Hour sponsored by Bath & Body Works, Blue Star Donuts, packing and unpacking and repacking every other night, sunscreen, the smell of bugspray, Panic Mode on my fancy GriGri, and school?