Mapping Love

Growing up in high school, I heard that Millican was the place to make out. I never made it out that far — or really that far in general — but every time I pass a certain basalt rock monument in Drake Park I do remember kissing someone by Mirror Pond under the stars. Most of Bend probably has the same memory, probably at that same rock (it’s the big one with a plaque.)

Mirror Pond in downtown Bend. Credit: Kimberly Bowker

It was on a Saturday night with fellow teenage friends after driving the usual triangle between Lava Lanes, Sun Mountain Fun Center and downtown Bend to see who else was out and about and also listening to late-1990s Green Day albums. That night we climbed to the top of the Tower Theatre with a view of the lights over Wall Street that was both the same and different from now — like me.

Place holds us, mapping love beyond time.

The streets in Bend and around Central Oregon are where I fell in love, where I learned how to ride a bike with wobbly training wheels, where I passed my driver’s test, where I hit my first tree with a car, and where I hugged my first tree (unfortunately not the same tree.) It’s where I worked for a newspaper and hosted my first kegger with Silver Moon Brewing Hound’s Tooth Amber at my first apartment on NW Saginaw Avenue. It’s where I bought my first house by a park with pine trees and where I keep learning.

I drive past the intersection on the way to work where a man I once dated lived, where he took me out camping on Horse Ridge because I said that I wanted to see sagebrush and where he made biscuits. I just drove by that street again, forgetting it all until now.

Downtown I pass the building that used to be Hans and remember my first Valentine’s Day date there with those macaroons, or my first coffee date at A Cup of Magic — a date which led to a first love.

The streets in Central Oregon continue in their remaking. I drive by the St. Charles Bend hospital almost daily, sending love and prayers and blessings and grace and light to those inside. I was in there once, looking over at Pilot Butte in the early morning sun, as love expanded and broke open upon the winter morning of my father’s passing. Watching NE Olney Avenue lift over the hill, it was completely still with no cars. Everything paused in that light of time.

In a different room on the fifth floor of the hospital, it seemed like we were flying, I looked at Awbrey Butte and realized that it resembles the lines of a mesa to me. A beautiful mesa, not the “fart on the earth” that someone in my high school class once said that it was. That image stuck with me for some reason until seeing it later from a different view.

It is a mapping and remapping — life. The music and heart and truths that we experience for the first time, or for the same time in a new way, are somehow held in place or within the spaces between the buttes and mesas themselves. It is continuous. And place — or, the spaces between — allow us to love.

Here.

This article appears in the Source November 13, 2025.