During an outdoor marimba concert this past summer, overlooking a bluff on San Juan Island in Washington State, it hit why I'd really left the San Francisco Bay Area. Many Californians, horrified at the thought of leaving Mecca for the boonies had asked me why, why would anyone want to leave the golden state? Traffic, money, and stress, oh my, would start to trip off my tongue, then get stuck in my throat like a traffic jam on 101. But with the sailboats bobbing in the Friday Harbor Marina, the wind tussling the cropped white hair of the women marimba players, and the pure sounds of joy emanating from the huge wooden xylophone-looking instruments, I realized the real reason why I'd left the Bay Area. California wasn't cool any more.
As a writer living in the Bay Area between San Francisco and San Jose for the past twenty years, I'd always felt smug compared to my creative compatriots living in other states, let's say Indiana. This was THE happening place. The slide from grace started so slowly that I hardly noticed it at the time. It dates, I believe, from the erection of the Oracle Headquarter silos just a few miles from my ex-house. Thousands of people poured into the area with Workaholic Techie Syndrome manifested by the omnipresent cellphone growing out of their ears and road rage. The silver silos with their mirrored surfaces-where we can't see them, but they can see us-hovered over the highway like some Orwellian viewing the future.
Now I'm sure some very nice people crowded me out of my nest, but the air of hurry, rush, read my Palm is not conducive to creative work. Creativity takes place best in a stream of consciousness that needs to meander, flow, toss the Palm into the river. This hit me on the hour-long ferry ride over to the San Juans, while I stared mesmerized at the dappled, rippling water and the islands emerging from the mist like some found Atlantis. I'd found what I didn't know I'd lost: Ferry time. Fax Time speeds the mind up, Ferry Time slows it down.
Before leaving the Bay Area, I had read about the rumblings of a potential creative brain drain from San Francisco as rents soared and the cost of living became stratospheric. Here I had thought I'd moved because of traffic, money, and stress, oh my, but my soul knew better what it craved; Ferry Time and the company of other ferry pilgrims.
In the Bay Area of years past, I used to meet interesting people, free spirits with a bank account. But since the advent of Oracle, where Silicon Valley rushed up the 101 like a tsunami and drowned many of us in its wake, when meeting new people I didn't have to ask what they did. Just looking at them not looking at me, their eyes glazed, fixing some networking situation in their heads that involved chips and not people, I knew. I became lonely for conversation with others of my kind who knew the difference between Proust's Madeleine and a Krispy Kreme.
Within one month of moving to Washington State, so far north I could spit and hit some incredibly polite Canadian, I'd met a man who forged gourmet cooking knives in his barn, two (not one) female botanists, and an Improv. performer of both genders. People of every walk of life moved to their own rhythms in the Pacific Northwest, living on ferry time, and not rushing around like Chicken Little on speed. I knew I'd found the new pool of cool and boy did I want to jump in, splash around, and play with the others. My own pace slowed and I started living more naturally, the weather determining my actions. Raining? Stay in and write. Sunny? Take a walk; the gym is for when it's pouring. Snowing? Write about how it feels to live in a snow globe.
Now, during the winter months, the marimba players of this past summer swaying with the blissful tunes in Friday Harbor play in my memory. They make so much better music than the blare of horns and pedestrians talking to wires running out of their ears in my old hometown. If you're the least bit cool, consider coming northwest for a visit. Your soul will be waiting to greet you at the ferry dock with a marimba band for backup.

Bliss can be reached at blissg1@juno.com