Wow. This has turned into a strange and headache making adventure, if you want to call it an adventure given that it's becoming more like a quest or troubled desire.
You see we still have stuff in storage in California that we weren't able to bring with us when we moved (9 years ago!) and haven't had the opportunity to move out here (or get rid of) since. I know moving is a big task -- especially if you've been in the same place many years as we were in our little house in California -- and sorting stuff and getting rid of stuff you don't need can take forever. Easier just to put it in storage and deal with it "later." But then the years go by, you have other things to do, and voila! The task you set never gets done.
So the time came. The storage unit rental had reached astronomical levels (I thought, anyway) and most of the stuff we have there is stuff I didn't know about because I was busy packing up the last of the house into the van while others were taking odds and ends I never saw to the storage unit in the rental truck.
Three years ago (or was it four?) we did a quick trip out there to work on clearing out the storage, but we didn't get very far. Ms Che found something she treasured in the storage unit, something she thought had been lost forever, something of her mother's, and that was basically it as far as doing any more work there. We took three or four pick up loads of things that shouldn't have been saved in the first place to the dump, packed the treasure and a few other items (pictures and such, an antique floor lamp with a Downton Abbey shade) into the car and drove home to New Mexico.
That's when we discovered how much oil the car uses! Oh, I didn't know. It's an older Subaru and apparently they have an oil consumption issue I hadn't heard of until the engine ran out of oil just over the New Mexico border from Arizona. Well, we eventually made it home after limping into a truck stop and buying quarts and quarts of oil to put in the engine, and the car seems to have recovered well enough. We figure it can make it to California and back one more time -- so long as we add a quart of oil or so at every gasoline fill up. Details.
So after a year of going nowhere because of the pandemic, we got a terse little note from the storage facility that the automatic monthly charge had been turned down by the bank, and oh, there would be a late charge, and oh the rent is going up again (!) and oh, would I like to take care of it by check or credit card?
Oh, I'd like to get the stuff out of there and save the nearly $300 a month for other things.
But it's complicated. We have an 8X16 storage building on our property that had a lot of stuff in it that we'd brought from California 9 years ago that we never sorted or really did anything with but just pack it away. The building sat beside the house where it was really in the way, and I wanted it moved to another location on our property where it would be more out of the way but still easy enough to access.
That meant emptying it and getting someone to do the moving.
We meant to do it in the spring but then the rains came unexpectedly and much of the back area turned to goopy mud. So. We didn't get it done. The rains stopped last month, and we started emptying the building, but it took much longer than we thought it would. Weeks, not days. We got another smaller temporary storage building delivered and we packed most of what we were saving into it, leaving an empty building to be moved. That happened yesterday. Much of what we are saving has sentimental value. It's in large measure memory things: Ms. Che's mother's things, many, many photos, Ms. Che's brother's things (he was killed by a drunk driver in the early '70s), and mementos of our extensive travels and unusual working life during our long-ago youth. Many lifetimes of stuff, most of which isn't meaningful to anyone but us.
We got rid of a lot, too. I think we still have too much stuff because we do, but at least we got rid of some of it, packed the rest neatly, and now have plenty of room for whatever we can salvage from storage in California. Which shouldn't be a whole lot.
At first, the plan was to do some leisure travel (visiting the Central Coast then to the Sierra foothill Gold Country, then to Central Valley) and take care of the storage during a week in mid-October, only to find out the schedule I'd set didn't quite jibe with the revised schedule of our friend who was going with me instead of Ms Che -- who wants to stay in New Mexico to take care of a new batch of kittens and work on clearing stuff out of the house.
So, I changed the schedule to leave NM in early October and return from California by the 10th. We'd start on the Central Coast, go up to Monterey, cross the Central Valley to the Sierra foothill Gold Country, then over the mountains to Carson City and Reno, Nevada, then back to California, do our business with the storage, putting what we would keep in a rental truck, towing the car behind us for the trip back to New Mexico.
Sounded good. Didn't work. Finding accommodation was a problem. But worse, when I reserved a truck to transport what we would keep, I got a call from the rental company saying "There isn't anything available now, and there won't be anything on your dates." Instead, they would ship our stuff in one of their boxes that we would load and they would transport. Well, that sounded ok though it was somewhat more expensive.
The problem of lodging became acute however. I could not find anything available for some of our dates at all -- or rather for less than a fortune. $500 a night for, say, a room at the Travelodge. This was crazy. Many places I checked where we'd stayed before were closed permanently. The pandemic and other factors had wrecked more havoc than I knew. After a while of this I became very frustrated. Then Ms. Che suggested I turn the itinerary around, starting with the storage problem then touring at leisure, and so I tried that and by golly, it worked. It was a bit of a strain time-wise, but otherwise it worked OK.
Then our friend said she could skip Nevada if we could go to the Bay Area instead, visiting San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and so on. I said... uhhhh. I had deliberately avoided the Bay Area in large part because of the insanity of traffic west of Vallejo and north of Gilroy. This is no joke. For an elder like me, driving in the Bay Area (or Los Angeles) is extremely stressful and troubling. The problem for old folks like me (or at least one of the problems) is drivers coming from the side; it startles and scares us, and truth is, we panic.
So I was reluctant, but said we could leave it open as a possibility. Yet Ms. Che was adamant. No, don't go to the Bay Area. It's too stressful, and not worth the aggravation. Hint: I'd probably get so stressed out, I'd get my stroke or heart attack. So I said no. We could, instead, tour the Gold Rush trail, Highway 49, and stay in Angels Camp or maybe San Andreas. That seemed to satisfy everyone.
Then came the issue of arranging lodgings. At least there were rooms available, and not all places were super-expensive, so I spent all day yesterday reserving places to stay. It was exhausting, but I got it done. (And now, several days later, I'm thinking of changing some of the reservations.)
I found that the continuing wild fires and the pandemic had had a severe impact on nearly everything in California, and it's not getting better. Many places have closed and those that remain open are struggling. The virus continues to spread. People are leaving California for wherever they can find to flee to. At least that's what I've been told.
Ms Che and I left California almost 10 years ago and are glad we did. We didn't leave with a lot of money the way some people do because we didn't own property. But we had enough and receive enough in retirement to live quite well in New Mexico. We look back on our lives in California -- she was born there, I arrived as a 9 month old infant -- without rancor, but with sadness over what it has become. Santa Maria where I first lived in California starting in 1949, and where I returned to over and over from 1973 to 1983, and where I intend to visit on this trip, has changed fundamentally -- as has much of California -- from the town, the little farm town, I once knew. Barely 10,000 people lived there when I was a kid. I remember it as a kind and happy place, filled with flowers and sunshine. Of course that's romanticizing it. It wasn't by any means a paradise, not for everyone, and in many ways, I was one of the lucky ones. Many Santa Marians -- especially farm workers -- did not live well at all and didn't have the advantages I did. I know that better now than I did then, but I knew it when I was a kid, too. We lived in Tiger Town, the part of Santa Maria populated by many of the Spanish and Tagalog speaking farm workers. We knew some of them. But we also knew and socialized with some of the overseers and owners, and my mother had been the girlfriend of one of the scions of a prominent farm and ranch family when she was in high school.
My sister was born there in 1933. Her father was not the previously mentioned scion. Instead he was a Texas roustabout who worked for my mother's step father. This little family lived in Santa Maria until about 1940 when they moved to West Sacramento and lived on a pear orchard managed by the Watanabe family. The daughter became my mother's best friend. You know what's coming. WWII and the round up and internment of Japanese Americans. My mother was infuriated when the Watanabes were interned. She divorced her husband, got a job at an air field, and eventually joined the WAACs. She met my father while he was in the Air Corps and eventually, they were married and I came along.
Their marriage didn't last, in part because my mother and sister couldn't stand living in Iowa where my father was an attorney.
My mother divorced my father, receiving his Packard car and a pile of money as part of the property settlement, and she drove me back to Santa Maria. My sister followed on the train.
So Santa Maria was the first home place I was aware of. I lived there until I was 5, then moved to Los Angeles County where I've recently learned my sister and her father were living at that time. I didn't know that. I didn't see my sister from shortly before my mother and I moved to Los Angeles in 1953 until 1956 or '57 when she was a college student in Sacramento, recently married and pregnant.
Santa Maria was never perfect but was always idealized in my mind's eye. Going back this "one last trip" to California is the highlight of my thinking and planning. Santa Maria is not the small farming town it was, though. It's changed a lot, not much for the better either. The population is ten times what it was when I was a kid there, and the spirit of the place is distinctly different -- at least it was the last time I was there in the mid-'90s. When the wineries came in to the valley in the '80s, the place became meaner, harsher, more "sophisticated" and much less open and friendly. Class distinctions had always been there, but they were greatly enhanced with the advent of the wineries. Who you were in society very much depended on how much money you had or could control, not so much on what you did or how you were regarded by the citizens.
I remember reading the obit of my mother's high school boyfriend a few years ago. She was not allowed to marry him as he was from a prominent pioneer ranching family, and she was merely the step-daughter of a mechanic. He had to marry well, not beneath him after all. Well, there is a whole story of his marriages, but his obit glossed over that and focused on his civic, charitable and farming business activities. In other words, what he did for others, how he lived his life, whose lives he impacted and how he changed the farm business in the valley.
The impression I got was that he saw himself responsible for bettering the lives of far more people than his immediate family. Though I don't think he was ever in elected office, he served on various boards and commissions and endeavored to fund wide spread educational opportunities. He tried to use his own successful farm and business as an example of how to do good by doing well. From the way he was regarded by the obituary writer, he seemed to me to be an example of the Santa Maria old guard, what the town and its people once were and were expected to be. Something was lost when he died. Not just a personality but a way of life.
We'll see. I have hopes that at least a little bit of what once was is still there. Some of the sites are certainly still there, though much has changed and the heart of the town was ripped out to produce a suburban mall at the central crossroad. The church where my sister's boyfriend played the organ. The high school (well part of it) my mother and sister both attended and graduated from. The Marian hospital where my mother worked (now a elder care facility). The theater where I spent eight summers working over 10 years in the '70s and '80s. The park where I fed the deer when I was a little kid. All three places I'd lived when I was a kid. I know these are still there and haven't changed much. But few or none of the people I knew are still around. Many have died, but many others moved away. We can revisit places, but there are different people there now, and there may be little or no memory of what used to be.
We'll be passing through Arizona and the Central Valley where resistance to Covid protocols is strong. The disease has relatively free rein, and I'm susceptible due to immune suppression, so there's risk involved beyond the ordinary.
But still an adventure.
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