The Great Relocation

It was just about exactly 40 years ago that I finally heeded the call to go west, young man (and before I get into the story...a word about Brexit...the financial chaos of the vote to leave the EU aside, there's this: no more will Brits be free to hit the open road and travel throughout Europe without passports and without the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. As with all walls, you're not only locking others out, you're locking yourself in.) Anyway,  Lorna and I packed little daughter Meagan into our Fiat (yes, my weakness for things Italian once even drove me to drive a Fiat), and we left our home on scenic Canaan Street Lake in New Hampshire for a most uncertain future in California...no jobs and but two contacts awaiting us. With Dylan’s New Morning playing on the cassette player, I broke into tears before we were even 5 minutes down the road from our first and still fondly remembered home. (I probably won’t cry as much listening to Dylan again until the day the poet dies.)
We spent our first night on the road in the tent we bought with Green Stamps at a campsite in the Catskills…yes, we were taking the scenic route. That night we endured the most ferocious thunderstorm of our lives…either we were so high in the sky or the storm was so low to the ground, but middle earth was rolling and roiling beneath our sleeping bags. I was getting up and daring the elements every 20 minutes to tip the water off our sagging tent so it didn’t collapse in on us. Maybe it was a message from God to turn back home to sweet New England and never venture forth again. If it was, we ignored it.
A night or two later we were camping in an odd spot of Kansas where one minute you were in Central Time zone and the next in Mountain Standard…and the whole damn time you were back in the 1920s because it was dry…Prohibition Era dry. Some men can’t camp out without building a fire; I can’t camp out without opening a bottle of wine…so another sleepless night. Had I been Dorothy, I think I would’ve stayed in Oz.

In Utah, Lorna and Meagan took their shoes off and waded into the Great Salt Lake. It was a bit surreal. I could easily imagine Jesus walking across it, and could almost understand how Mormons came to believe that they’d stumbled upon some place Biblical.
When we reached San Francisco, once and future friend Bruce MacLaren had kindly left us the keys to his place in his absence so we could give northern California a proper tryout as our final destination. But that first weekend was the Fourth of July, and that California sun we'd come looking for was not to be seen. Sensible New Englanders that we were, we had packed our parkas and donned our grim apparel to watch the parade. We decided then and there that we had not traveled 3,000 miles for the laying out of our winter clothes/And wishing we were gone....
And soon we were…driving down the spectacular California coast, which was all that fed our imaginings about the Golden State once we had outgrown the fantasy of Disneyland. We hit Ventura and once again pitched our tent…this time on a beautiful, white sandy beach. I do declare, we found some real comfort there. I truly could have lived on that beach indefinitely…even in a tent. But then one weekend the rangers came by and told us they were booked solid and we would have to vacate our site for at least a week.   
It seemed a good time to look up Lorna’s long lost Aunt Bev in Van Nuys. So we called her and soon enough we were squatting with her in the famous San Fernando Valley, home of San Fernando Red, The Real McCoys and hundreds of other characters and places we had learned so much about growing up in front of American TV. Everything our pre-trip research had revealed convinced us to avoid Los Angeles, which included the Valley. But within a week, though not exactly charmed by the place, we were definitely intrigued. The writer Jan Morris had just written an article for Rolling Stone describing San Francisco as a city that offers less than meets the eye and LA as a city that offers more than meets the eye. We had come with fresh eyes to be witnesses to the truth of that. Soon we found an apartment of our own, Lorna found a job in the heart of LA, and we enrolled Meagan in a local school.

As planned from the start, I was to spend my days launching the writing career I had failed to launch while teaching in New Hampshire….the lesson being: you come to New Hampshire with your writing career in hand--à la my hero Salinger--you don’t start your career there (Grace Metalious be damned). Every day I tried my hand at writing scripts for sitcoms and finding the all-important literary agent. I found one who asked me to get him some sample one-liners he could submit to Johnny Carson. I worked like a madman on them on two different and equally difficult typewriters. One was a classic black Royal from like the Gutenberg days that Lorna’s grandfather had willed us; the other was Lorna’s robin’s egg blue, toy-like Olivetti. They both had persistent jamming problems and of course required correcting strips for my innumerable rewrites and typos. None of that put me in much of a mind for writing comedy, and the situation wasn’t helped much by the Valley heat and claustrophobic conditions of our small apartment. The frustration grew so much that one day I threw the Olivetti through a wall. The jokes never did come, but Lorna being Lorna sacrificed one of her paychecks to buy me a new Corona Selectric…which would do until Steve Jobs came along to rescue me from typewriter hell.
Two of the sweeter memories from that first year of the great relocation…
One, by November I had gone stir crazy being alone in that apartment with just my imagination for days on end and decided to take my mitt and go out and find a softball game. The first place I went was the park across from the home of Meagan’s best schoolmate pal Michelle. I approached a group just warming up for a game and asked if I could play. They said yes. Turned out they played every Sunday, and Lorna and I joined them, and after every game we went to a favorite Mexican restaurant. Lifelong friendships were formed back then…that persist through Facebook to this day…with me and Lorna and the softball gang…with Meagan and Michelle…with Lorna and me and Michelle’s family…with the softball gang and Meagan…and later Gillian…with Meagan’s kids and Michelle’s kids.

The second sweet memory is that it was the high summer of Ronstadt and Eagles glory. You couldn’t go into a restaurant without hearing a cover band do Desperado. You couldn’t walk down a street without having a convertible drive by blasting Take It Easy. You couldn’t say goodbye at a party without someone reminding you that you can check out any time you want but you can never leave. For any who have disdain for that period of music and that particular sound--and I know you're out there--all I can say is, you had to be there. For me it will always be the soundtrack to the great relocation...a time when I was the new kid in town.  

Thanks to old friend Art Pease for vintage postcard of old home in Canaan, NH