Busted Flat

Inspirational song: Me and Bobby McGee (v. Janis Joplin)

Since moving has been on everyone's mind so often lately, when I polled my man and my daughter for suggestions on topics for this evening, simultaneously, on separate continents, they suggested stories of our moving disasters. In a split second I have gone from having nothing to write to needing to pare it down to fit in my standard space. I'm so glad I asked. The sad thing about it is that I asked for things that are funny, because I was tired of writing depressing posts. What kind of freaks are we that when asked for amusing memories, my family members immediately go to "our rental truck is broken and we are stuck in the middle of nowhere for hours" as if that was hilarious?

As often as we have moved, all around the country or just across town, we have only allowed movers to help us out one time, when we moved from a temporary rental house to a newer one 40 miles closer to where the man worked in California. That experience, watching men who looked like they were pulled from a halfway house to spend the day throwing my furniture and boxes around soured me on the experience so badly, I stopped suggesting we hire movers ever again. These men took my full, vintage Danish modern dresser, and rolled it up the stairs when they unloaded it. Rolled it. On purpose. Stood it on one side, then flipped it on its top, then stood it on the other end, and finally landed it on its feet at the top of the stairs. If I had been in any shape to argue, I would have let them have it. But I woke that morning with food poisoning, and very nearly had to miss the entire experience. I almost wish I had. Moving stresses me out, and I have often been at my lowest points as we hit the road. The first time we left California, I had the worst bout of flu I have ever experienced, and I was barely functional as we pulled out of the driveway in Santa Barbara county. By the time we hit Burbank, my fever broke (after about six days with one), but I still felt totally wretched. It was evening, and the plan was to make it to Barstow and find a hotel as soon as we peeled off on the 40. We had not done our homework, and didn't know that there are no hotels on the 40 at that point, and so we just kept driving, farther and farther into the desert, until we pulled into a tiny truck stop in Needles, and just pulled onto a side street to sleep for an hour or so. I couldn't fall asleep, as exhausted as I was, because so many cars and trucks kept pulling in and out of the gas station, making noise and flashing their headlights in my face. I said to my daughter, "Could this get any worse?" As soon as I finished speaking, a noise caused me to look in the mirror, where I watched Berkeley the cat climb onto the deck behind the back seat, and barf right next to the window. Why, yes, yes it indeed could be worse. And this is what my daughter told me to tell you was a funny story from our past. Freaks, I tell you, they are freaks.

That trip out of California got better from there, in a real sense. It was early December, and as we drove through Amarillo, someone had used those fuzzy window paints in a gas station to write "Faliz Navidad," and I got a lovely chuckle at their showy, celebratory illiteracy. A little farther down that road, still in the Texas panhandle, and we approached Groom, where they have a stations of the cross roadside attraction, and a cross that is easily four or five stories tall. Back in those days we used to use little walkie-talkies between the car and truck, and in the dark car, from the radio in my older daughter's lap, we heard the squelch sound and my younger daughter's voice say sweetly, "Somebody big died there." Child always had good comedic timing.

But for all the late night punchiness of that move, at least we made it to our destination on time and intact. My man suggested I write about the times we broke down, and helpfully pointed out that there were only three. Sure, three times that the Budget, Uhaul, or Ryder trucks had major mechanical malfunctions. But honestly, I think he's missing several that qualify. The move from North Carolina to California immediately preceding the December move was a nightmare. The first truck was gas powered, and barely made it up the mountains in North Carolina, and by the time we hit the Eisenhower tunnel in Colorado, it was spewing thick black smoke from the drive train underneath. We spent a couple nights in Frisco, and when the replacement (meatier diesel) truck arrived at our hotel, the Ryder crew backed it up to the old truck, and the man stayed up all night with them moving every single item straight across and stacking it front to back. So much for our careful arrangement to have most needed items where we could grab them first. Two moves later, going from Oklahoma to North Dakota, we hadn't made it out of Braum's territory in Kansas (if you've ever eaten ice cream in Oklahoma, you know what I mean) before the brakes on the trailer pulling my man's truck seized, and stopped us for two nights in the middle of nowhere on I-35, waiting for U-Haul to send a new trailer. The second California exodus gave us three nights in Flagstaff, waiting for a repair to the Budget truck, and if I'm not mistaken, it ended up being yet another transfer of goods, in the middle of a repair shop parking lot, in July. These are things my man considers funny stories, and these are the only big incidents he remembers! Let me see... I believe the first big trip from Boulder to North Carolina involved my van broken down on the side of the highway just past Asheville, while the man kept driving all the way to Fayetteville, before he realized I hadn't been behind him for seven hours. That was the trip that taught us never to travel without electronic communication (and cell phones weren't so common back then). North Dakota to California wasn't so much a breakdown as a spring blizzard, that meant we couldn't go through Denver to see family, and we had to hunker down in Cheyenne for a night (where we're pretty sure the cats were doing swirlies in the bathroom while we went out to dinner), before taking off across icy roads in Wyoming, on our way to Utah. That trip I learned how much I dislike towing a trailer, as I nearly fishtailed my way into oblivion, surrounded by trucks who didn't give a flip that it was my first time out, I had to maintain highways speeds on ice. And I'm thinking the man has forgotten that on our last move, to get here, we hadn't made it an hour out of New Mexico, before the U-Haul trailer got a flat, in the early July heat wave in west Texas. We pulled in to our hotel in Oklahoma City at about 4 am, and were scheduled to have breakfast with my entire family. I didn't know that there was that much coffee in the world, but I drank it all to stay awake with the family.

You know, looking back at this, maybe I don't want to move from here after all. Maybe I can learn to live with the humidity and the spiders. We have some seriously bad automotive juju.