I can’t believe it's been four years since I left Oregon and moved to…Indiana, a state I had never been to, nor in a million years would have thought I would ever live. Four years feels significant, like the length of high school or college. To recap, we relocated to Fort Wayne, Indiana for affordable housing. Our plans were hatched during the pandemic and executed just as the masks were coming off. And if it weren’t for the soaring house prices in Portland, I would have never left. I love that city and the gloomy Northwest dearly. I was born in Portland, my family still lives there and it will always be a part of me. The moss and pines and rain are in my DNA.
But, Erica and I are both painters. We spend about 90% of our time making art at home, and we really wanted to buy a home where we could have one bedroom and a little art studio space for each of us. Portland as well as the entire West Coast just felt too expensive.
And so we started doing some research and discovered Fort Wayne, Indiana, as it kept coming up on multiple “most affordable cities” lists. I think it still has one of the lowest housing costs in the country although things have gone up a bit since we moved out here. Our idea was that we would buy a home in one of the cheapest cities in the country and the super low cost of living would free us to live fully creative lives, and help us to be more comfortable in old age. And so we flew out to Fort Wayne for a week and thought…”hey, it’s not that bad”. About a month later we bought a house sight unseen, sold everything, and journeyed out to the lightning lands, the twilight flats--pioneers moving out East with hopes for a brighter tomorrow.
Living and painting in the Midwest:
There are always trade-offs, and I don’t think any place is perfect. However, I think we made the right decision--that, and we got lucky. We scored a 116-year-old Victorian across the street from a beautiful park, within walking distance to downtown. (Impossible in Portland!) It was everything we were looking for and then some, and I don’t know if our Fort Wayne experience would have been as enjoyable if we hadn’t bought this specific house in this specific location. We didn’t know a single person when we moved out here and in the last four years we have met some nice people, and found our place.
For those who don’t know, Fort Wayne is a rust belt city that’s bounced back fairly well and it’s growing. Geographically it is flat and surrounded by seas of corn and soy with scattered forests and lakes. These were wetlands before they were farmlands. The weather here is dramatic: all four seasons, brutal winters, hot but comfortable summers and storms in between. It is a proper mid-sized city with tall buildings but a “second city”. The major touring acts usually skip Fort Wayne, but Chicago, Detroit, Indy and a bunch of other larger cities are close by. There are some pretty good coffee shops and parks.
Overall it is quite pleasant, but the hardest part about living in Fort Wayne is the cultural shock. Culturally it’s more conservative and religious than what we are used to, and this can be challenging as a bicycle-riding vegan pagan artist from Portland. It’s still a challenge. Yet, aside from Kroger all of the places we frequent--the coffee shops, tattoo shops, the health food stores, record stores and bookstores--we see people who are similarly-minded. If anything, being a little of an outsider has made us more confident in our weirdness.
I’ll finish up by saying that our adventure/experiment has turned out great. I will always miss Portland, but the lower cost of living has really helped us to live our dreams of being full time artists, which is what matters the most to us. Along the way we have gotten to meet some really great people and have had the opportunity to explore the Midwest, which I now feel is fairly underrated.
Also, I am planning on drawing on a new Southwestern Bellows world map with a Midwest region, reflecting the flat marshy terrain of Fort Wayne--a land of lightning, white winters, and many lakes buzzing with mysterious creatures.
Bonus: we had a really abundant garden this year.
