Image by Rain Grimes

A month before moving from D.C. to Seattle, I purchased a plaid flannel shirt, a pair of Doc Marten’s and the soundtrack to the movie Singles. It was 1993. Having already quit my job as a legislative assistant, I ditched my pantyhose and pumps and adopted a new uniform. I paired the clompy black shoes with an array of logo T-shirts and long, flowy skirts, and wore the flannel either unbuttoned or tied around my waist. It was a look I’d seen in a Vogue spread on grunge fashion, whose pages I’d taken to studying with Talmudic intensity.

“I see a Seattleite,” my housemate would singsong as I emerged from my room each day wearing an only slightly varied version of the outfit. Eventually I believed it myself.

After landing on the West Coast I approached my environs like a toddler. Every little thing seemed shiny and thrilling and out of the ordinary, and I felt compelled to reach, grab and put things in my mouth. I had arrived at the tail end of the grunge phase—in truth, the last hairs at the tip of the tail. Perhaps out of a sense of being unfashionably late to the party, my new Seattle roommate and I made a point of going out to hear music several nights a week. We listened, grateful, as band after band sang mournful, angry songs combining the gentle lap of a ballad with a tsunami of raging guitar. At age 25, I couldn’t imagine feeling more alive than when standing in a smoky, sticky-floored room with a hundred other faces uplifted toward the same stage.

In these darkened venues, the possibility felt endless. You never knew who might show up in the audience or onstage. Spreading the weekly alternative paper on the floor of our apartment (located a mere block from the Singles building), my roommate and I would scour the club listings and try to predict which rockers would be likely to go where. Eddie Vedder often made the rounds semi-incognito in a black baseball cap, and Layne Staley could be counted on for impromptu performances. We saw Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic at plenty of shows, but though we searched and searched for the Christ child of grunge, we never succeeded in seeing Kurt Cobain’s blond head amid the nodding crowds.

I suspected I might find a boyfriend somewhere within that angsty spiral of sound, just as Kyra Sedgwick’s character did in Singles. And in a scene Cameron Crowe might have directed himself, I fell for a guy while standing in line for a Sky Cries Mary show at The Rock Candy. He lived in his orange VW bus and made just enough money doing odd jobs to support his music-going habit (and a few other addictions). In D.C. I would never have considered dating a guy who lived in his car—in large part because the opportunity never would have arisen—but it seemed like no big deal in the laid-back Northwest.

Already I had met two women whose boyfriends held the same sort of roving Germanic address. My friends back home dubbed my boyfriend the Van Man, and when they called to ask how things were going their voices dripped with amusement at my folly.

But the Van Man was openly interested in a way guys from home never were, their East Coast brand of romance as reserved as the suits they donned to lobby senators. On our first real date the Van Man announced, “You’re a stone fox,” and recalled how he’d been “drawn to my energy” in line for the Sky Cries show. Eschewing deodorant (a tool of oppression), he emanated a powerful scent—sweat mixed with pot mixed with the musty aroma of his van. To me it smelled sexier than any policy wonk’s aftershave.

During one of our breakfasts at a local diner, the Van Man glanced up from his over-easy eggs and said, “Hey, there’s Kurt,” in the same tone as if he were saying, “Dude, a rainbow.” Sure enough, Kurt Cobain was walking right past the window, his head bowed but his face smiling. I decided the Van Man looked a little like Kurt: same thin blond hair, same angular features, same seemingly accidental attire. Certainly, I thought, they shared the same rockin’ refusal to abide societal constraints. I tried to play it as cool as possible while my heart raced and I marveled at my new life.

As part of my continuing plan of total immersion, I decided to try snowboarding. The Van Man made frequent trips to the mountains all winter long, leaving my apartment when it was still dark in order to reach the slopes when they were at their most “radical.” I was intoxicated by such a relaxed approach to life. Still unemployed, my savings account was dwindling, but this was the new grunge me. Why buy into the 9-to-5 slog? Screw my master’s degree. Work could always come later. Now was the time to grab life by its gnarled horns!

At the crack of dawn one morning, two girlfriends and I drove to Snoqualmie Pass to take a lesson. Of the many area ski slopes, Snoqualmie was the closest to Seattle, which rendered it a dumping ground for amateurs like us. Tourists, children and other novices swarmed the slopes, propelled by a common vision of swishing effortlessly down the mountain. It was early April, the end of the snow season, but the lifts were still open, and we figured our outing would at least have us amped and ready for next year. We were all recent East Coast transplants so none of us had the proper gear: There wasn’t a scrap of Gore-Tex in the group, and two of us were actually wearing jeans.

In D.C., the kicks had been of a decidedly different sort. At work, we found our excitement on C-SPAN, watching votes roll in as if we were Olympic skaters waiting for scores. Happy hours were spent hunched in dark bars, arguing over bills and riders and constituencies. At election time we gathered to play debate bingo, everyone carefully crafting homemade cards using buzz phrases we predicted would be uttered during the telecast. It was its own sort of cerebral, bodiless fun.

Snowboarding was perhaps the complete opposite, calling for total reliance on physical feeling and instinct. I had no gift for it. After a lifetime spent in my head I couldn’t seem to let my limbs do the driving. My two friends and I persevered all day long, through the summary lesson in the morning and the many humiliations of the towrope, and after being cast out into the snow on our own for the afternoon.

Before I’d left that morning the Van Man had offered some advice. “Don’t let your mind get in the way,” he said between bong hits. “Just let go and fly through the powder.”

Time after time I botched my dismount from the lift. I became aware of my triceps in an entirely new way after pushing myself up from countless rear tumbles. I didn’t breathe much—I was laughing too hard, in an unstoppable, high-in-the-chest way. I felt ridiculous and afraid and out of control. The snow was icy. Frozen nuggets collected at the back of my neck and in all the crannies of my non-wicking, non-native clothes.

By the time we piled back in the car we were sore, soaked and more than slightly hysterical from the adrenalin and the painful hilarity of falling on our butts for hours. We loaded into my friend’s battered Civic for the drive home, exhausted but excited to have made another step toward becoming true Seattleites. When we turned on the radio to sing along with our favorite local station, we heard the DJ say Kurt Cobain was dead, an apparent suicide. “Reports are confirmed,” he said, though his voice sounded doubtful. “This is not a hoax.”

At that moment I had no way of knowing that the Van Man would soon explain that he loved women—as a gender—too much to be “into” monogamy. Neither did I know that I would pretend I didn’t mind. Nor had I stumbled upon the benign lump haunting my left breast, the result, my doctor hypothesized, of the stress of adapting to a new living situation.

But upon hearing the news of Kurt’s death, I felt a sort of shift. “It’s not a hoax,” the DJ repeated, trying to convince himself and anyone listening. Pulling off my sodden gloves, I noticed that the wrist stamp from the club I’d been to the night before had lost definition and smeared into a bruise. All at once the sweet promise of my new life drained from my body, puddling on the floor mats like the snow from my East Coast shoes.

Brangien Davis is a Seattle-based writer and editrix in chief of Swivel (www.swivelmag.com).