I moved to Portland because of the trees. That sounds like something people say when they want to sound poetic, but I mean it literally. I grew up in Phoenix, and I spent twenty-three years looking at brown hills and strip malls, and one summer I drove up through Oregon on a road trip and I pulled over on Highway 30 just to stand in a forest that smelled like rain and bark and something ancient. I thought, I need to live here. Three months later I did.

What I did not tell myself, not in any honest way, was that I had been smoking since I was twenty-three. A pack a day by twenty-five. Camels, the Turkish Golds, because I told myself they were less processed, which is the kind of logic that only works when you really want it to. I smoked through my twenties in Phoenix, in the dry heat, where it didn’t feel so bad. You smoke outside and the air is already so thin and hot that the cigarette almost disappears into it.

Portland was different. The air there is wet and clean and you can feel it. And six weeks after I moved, I decided to hike the Wildwood Trail in Forest Park, which runs right through the west side of the city. I’d read about it before I moved. Thirty miles of trail through old-growth forest, practically inside the city limits. I packed a water bottle and wore my hiking shoes and set off feeling like I was finally becoming the person I’d imagined.

I made it maybe a mile and a half before I had to stop. My chest was on fire. Not exertion-fire, not the good burning of muscles working. This was a scraping, desperate tightness, like my lungs were trying to close themselves off from the inside. I stood there in the middle of that beautiful wet green forest, bent over with my hands on my knees, and I could hear myself wheeze. A woman passed me with two dogs and asked if I was okay. I said yes, just catching my breath. She looked at me the way people look when they know you’re lying to yourself.

I smoked on the drive home. I know how that sounds.

But something had shifted. I’d made this enormous life decision to move to a place specifically because of what it offered outdoors, and I couldn’t even hike two miles without my body staging a protest. The math didn’t work. I couldn’t have both things. That night I sat on my apartment steps in the rain and smoked what I decided would be my last cigarette. I didn’t make it dramatic. I just smoked it, noticed the taste in a way I hadn’t in years: slightly sweet at first, then acrid, then that hollow aftertaste that coats your teeth. I put it out and went inside.

I quit cold turkey. No patches, no gum, no Chantix. I want to be clear that this is not necessarily the right approach for everyone. It was brutal. The first three days, I had headaches that sat behind my eyes like something pressing outward. I was irritable in a way that felt almost physical, like my skin was buzzing. I ate an embarrassing amount of peanut butter straight from the jar. I walked. When a craving hit, I put on my shoes and walked around the block, sometimes three or four times.

The hardest part wasn’t the physical withdrawal, though. It was the social scene.

Portland has this thing where a lot of the bars and music venues are small and the smoking happens right outside the door, and everyone clusters there between sets or between drinks. I’d made friends through a coworker, and our group spent a lot of Friday nights at bars in the Alberta Arts District and Mississippi Avenue. And every time we went outside, which was all the time, everyone smoked. Not everyone. But enough people that I was always standing in a cloud of it, and worse, I was always standing slightly apart, slightly outside the ritual, holding a seltzer water and trying not to look like I wanted to snatch a cigarette out of someone’s hand.

Week four was the hardest week. We went to see a band at a venue on East Burnside, and I had drunk two beers, which was exactly the wrong number: enough to lower my resistance, not enough to blur the craving. My friend Marcus offered me one without even thinking about it, just holding the pack out the way you do. And I stood there for what felt like a full minute looking at it. I could smell it. My hand actually moved toward it.

I said no. I went inside and drank water and watched the band and when everyone came back in smelling like smoke I pretended not to notice.

I won’t say it got easy fast. The first two months were hard in ways I didn’t expect. Sleep was weird. My appetite changed. I started tasting food differently, which sounds like a benefit, and it is, but it’s also disorienting when the garlic in your pasta suddenly hits like a fire alarm. My body was recalibrating, and recalibrating is not always comfortable.

What saved me, what actually saved me, was the running.

About six weeks after I quit, I tried the Wildwood Trail again. I made it three miles before I needed to stop, and even then it was because my legs were tired, not my lungs. I started going back twice a week, then three times. I downloaded a training app and started jogging the flatter sections. By month four, I was running. Actual running, sustained running, in the rain, in the mud, with Douglas firs dripping on my shoulders and the smell of wet earth everywhere.

There is something that happens to your lungs when they start to clear out. I don’t have a scientific way to describe it, but they start to feel like yours again. Like they have space. I’d take a long pull of cold Pacific Northwest air on a trail and feel it go all the way down, and I’d think, I could not do this before. I could not feel this before. That awareness kept me honest every time a craving came back.

Last July, I summited Mt. Hood. I went with a guided group (it’s a technical climb, glacier and all, you need crampons and an ice axe) and we started at 2 a.m. to catch the snow when it’s frozen solid. I stood at 11,249 feet in the dark with the lights of Portland visible to the north and a clear sky full of stars overhead, and I was breathing hard from altitude but my lungs were doing their job. All of it. No wheeze, no tightness, no scraping. Just cold air going in and out.

I thought about that woman with the two dogs on Wildwood Trail who watched me wheeze over my hands on my knees.

Three years without a cigarette. I’m not going to tell you I never think about it. Some mornings, especially when I’m stressed, there’s still this phantom reach, a moment where my hand wants to go to a pocket that’s been empty for three years. It passes. It always passes faster than it used to.

If you’re still smoking, I understand why quitting feels impossible. I tried to quit twice before this and failed both times. What was different this time wasn’t willpower. I don’t think I have more willpower than anyone else. What was different was that I had something specific I was choosing instead of something I was just giving up. I wasn’t quitting cigarettes. I was choosing the forest. I was choosing the trail. I was choosing to find out what my lungs could actually do.

You don’t have to want to run a mountain. You don’t have to move to Portland. But find the thing you want more than the cigarette. It’s out there. And you’re not doing this alone. There are more of us on the other side of it than you think, and every single one of us remembers exactly how hard it was to get here.

It’s worth it. The air is worth it.