29—Shrink-Wrapped

To: Friends and Family

Subject: Shrink-Wrapped

From: walden@intermind.net

May 19, 1999: The cats and I are now at a Motel 6 in Eugene, Oregon. We’ve got just three more hours to Netarts, but the cats got edgy so I decided to stop. Also, I thought I might use the time to sort out all the emotions surrounding the move. Although I must say that apart from the kaleidoscope of anxieties, Moving Day went smoothly. 

I’d spent the last few months eliminating nonessentials. So in addition to my bed, desk, sofa, recliner chair, and some shelves and a filing cabinet, I’d pared down my possessions to a small stack of boxes in the corner of my apartment. As I sat waiting for the movers, I fretted over the money I could have saved over the years by not aspiring to a larger life. 

The last fourteen weeks have been difficult and strange. When I returned to Las Vegas on Groundhog Day, I sat in the supermarket parking lot watching shoppers slap across the pavement in their flip-flops. Smog coated my eyeballs and clogged my sinuses. I longed for the clean ocean air and even missed the wind and horizontal bullets of rain. Inside the market, coins clattered out of the slot machines lining the front wall. And I thought of how T. S. Eliot’s magi felt after returning home following the holy birth—“no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.”

I’d left Netarts with Heron alive inside me, right there at the center with my heart and lungs, that gray and indigo stillness at the edge of the silvery peach water at twilight. By March, Heron had become a memory, an image I held in my thoughts. By mid April, the memory had turned into a bird I pictured in a distant place.

It was also about this time that I became alarmed that the owner of the cabin was not sending me the two-year lease as promised. On May 2nd, his wife called. They were getting a divorce and selling the house. In a panic, I phoned the rental agent who’d set me up in the house. She called back with news that the apartment, just two houses north of the house, was still available. I’d looked at the place and thought it fine but preferred the house. Now, with moving day set for May 18, I was stuck. I called Chuck, the landlord, made a deal, and decided the outcome was a blessing I had yet to understand.

Around ten on Moving Day, a van, the size of a high-roof boxcar, arrived.

Vinny, the mover, was a short square man. He surveyed my load. “Good job boxing. Piece of cake,” he observed, his muscles bulging with an eagerness to begin lifting and hauling.

“So what happens if the van can’t make it down my street?” I asked. “I mean, we’re talking a back-alley-small street.”

“We just rent a truck and bring it in,” Vinny said.

The cats tucked away in the bathroom began wailing and scratching the door.

“What if there’s no truck rental available?” I asked, my stress mounting. 

“Can I make a call?” Vinny asked as he began pushing the buttons on my phone. 
“I think I bought some sort of insurance for this type of emergen...,” I was saying when an African-American man in a wildly flowered shirt of many colors wandered through the door with a gigantic roll of plastic wrap. 

“Hi-ya,” he greeted us in a Carribean lilt. “Name ees Richmond,” he added with a big half-moon smile.

“You're late,” Vinny snapped.

Richmond shrugged, peeled open the plastic rap, and began shrink-wrapping my sofa. 

I recalled the dire warnings of Dr. Helen Caldicott who’d come to Las Vegas to lecture on nuclear disaster but spent more time on the threat of carcinogens leaching from plastic wrap into our muffins.

“Yeah,” Vinny was saying into the phone. “I’m over here at the partial. She says there might not be no truck rental in . . .” he extended his arm, drew back his head, and squinted at the moving orders.

“Knee-tarts,” I said.

“How far’s Astoria?” he asked me.

“Seventy miles,” I told him. 
Vinny rolled his eyes and repeated the number into the phone and waited. “Yeah, you do that,” he muttered then slammed down the phone. "New dispatcher can’t tell her elbow from a destination rental,” he said.

Richmond stood over my recliner scratching his head. “The back come off this nice chair?” he asked.

“Not that I know of,” I replied as he grabbed the back of the recliner by its sides, then jerked it upward and off. 

“Yah, man,” he said.

Anxiety swarmed over me like ants. Who were these men dismantling my life? And what had possessed me to move?

“I can see you upset, little lady,” Richmond said. “You go in the bedroom. Sit. Breathe slow and deep. We take care everything real good.”

In the bedroom, I lay down on the bed and for first time in five years felt myself falling irretrievably into the full grief of everything I’d lost. I was saved by the ringing of the phone. Dispatch. Yes, there was a truck-rental facility in Tillamook, I reported to Vinny as he and Richmond lifted the sofa out the door as if it were a balloon.

Several hours later, I watched the van disappear with all but my most essential and valuable possessions, which I then packed in the back of my truck. Being what Vinny called a “partial” meant that my belongings were part of two larger, more lucrative loads so that I’ll be the last delivery, in about three weeks, if I got lucky. 

Finally able to let the cats out of the bathroom, I understood their terror as they ran about in search of the familiar and found only bare walls. There was nowhere to hide. The place was spotless. Sterile and impersonal. For all the turmoil, we lived easy. For all the struggle, I’d left no mark. 

All evening friends called with their goodbyes and best wishes. My voice echoed off the walls of the empty apartment. My favorite Buddha Delight take-out now seemed flavorless.

Around eleven, the cats and I burrowed into my sleeping bag. At two, I realized I was not going to sleep and decided to stave off anxiety by leaving. The cats, seeming to understand, walked into their carriers. By three, we’d begun our gradual ascent up 95 North. The town of cards glittered for a time in the rearview mirror like a fallen galaxy. Then the lights blurred into a small shimming amber light that vanished abruptly into the night. The high beams of my pickup streaked through the shadows lining the road like the set in a dark theater. 

Perhaps I’m dead, I thought, sent off in my old truck Egyptian-style with my beloved cats, all my favorite possessions tied up in the blue tarp for my next life. As I sped through the night with the stars, I wished I’d spent more time learning their names.

Daylight convinced me I'm alive. And the drive through the desert to Reno was heart-wrenchingly beautiful because I know that while something has called me to the Oregon coast, the desert will always be my spiritual home.

Here, now, at the Motel 6 in Eugene where I am neither here nor there, I am now asking myself if feeling “called” is just my rationalization for dipping into my retirement savings to make such a drastic move with so little thought.

Or might there really be such a thing as destiny?