California… and bust

After getting fired from CompuLit, I went back to doing temporary work. Eventually I got tired of the uncertainty of this and took a job at a pizza place. Not surprisingly, I didn’t excel at it. My primary responsibility was delivering pizzas, but my sense of direction is akin to my sense of spatial relations. I got lost a lot, and in any case the restaurant wasn’t really busy enough to justify having a full-time driver. I was frequently reprimanded for standing around and doing nothing – because there wasn’t anything to do. (My boss would insist that I wipe perfectly clean tables just to “look busy,” behavior that I found pointless and borderline unscrupulous.) I tired of this and walked out. After that, I got a job at Blockbuster. That was an embarrassing, boring, and low-paying job, but it wasn’t particularly difficult, and occasionally I would get to answer questions about movies. I remember telling one guy that while the cinematography of Legends of the Fall was excellent, the story wasn’t very involving. He asked me what cinematography was. The other benefit of working there was that I got to watch a promo video featuring the release of The Fugitive several hundred times. I still fantasize about starting a business meeting with my Tommy Lee Jones monologue:

We’ve got a fugitive who’s been on the run for 90 minutes. Average foot speed over uneven ground, barring injury, is four miles per hour. That gives us a radius of six miles. What I want out of each and every one of you is a hard target search of every gas station, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. Your fugitive’s name is Doctor Richard Kimble. Go get him!

By the end of September, 1994, Julia and I had about two thousand dollars saved up, and we began planning our move to California. We had intended to leave early in the afternoon of October 7 but didn’t manage to get everything packed until nearly 8pm because we greatly overestimated how much stuff we could jam into a 5 foot by 8 foot trailer and a Bronco II. (When you find yourself saying things like, “Do we really need this cookie sheet?”, you know something has gone wrong.) We had liquidated nearly all of our furniture and many of our other belongings, but we were left with about a ton and a half of stuff to lug across the country. That estimate, by the way, includes our sixteen pound cat, Luther, who had never traveled in a car for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

The trip started out well, if a little late, and by the second night we made it to Hull, Iowa, where we stayed with my dad’s brother and his wife. We spent the early part of the third day visiting with various members of the Kroese family and then left early that afternoon, feeling well-rested and ready for the rest of the journey. That night we stayed in a motel about an hour and a half east of Rapid City, South Dakota.

The next day we got up early, intending to drive up to Mount Rushmore. Neither of us had seen Mount Rushmore before and, considering my affinity for North by Northwest, this was a situation that needed to be rectified. To get to Mount Rushmore, though, you first have to drive up a very, very large hill. A sensible person probably would have realized that driving up any more steep inclines than was absolutely necessary is not a good idea when you’re driving an underpowered vehicle that’s pulling a trailer packed full of everything you own. By this point, I don’t think I need to clarify that I was not a sensible person.

About two thirds of the way up the hill, the car began to overheat, so I pulled off the road into a campground and waited for it to cool. We had brought along a litter box for Luther, but as far as we could tell, he hadn’t used it for the past three days, and I was getting concerned that eventually he was going to have an accident all over our possessions in the back of the Bronco II. I took Luther outside in the hopes that he would make use of the facilities. Not wanting to risk him running away, I attached a leash to his collar and attempted to take him for a walk.

It turns out that there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of people out walking their cats in this manner. The reason is that cats don’t like leashes. Especially very old cats who have never before seen a leash and are all WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ATTACHING TO MY COLLAR GETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF!

I have never seen a cat so terrified. As God is my witness, he leapt six feet straight into the air. For an overweight, fifteen-year-old cat, he could do some serious acrobatics. He jumped, he twirled, and he somersaulted, all while caterwauling like an angry demon. He was like a speed freak with Tourette’s having an epileptic seizure.

I managed to get the collar off, and he thanked me by immediately running underneath the porch of a nearby building and ensconcing himself in a corner as far away from me as possible. We spent the next half hour coaxing him from his hiding spot – a nice diversion while we waited for the car to cool. When we returned to the car, I noticed two large puddles underneath the car. I wasn’t exactly mechanically astute, but I knew that one of the puddles was coolant. And the other… well, I kind of hoped it had been there before we arrived.

The car started up fine, but putting it into gear had no effect. It simply wouldn’t move. Even I was smart enough to figure out that something bad had happened to our transmission. We called a towing service and waited another forty-five minutes for a tow truck to arrive. We unhooked the trailer from the Bronco II, and the tow truck driver hooked the Bronco II up to his truck. We were about to get into the truck when the woman who owned the campground showed up, shaking her head and stating firmly, “You can’t leave that trailer there.”

“Uh,” I replied, “We don’t have any way to move it. It weighs about three thousand pounds.”

She told us that wasn’t her problem. It had to be moved.

The tow truck driver mentioned that his truck didn’t have a hitch on it, so that even if we disconnected the Bronco II from his truck, he wouldn’t be able to move the trailer. And since the Bronco II was hooked up to his truck backwards, we couldn’t daisy-chain the vehicles, towing the trailer with the Bronco II and the Bronco II with the truck.

“Well, it can’t stay there,” the lady said.

“Could we move it to that site over there?” I asked, motioning to an area about fifty feet away and slightly downhill from where the trailer sat. She said that would be OK.

The driver and I lifted with all our might on the tongue of the trailer while Julia stood on the back end to provide a counterweight. We managed to lift it about a foot and started pulling it forward. The trailer gained momentum as it rolled downhill and soon we were in danger of being overrun. “Drop it!” the driver hollered, and we both let go and leapt out of the way of our U-Haul juggernaut. The tongue hit the dirt and skidded to a stop. We had gone about ten feet.

The driver and I resumed our positions on either side of the trailer and once again strained to lift the tongue a few inches off the ground. We pulled slightly forward and once again the trailer began to move, picking up momentum as it did so. “Drop it!” the driver yelled, and we dove out of the way again. The trailer skidded to a halt. Sweaty and shaking with adrenaline, we resumed our positions and did this three more times. Finally, the trailer sat in its designated spot. I promised we would be back for it soon, and we got into the tow truck and took off for town.

By the time we got back to Rapid City, the transmission shop was closed, so we shacked up at the Motel 6 across the street. The mechanic looked at it late the next afternoon, and the prognosis was grim. We were going to be spending a lot of time in Rapid City, South Dakota. When I asked the mechanic if there were any options other than replacing the transmission, he said, “Well, you could stay here.” He seemed to be serious, as if a typical response to one’s car breaking down in a strange city in the middle of nowhere was to give up and put down roots wherever your U-Haul trailer had skidded to a halt.

Speaking of the trailer, I was by this time getting a little concerned about the bulk of our worldly possessions languishing unattended in a campground just off the road to Mount Rushmore. I called a few car rental places until I found on that had a Chevy Suburban with a trailer hitch. We had to walk about three miles to get to the place, but we got our Suburban, picked up our trailer, and brought it to the transmission shop, where we could keep an eye on it. Since we had a full day left with the Suburban, we decided to make the most of the situation and drive back up to Mount Rushmore.

The neat thing about Mount Rushmore is that it’s the heads of four U.S. presidents carved into granite. Also, there’s a gift shop.

Seriously, I don’t mean to denigrate the significance of hacking the shit out of a mountain with TNT until it looks like four U.S. presidents; it’s certainly a sight to behold, but frankly the experience lacks something if you’re not being chased by Martin Landau.

We spent another full day – and our entire savings – in Rapid City, getting our transmission replaced. Most of our last day there was occupied by sorting through our belongings in the parking lot of Quality Transmissions, in forty-mile-an-hour wind, trying to lose about 500 pounds of junk. I had wisely – if belatedly – come to the conclusion that we were expecting a little too much of the Bronco II. We donated most of my weight set, about five boxes of books (including my first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook!), and assorted other flotsam and jetsam, to the guys at Quality Transmission.

Finally, we were able to drive the Bronco II out of the shop, hook up the trailer, and resume our travels. We didn’t realize at this point that the Bronco II still had a bad water pump – and the most taxing part of the journey was still ahead of us. Even with the new transmission and 500 fewer pounds, we barely made it to California.

Every time we would drive up a steep incline, crawling along the shoulder at forty-five miles per hour, I would breathlessly watch the temperature gauge creeping into the red. Usually we would make it to the top just as the radiator started to steam, and then the needle would drop back down to the safe range as we coasted down the other side. Every time this happened it felt like winning the lottery because, as anyone who has been in this situation knows, if you can’t quite make it to the top, you’re screwed. You have to pull over before the car shuts itself off and then sit for a good hour on the side of the road waiting for the engine to cool. Sometimes we would have to do this more than once for a single hill, and let me tell you, when you’re in the middle of a 2,300 mile drive, it’s pretty damn demoralizing to spend more than two hours traveling less than a mile.

We finally arrived in to Ripon, California, ten days after having left Grand Rapids. Initially, we stayed with Julia’s mother. This was supposed to be a very temporary arrangement, but as we had spent our entire savings on the trip expenses and a new transmission, we weren’t going anywhere for a while.