Dark Brown Beams

In 2018 I wrote an essay for an exhibition in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington by Sam Gorham and Michael McKeagg and Dexter Murray.

Dark brown beams

I think it’s the dark brown beams. I grew up with them, my parent’s house was built in the mid 1970’s and those beams were just the thing back then. Downstairs they were horizontal, they held up the floor above. Upstairs they sloped sharply giving a high space for the eye to wander to when you couldn’t sleep. In my bedroom my parents put in a mezzanine floor for more space, it rested on more dark brown beams. Last year we moved out of a house with dark brown beams, I’m sure it was one of the things that I liked about it when we bought it 13 years earlier. My partner always wanted to paint them white because they were too heavy for such a small space, and he might have been right. But I couldn’t bring myself to agree, because dark brown beams = home.

Raroa Road is the snaking path between work and home, it winds from the hip depths of Aro Valley up towards the hill suburbs where I live. “Where I live”. It sounds so definite, but where do I live? In our house, our suburb, our city, our region, our country? Maybe all of the above, maybe none. Remember when you were a kid and you used to finish your address with:

The World

The Solar System

The Milky Way

The Universe

As though some being from another universe who just happened to pick up your mail would need that level of specificity to get it to its intended recipient. But I guess it was really about placing yourself, working out where you belonged. But where do you belong?

The contemporary world with its ‘real’ and its ‘virtual’ can sometimes feel like living inside a giant, slow tumble dryer. There are days when I find it hard to remember which way is up. Connections snake out across the world. Relationships twist, intertwine and strengthen themselves, or thin and slowly break apart. Yet this giant experiment we have all been living inside in the past two decades is starting to show unintended consequences. I mean, how connected do you feel? Where do you belong?

It can feel as though moving into adulthood is a journey towards uncertainty. You felt so safe as a child (I really hope), but teenage-hood brings unrest, a desire to move and stretch yourself. So you move away, maybe to study, and you learn to deal with the uncertainty of rental life. Who you live with oscillates like a series of constantly shifting Venn diagrams, you come to some sort of terms with long-term uncertainty. Then maybe you move overseas, further away from your family and your support systems. You learn to navigate another culture, other ways of being in the world. Possibilities open and close themselves around you. Every decision sends your life down a different path. But where do you belong?

You keep yourself grounded in a myriad of ways; maybe you drag piles of stuff around after you, or maybe you have a great group of friends whose shared experiences bond you as de-facto family. Or maybe your coping mechanisms are more esoteric. Do you collect train tickets? Or buy a t-shirt at every concert you go to? Do you buy books set where you grew up and cry when you finish them because then you have to leave all over again? Do you buy a house that has the same dark brown beams as the house you grew up in? No? Well, maybe that’s just me. I think I know where I belong, I’m just not sure I live there anymore.

Caroline McQuarrie