It’s been a year since our arrival at our new home in the Willamette Valley of Oregon in the Pacific Northwest.  It’s taken about that long for it to sink in for me that we’re actually here.  For some time after arriving, I had the irrational fear that we would have to go back to Texas for some godawful reason.  Slowly, though, that fear subsided, allowing me to really register being in this new and beautiful place, for it is beautiful, in so many ways.

Despite chomping at the bit to leave, there were sad elements to our departure.  We still had friends in Austin that we were going to miss, and one of them decided to throw a going-away party for us in her backyard.  She invited many friends whom we had not seen in quite some time and it was lovely to see them all.  There was even some drumming, something we all used to do together quite a lot but hadn’t in a while for various reasons.  It was good to reconnect with friendly faces we hadn’t seen in a while, but added a bittersweet element to our leaving.

One of the things we had to deal with in the weeks leading up to our move was getting rid of our beloved fishtanks and our son’s bearded dragon, Alduin (named after the boss dragon from the game Skyrim).  One of the fishtanks was 110 gallons, which we had had for over 20 years and had housed several schools of lovely freshwater fish, including my favorites, clown loaches.  They’re so festive with their orange and black stripes, and their group behaviors make them somewhat like aquatic puppy dogs.  I was very sad to see them go, but we found them a good home with someone who had a beautiful tank to put them into.  He was gracious enough to send us some videos of them swimming happily with their new tankmates.

A friend from Dallas came to take Alduin off our hands, giving us some cash which would be much-needed in the weeks following our road voyage.  He had had his own bearded dragon who had recently died, so he was happy to get a replacement for his reptilian friend.  Personally I missed Alduin less than the fish, but our son was sad to see him go as he was his pet.  Moving was overall very hard on both of the kids, but we had no choice given the economics of Austin and the political climate of Texas, which had turned us as parents into criminals for supporting our children’s desire to be transgender.

The week before we left last year, my husband and I were losing our minds trying to wrap up the last of the moving preparations and finish packing.  There was so much to do and only the two of us to do it.  Our children were supposed to leave two weeks before we did, but their departure was delayed by a week, because reasons.  This meant we had less time to do more work.  I was and am grateful for the help of friends and family in helping us pack up the last of our things, because otherwise, it wouldn’t have gotten done.  That last week was a hellstorm of checking things off the list of things to do, adding more things we hadn’t considered, and me basically telling myself to just keep moving, because if I didn’t, I didn’t think I’d get back up.

There was also a yard sale to manage, which I had vacillated on whether or not to have, but I’m glad we did because we wound up needing that money.  I was also selling furniture and other items on Facebook, which also yielded money we wound up needing.  After a point, though, I simply had no time to deal with managing queries and visits from people, so we had more than one “freesale” in our driveway, inviting the neighborhood over to take our stuff we didn’t have room to move in the 26’ UHaul we were taking.  Everything else went on the curb to be picked up on no less than three sequential bulk trash pickups.

The UHaul was picked up the day before a loading crew came to pack our belongings into the truck, but the night before, my husband and I were up until 4am tackling final packing tasks, mostly of our kids’ stuff in the garage.  We were still packing as they loaded, and in my haze, I didn’t even notice all of the art still hanging on the walls.  My gracious mother-in-law took care of all of that, and of shipping it to us when it was clear it wouldn’t fit into the truck.

Our final task was cleaning the old house as best we could, which took all.freaking.day.  I had hired a cleaner to tackle the nitty-gritty cleaning, but made the mistake of paying her ahead of time, which practically invited her last minute cancellation and my having to spend the next few months trying to get her to pay me back (I got half the money back).  By the time we had our landlord over to inspect things and give him the keys, we were energetically spent.  And we still had a 5-day drive ahead of us!

We got to spend an evening resting and relaxing at my mother-in-law’s house, which was thankfully only 10 minutes away, though I was still tending some last minute hotel reservation changes.  We weren’t just moving ourselves, we also had four cats to move.  Two of them went with the children the week before on the airplane, which meant we had to take the other two with us in the car.  One cat didn’t mind so much, but the other was pretty freaked.  She woke us up in the middle of the night searching for her catbox, poor thing.

Finally, it was departure day.  We arose early, had some breakfast and coffee, then trundled  the cats into the small kennels we had purchased for their journey in the back of the car.  My husband had already decided he would drive the truck the entire way and I would drive the car.  Normally on road trips, we would switch off every two hours to avoid driver fatigue, but we did not have that option this time.  Each of us would have to drive about 8 hours a day, all day, for five days to cover the 2223 mile trip.

The first leg took us from Austin to Amarillo, where we would connect with Interstate 40 that would take us all the way across the Southwest.  I was glad that this was the last time I would ever have to drive all the way across Texas, which is gargantuan in size.  It was one of  the reasons we were leaving: we were tired of living somewhere that took so long to get anywhere else within the state, let alone leave it.  It was predictably boring, though the weather cooled significantly as we headed north-northwest.  Amarillo was my husband’s place of birth and where he was raised, and he was happy to bid it adieu.

While we were happy to be on the road, the same cannot be said for the cats, though one handled it much better than the other.  Both had many things to say on the way, but only for a couple of hours, then they were quiet.  Dharma, our fat calico, was more energetic, moving about her kennel during the drive, but my black girl Shadow simply laid limply in the bottom of hers.  At one point at a rest stop, I looked back at her and it looked like she was crying.  I felt so bad for her.  They were happy to be out of the car and into the hotel room when we finally arrived in Amarillo that evening.  We had dinner at the steakhouse next door and then settled into the hotel room to get some rest.  Dharma, who usually slept alone, parked herself between our pillows.  Shadow hid somewhere, then awakened us around 2am panicking because she was in a strange place.  Poor thing.

We were looking forward to the next day, which would finally see us leave the state we both hated so much.  We got the cats and our luggage loaded that morning and headed west on I-40.  A couple of hours later, we finally crossed the state line, as well as a time zone, pulling over at a massive rest stop in New Mexico just a mile after doing so.  We both did a little dance and even cried a little bit with relief to finally be out of Texas.  I had a smoke break, and then we hit the road again.

Gradually the flatness of the Great Plains gave way to rolling, scrub-covered hills that featured interesting geological colorations.  The further west we went, the more interesting the landscape became.  It was refreshing after such a dull drive the day before.  We did take the opportunity to stop in Tucumcari, the first city with a billboard advertising cannabis dispensaries, where we made our first legal weed purchase.  It made our evenings for the rest of the trip more pleasant.

Then the wind picked up.  A massive, late season winter storm was pushing its way across the entire country, and we were driving through the tail end of it.  40-50 mph winds forced us to slow our speed to accommodate the heavy UHaul, and we were both frequently buffeted out of our lane.  The other result of the heavy winds was that we were unable to reach our intended destination that evening, which was supposed to be Flagstaff, Arizona.  Being a bit older, we don’t see as well in the dark as we used to, so we were forced to stop in Holbrook, AZ, a couple of hours east of Flagstaff.  Luckily there were hotels and restaurants there, but not much else, and half those restaurants were closed already.  Definitely a town that rolled up the sidewalks at sundown, although there was quite the party going on in the room below ours.

Our third day on the road would take us to Barstow, CA.  We stopped at a rest area east of Flagstaff for a break, where the weather was oddly cold and windy due to the previous day’s passing winter storm.  While there, my husband got a phone call informing him that my pillow had been left in our hotel room.  After some inquiring about having it shipped to our new home, we decided it would be too expensive to do so, nor could we turn back to get it.  I found this upsetting as it was made of memory foam and had a flannel pillowcase, so it was a source of comfort.  I told myself I’d replace it once we got to Oregon and we went on our way.

Our route on I-40 took us through the Mojave Preserve.  I remember passing Flagstaff, after which there was almost nothing, and wondering why.  The passing storm system had made the weather fairly pleasant and I was curious why there were no towns.  Then a summer temperature map flashed in my head, and I realized that this area of the country is essentially America’s convection oven, with temperatures routinely reaching 120F or higher in the summertime.  All was suddenly clear.  The area was stark and foreboding, like Mordor, but also strangely beautiful, with high mountains descending to alluvial plains.

Normally on a road trip, we would have stopped frequently to take pictures, but we were on a schedule, so we only stopped three times for photos.  This was one of them, somewhere in far western Arizona at an isolated rest stop, looking towards where Death Valley would be: 

Then we got back on the road to Barstow, a town seemingly built for truckers tucked at the end of I-40 at I-15.  It was very industrial, and oddly cold for that time of year given the winter storm that had passed through the day before.

Day 4 of our journey was the worst, for me anyway.  I checked my maps program in the morning to see what the best way was to our next destination, Sacramento CA, and it advised me to take CA-99 through the Imperial Valley after leaving Bakersfield.  I was fine with this, as I had driven on I-5 through central California before, and I had never been on a flatter, straighter, and more boring stretch of highway in my life, not even in Texas or Kansas.  It practically invited highway hypnosis.  So we took the state highway instead, and I wish I hadn’t, because it was awful.  Agricultural trucks along with the residents of the cities that dotted the highway created terrible traffic in sections.  We spent a great deal of time passing trucks that were going slower, and the highway itself was claustrophobic in its construction, tending to dive below the level of the surrounding cities that lined the embankments.

At one point I was so aggravated by the traffic and rudeness of the drivers that I quickly swerved off onto an exit ramp that offered no real place to rest.  I wound up parked at the corner of someone’s residence to the side of the road, sobbing from the stress and smoking two cigarettes in a row to alleviate my tension.  I had exited so fast that my husband was unable to safely follow me, and he texted me from down the highway a ways where he was waiting for me when I finally got back on the road.  I managed to finish the day’s journey, but just barely.  I was sobbing again by the time we got to our hotel in Sacramento as I thought about my hasty exit and how that must have scared the cats, not to mention how dangerous doing that was.  My husband graciously unloaded everything, including the cats, instructing me to try to relax (after giving me one of his Xanax) while he went to get us some food.

At least the weather was beginning to resemble what we were expecting in the Northwest, with a cool rain falling amidst tall trees.

The fifth and final day of our moving adventure would take us from Sacramento all the way to our new home in the Eugene, OR area, or at least to the hotel we were staying at that night.  We had been texting our older son the entire time to let him know our progress along the way, and he was excited to see us after two weeks.  The drive was gloriously beautiful, taking us past Mt. Shasta and to Weed, CA, another one of our only tourist stops, where I took a picture of the aforementioned volcano: 

I also picked up some souvenirs: a storage jar and a coffee cup that said “got weed?”

It became increasingly forested the further north we went, buoying my spirits.  After all, it was the trees that had made me fall in love with the Northwest in the first place when we first visited in 1999 and I immediately made the decision that I would live there someday.  Now it was happening, and it was feeling more real.

We crossed many mountains between New Mexico and the Willamette Valley, but none more stark than Siskiyou Pass, at the border between California and Oregon.  The winter storm a couple of days before had dumped a lot of snow on the coastal mountains, which we had seen none of yet, but as we climbed the pass and rounded the topmost bend, BAM!  Suddenly it was winter, as though we had passed through a veil.  Traffic slowed to a crawl in the snowy fog, and drifts were piled along the side of the road, which had been blessedly plowed.

The wintry weather abated as we descended the pass on the other side into country I can only describe as Shire-like.  The land was awash in every shade of green imaginable, and speckled with wildflowers.  I cheered as we passed a sign high on a hillside saying “Welcome to Oregon!”  I’m sure my husband in the UHaul did too.  It was a spectacular drive for the remainder of our trip, only dimmed by my increasing exhaustion.  We passed through beautiful forests and crossed many rivers, all flowing strongly with snowmelt.  At a rest area in the Medford/Ashland area, I took my third and last road trip photo of the snow-covered mountains:

Finally we passed by a sign saying “Eugene 150 miles”, which should have filled me with delight, but it didn’t.  I was so tired from the ordeal of planning, packing, preparing, and actually driving that I burst into tears, a part of me saying “I can’t do it, I can’t drive anymore!” and another part saying “you have to, come on, it’s just another couple of hours, you’ve come this far”.  I somehow summoned an invisible reserve of will and energy and plowed on, not even stopping at rest areas to smoke, even though they were beautiful and I wanted nothing more than to sit beneath the trees for a while.

At last, our exit off I-5 appeared, and we drove to our hotel on the rainy highway to drop off the cats and then go see our kids, who were staying at our nephew’s mother’s house.  We went to a diner for food with our older child, then took him with us back to the hotel so we could visit.  Even the cats were happy to see him, with Shadow appearing relaxed for the first time in a week.  She had been so freaked by the trip and by staying in a strange place each night that twice during the trip, we’d had to call hotel maintenance and have someone help us move the bed, where she had wedged herself between the frame and the wall where we couldn’t get to her.  Seeing my son, she jumped onto the couch and got into my lap, comforted by his appearance (poor thing).  Then we took him back to our nephew’s mom’s house and returned for our final hotel stay.

The next morning was clear and cool, and we sat by the Willamette River watching the mist rise from the water before heading to our new house, which we had rented sight unseen aside from the internet photos.  Some of our friends questioned our decision to move to a city we had never even seen, but it felt right, and in more than one way, we didn’t really have a choice.  We knew people here, it was in a part of the country we loved, and for about a dozen separate reasons, we absolutely could not stay in Texas anymore.

We drove to our new neighborhood and parked the moving truck with some difficulty, as our street had a dead-end but no real way to turn around, necessitating what must have been a 15-point turn on my husband’s part to get the damn thing pointed the right way.  At last, the unloaders arrived, and our things were taken inside over the next 4 hours.  I went between the back porch, where I sat in the sun to keep warm, and the front porch, where I alternated between being warm when the sun was out and nearly freezing when it hid behind a cloud, a pattern I would eventually get used to. As I waited for the truck to be unloaded, I marveled at our new view, which features forested mountains and dairy pastures.

Once the unloaders were done, we took the UHaul back and returned home to assemble our kitchen table and the bed, which made the cats happy (and me!).  Then we drove back to our nephew’s mother’s house to retrieve a third cat, Bhakti, another black girl who had flown up with the kids two weeks prior along with our son’s cat, Zen.  She had been cooped up in a small room for the last two weeks and somewhat tormented by Zen, who could be a jerk sometimes, so she was delighted to have an entire house to run around in, taking advantage of the long hallway to zoom up and down between the living room and our bedroom.

Then I numbed out and collapsed for the next six weeks, doing nothing but sit on the back porch drinking coffee, smoking, and watching it rain, my head blessedly free of any thoughts of moving (or anything else, really).  I slept like the dead every night and took a 3-hour nap most days, being as yet unaware that I was suffering from extremely high blood sugar that was fatiguing me.  The kids would come and visit sometimes, especially after their living situation became untenable due to some health issues on the part of our nephew’s mother, after which they moved in with us.

It really did turn out to be a life-saving move for us to have that yard sale and for me to take the time and energy to sell furniture online, because gas prices spiked just in time for our journey across six states.  The UHaul got terrible mileage, of course, and so each time we stopped for gas, we were spending between $200-300 to fill both vehicles.  The highest priced gas we paid for was in the middle of the desert, at more than $7 a gallon.  This meant that by the time we actually moved in, we had but a few hundred dollars left, and by the time we got paid at the end of April, we had a grand total of $11 to our name.  I calculated we had probably spent around $2500 just in gasoline over 5 days.

We learned a lot on the trip, such as it was always better and easier to fill our tanks at one of the many Love’s and Flying J truck stops that dotted the highways rather than try to navigate the UHaul inside a city.  It had been a long time since I had been in a truck stop, and they had undergone major upgrades in that time.  Coffee was no longer gotten from an aging Bunn-o-Matic that had probably been sitting there for hours, if there was any at all.  Entire corners of the stops were devoted to multiple coffee pumps featuring a wide variety of roasts, blends, and flavors.  I was fond of the Colombian Dark Roast, myself.  Most even had a pump for real half-and-half so we didn’t have to stand there opening one tiny container after another to get our coffee the way we wanted it.  Most usually had one fast-food joint or another attached as well, so we could fuel up the vehicles as well as ourselves in one stop.

My mental health issues demanded that I secure a doctor’s care almost immediately so I would have someone to handle my prescriptions, which turned out to be fortuitous due to the aforementioned blood sugar problem I didn’t know about.  In late May, I was informed I was severely diabetic, at which point I made some radical lifestyle changes that probably came none too soon.  My blood sugar was high enough to put me in danger of ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition, not to mention the extended danger of heart attacks, strokes, blindness, and amputation.  Nothing like a health scare to light a fire under one’s ass.  Within a month, I was feeling much better, no longer needing a 3-hour nap each day, and getting some exercise now that we lived in a place one could actually go outdoors without the sun trying to kill us, something we took great advantage of.

Over our first summer, we would visit several local parks, drive to the incredibly gorgeous Oregon coast three times (it’s only 2 hours away!), visit Crater Lake National Park and Cascadia State Park, and take a lot of walks in the nature preserve we happen to live right next to.  I also took several drives on beautifully forested, twisty roads just to get out of the house and sing along to my favorite songs, something I find healing.

That may have been the best thing we got from leaving Texas for Oregon: healing, on many levels.  Our physical health has improved from the increased ability to exercise in the absence of constant severe heat as well as the incredibly clean water we are privileged to drink here.  All of the food tastes better here.  We had never really enjoyed buying fresh fruit in Texas because most of it is shipped there unripe from other places since it just won’t grow there most of the time.  Not so here.  The combination of mild temperatures, reliable rain, and the volcanic soil that covers the state mean that a wide variety of fruits and vegetables grow locally, and it is all delicious.  Even the dairy and meat products taste better.  I guess it’s true what they say about happy cows.  In fact, we are so close to the edge of town that we can see a cow field from our front windows, a field that also has beehives from spring to fall.  Land of milk and honey, indeed.

Then there’s our mental health, which we did not realize was suffering so badly from living in such an oppressive environment as Texas, especially myself.  While we have still had our anxieties to deal with since moving, I am of much sounder mind here than I ever was there, in no small part due to receiving better medical care here than there, in addition to just being in an environment that is more pleasant on many levels.  The area we live in has about a tenth the population of Austin, which improves so many things it’s difficult to convey.  If we need an Austin-sized metropolis for some reason, Portland is 2 hours up the freeway and Seattle, one of my favorite cities, another 3 from there.

It was hard getting here, and there were difficulties adjusting to life in a new place, but I’m so glad we did it when we did it.  Had we stayed in Austin just one more month, we wouldn’t have had enough money to make the move simply because it has gotten so expensive to live there.  It was literally sucking us dry, body, mind, and bank account.  I still fail to understand why it’s the fastest growing metro area in the United States.  Now that we are finally in the Pacific Northwest, I am never leaving.  To me, this is my “soulscape”, a word I learned from my favorite writer, Neil Peart.  It is Home.