Can You Step into the Same River Twice?
I’ve lived in my hometown of Petaluma for most of my life. People are sometimes surprised when they discover this, but I’ll tell you an open secret — it’s not actually the same town.
Heraclitus famously noticed that you can’t step into the same river twice. Here in the River town of Petaluma, it seems truer than ever, but is it?
Layered in the Landscape
Our town —and probably every town — changes at least a little, sometimes a lot, every ten years or so. And one of the benefits of remaining in the same place is that consequently, I can live in a new town every decade and never have to move.
It’s because, as the town itself shifts, I and everyone I know are also changing. Some people move away. Others move here. Businesses come and go. The cultural, social, and built landscape is constantly repositioning, responding, even as the underlying natural landscape changes, but much more slowly.
The most intriguing thing to me about living in one place are the multitude of layers that accumulate over time. Layers of memory, of people, places and things embedded into the land and into the built environment.
While a place like the Mystic Theater, for example, may seem solidly the Mystic Theater, I’ll physically see that iteration as the skin on top. Beneath the skin are the sedimentary layers of the places it used to be in my memory —not only how it looked but how it felt — experiences and moments that are still strangely present. And because of those layers, I can feel still others lurking even further underneath — the ones outside my own memory.
So when I walk into the dark space of the Mystic — these days more a concert venue than a movie theater — I still secretly feel the energies of the Palace Theater and the Plaza Theater, earlier iterations where I spent many hours watching movies.
The aroma of the place seems very much the same, which is startling sometimes, like the scent is a physical manifestation of other times infused into the wood and fabric of the building.
The 1962 film Day of the Triffids permanently reflects off the art deco light fixtures, and the brocade walls are embedded with the lingering sounds of the old films, including Janette Scott’s screams, Jacques Tati’s comedy, Beatles movie music, and the horror that was Watership Down, mixing faintly and harmoniously with the current sounds of Sean Hayes.
The theater itself is part of the McNear Building, which also housed a café and record store where we all met up with random people — some of whom I still know today. The café is now a sushi restaurant, and the record store is a wine shop, but the brick wall in the sushi place must still be vaguely infused with the smoke of our late night cigarettes.
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Beyond the built world, the layers are even more prevalent, even as they are more transparent. Many of the oak trees in the Chileno Valley outside of town still seem the same size as when I was younger — how old must they be if they grow that slowly? How many people and animals have passed by? And San Antonio creek has a new path now, its new curves easing slowly west with erosion.
Sometimes I walk in the gentle hills teeming with multitudes of wildflowers and grasses, climb a stone outcrop covered in lichens, moss and ferns, or cool off in fragrant oak woodland above San Antonio Creek.
Other times I’ll sit by the Petaluma river, not even a river, but a tidal slough, the water commanded by the Bay. And when I’m in these wild places, sometimes I truly don’t know if I’m still in the same time, the natural landscape feels so ancient and forever, embedded with memories that go far beyond my own, both past and future.
So while it’s certainly true that we can’t step into the same river twice, I sometimes think that we can step into all of them at once.