Published August 9, 2020
Ten years ago today, I stuffed essentials into my 1999 Honda Civic LX and left the only state I’d ever lived in for the start of a new life. Here is the story of that trip: a blog post at least 10 years in the making.
This wasn’t the original plan
When I accepted the job of sports editor of the News-Register in McMinnville, Oregon, I had to figure out how to move myself, my car and my possessions all the way to the Pacific Northwest from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The plan changed a few times.
With the help of my sisters, I was going to fly to Portland and have separate shipping companies transport my car and belongings to Oregon. I decided — at almost the last minute, planning-wise — to drive, taking only what I needed until everything else could catch up with me. That meant that until then, I’d have with me only what would fit in my car or what I could buy.
Two dear friends had agreed to let me stay with them in Newberg, Oregon, just up the road from McMinnville, until I got a handle on where I wanted to rent an apartment. (In a quirk of scheduling, they were in Baton Rouge visiting family when I set out on my journey, one of many interesting layers to the story of how I came to be a resident of the Pacific Northwest.)
With my stuff in Baton Rouge, my new job awaiting in McMinnville and my temporary residence 14 miles from there in Newberg, the complications started to overwhelm me. “I’m driving,” I said one day, and that was that. The rest of the plan soon fell into place.
I boxed up everything, numbered the boxes, kept an inventory by box number, and left a wad of cash for my roommate and former co-worker (another long story about someone doing many kindnesses for me). At her convenience, she would be shipping the boxes to me, and I would put them in a storage unit I’d rented in Newberg (the only U.S. city whose name ends in “berg,” by the way!). Little did I know that months later, after getting off work around midnight, I’d be stopped by a law enforcement officer and eyed with suspicion because of the boxes filling my car. Someone later explained it to me: Louisiana license plate, lots of boxes, driving late at night on a highway used by drug runners, and red, watery eyes (after a 16-hour day in problematic contact lenses) — yeah, it made sense that the roadside conversation lasted as long as it did.
Oh, right, the tape I used to seal the boxes? Purple. My nephew told me that trick, saying that it would make the boxes stand out if my stuff was in the same trailer moving across the U.S. with other people’s boxes. Years later when purple became the unofficial color of another major life journey, I smiled when I found the leftover tape in a drawer.
Saying goodbye
There was a lot to do before leaving.
My whole life had been in Louisiana. Saying goodbye would be impossible, but making the effort was necessary. This being the social-media age, many people knew I was moving before I had a chance to tell them (thanks, Facebook). I narrowed my list of in-person farewells to the few I could manage in the time remaining.
I went to Lake Charles and took a long look at the house I grew up in. I drove to the grounds of the seminary I’d attended in my early 20s to have a quiet walk around a place that had meant a lot to me at a difficult time in my life. I’d never been a picture-taker, but on that Saturday, I took several to mark the occasion. Then I had a lovely dinner with a journalist friend, who has since died. It was the last meal of “Louisiana food” I ate inside the state.
My roommate threw a going-away party for me the next day, the eve of the start of my drive, and unlike some legendary people in the newspaper business, I followed that up by actually going away.
Hitting the road
Armed with AAA maps and TripTik Travel Planners, I left Baton Rouge later than I had wanted to and ended that Monday, August 9, in Tyler, Texas. Day 1: 384 miles, one last Johnny’s Pizza (in Shreveport), the first taste of what a scorcher the whole week would be, and “Amarillo by morning” in my head as I fell asleep.
It was still dark the next day when I reached Dallas, which would be my cue to find and take the way to and through Wichita Falls, Texas, to Interstate 40 for the bulk of the westward leg. I was not prepared for the stalled van on a curvy stretch of interstate highway in Dallas, and light traffic allowed me to quickly change lanes and avert what would have been a disastrous second day — and derailment — of my trip. Whew!
My soundtrack became “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls,” a longtime favorite album by Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays. Some of the songs appear in “Fandango,” a bit of a cult classic from 1985 featuring Kevin Costner and a rather unorthodox road trip through Texas. I planned for this, of course. One doesn’t go on a life-changing drive across the country without thinking through the music ahead of time. (More on that CD later.)
In Plainview, Texas, I stopped for a stretch and a restroom break. Two signs of note: Next rest stop, 76 miles. Watch For Rattlesnakes.
It was early afternoon when I reached Amarillo, and the massive windmill farm just north of I-40 was a welcome distraction from the blazing sun and heat. The Honda’s air conditioner was working overtime to keep up. About an hour west of Amarillo, everything changed.
The July 2019 post that you’ll find via the hyperlink above explains better than I can today just what a dry-land equivalent of a sea change it was. Breathtaking best describes the views I had for the rest of the trip. The western half of the United States is gorgeous in ways that are remarkably different than in the South.
By the time I reached the twists and turns and ups and downs of I-40 in Albuquerque, it was time to call it a day. Twelve hours of driving in one day was enough. I slept well, not even stopping to think about what new developments in “Breaking Bad” might be filmed that day just a few miles from me.
I listened to Dan Fogelberg’s “To the Morning,” which would soon become my wake-up alarm every day, as I looked down on a beautiful predawn part of Albuquerque. By this point, my BlackBerry had snapshots from the last few miles of west Texas scenery until I crossed into: New Mexico, Land of Enchantment. With that came the first time zone change of the trip, a really cool moment for me. The BlackBerry adjusted to Mountain Time, and off we headed together, repeating the previous hour (sort of).
At some point on August 11, the third day of the journey, I stopped to journal a bit. Miles driven to that point: 1,122. Armadillo sightings in Texas: 1. Somehow, I managed to keep Amarillo and armadillo straight in my tired mind. The rest of that day’s entry was shared with a group of journalism friends who were keeping up with my travels.
Just past Amarillo, I saw a wind farm (the Wildorado Wind Ranch) that wasn’t able to do much farming. The air was barely moving. But that was a pretty cool sight.
Two transcendent moments: Noticing everything changing — the sky, the colors, the landscape, the air — as I drove deeper into New Mexico, and reaching the southernmost peaks of the Sangre de Christo Mountains at Albuquerque.
Thanks to the movie “Roxanne,” I can spell Albuquerque without having to Google it.
My makeshift Wichita Falls soundtrack was cool, but even better was listening to the “Almost Famous” soundtrack and hearing Simon and Garfunkel sing one of my favorite songs as I drove through places I’d never seen before.
“I’ve gone to look for America.”
We live in a big country
As a friend said once I got settled in Oregon, the trip gave me a profound sense of the size of the elephant, just how enormous the United States of America is. You can drive for a long time and see just a sliver of it.
The total mileage I put on my car? About 70 miles owe to my forgetfulness. Well into my Wednesday drive on August 11, I realized that I had blown past one of my intended stops and had to circle back. It was worth it for the fun of spending about an hour in a place where I added a short note to my chronicles.
I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.”
Yep. They made an intersection there into a thing because of the Eagles song (written by Jackson Browne, with an assist from Glenn Fry). Google it!
I ate lunch in Flagstaff. How does a body digest food at that elevation, I wondered? Anyway, driving downhill from nearly 7,000 feet is a trip, no pun intended. Easy on the clutch and brakes there, Carly.
Rolling into California, I couldn’t stop to take a picture of the sign that marks the crossover (thanks, Colorado River), but by day’s end I was on Pacific Time and thinking that that was a very cool thing. Mountains and Pacific Time, Carly: They’re with you to stay from now on.
A lightly edited version of that night’s shared journal entry:
Bunking tonight in: Needles, Calif.
Miles so far: 1,764.
Honda: Holding up nicely for an 11-year-old.
Incidents: 0.
Close calls: 3.
Line of the day: “Are you hiding an alligator in the trunk?” (woman at checkpoint entering California).
That line followed this one: “Do you have any produce with you?”
Those two lines preceded this one at check-in at the hotel: “Got any pets?”
I was too tired to say: “You mean other than the alligator in the trunk?”
Highest elevation so far: 7,000-plus feet.
Number of times ears popped: 8.
Tomorrow: Anaheim Hills and my sister’s house.
Reminder to the puzzled: I’m visiting family before I turn right and head to Oregon.
Overall impressions: New Mexico is breathtaking. Arizona has more green than I thought. Flagstaff is gorgeous. The road for the last few miles of I-40 before entering and after entering California is so bad, I was having Louisiana flashbacks. I’m also betting that a few rough characters have emerged from Needles.
I’m going to sleep well tonight.
Of course, Snoopy’s brother Spike lives in the desert outside Needles, so I may have been thinking about him when I made the reference to rough characters there.
Day 4
I drove along the edge of the Mojave National Preserve, aware that I had bypassed Hoover Dam and would be bypassing Joshua Tree National Park, but I had a schedule to keep so I’d be on time to start my new job.
Lunch with a friend who’d lived in my hometown in the ’80s was a refreshing break, and then it was on to Anaheim Hills for what turned out to be something of a family reunion. A couple of nights’ stay in a home rather than a hotel proved a welcome change.
That night’s entry:
Miles so far: 2016.9.
Margaritas this evening: 2.
Family members converging here the next few days: 8.
Photos to share today: 0.
Hours I plan to sleep tonight: 10ish, if I can get away with it.
The Honda is looking forward to a day off too.
No driving, no journaling the next day. Visiting with family recharged my battery in all the right ways, and I was back on the road on Saturday, August 14.
“Alligator lizards in the air” was my first signal to those keeping up with my trip, an indication that I was northbound, with Los Angeles in my rearview mirror, although the “Ventura Highway” reference could be confusing to someone who knows the difference between the song and the Ventura Freeway.
I had another close call in traffic in San Luis Obispo, and it was a reminder to be extra careful the rest of the way. Dinner on the edge of the ocean was the perfect end to another long day of driving, one that featured gorgeous scenery around Santa Barbara and up through Big Sur. A stretch not far from Solvang called to mind the movie “Sideways,” and activated my pun brain: “You’re Solvang, you probably think this song is about you.”
That night in Daly City, near San Francisco, was lovely. That dinner with my uncle and the love of his life, at Nick’s on Rockaway Beach in Pacifica. It was my first meal with a Pacific Ocean view, and my last meal with the two of them. They died a few years later, before I could keep my promise to visit them again now that I lived on the Best Coast.
Day 7
California is a tall state. I was reminded of this on yet another day of driving its highways.
I drove across the Bay Bridge, saw hot air balloons near Vacaville, then listened to part of a 1970s “America’s Top 40” with Casey Kasem on some radio station. I never heard what song was No. 1, but “Shambala” by Three Dog Night was No. 27. More roadside scenery straight out of “Sideways” colored my day.
The Lake Shasta area is so beautiful. I wish I still had the photos. Mount Shasta as close as I was able to get to it was majestic. And I wasn’t done with mountains, that’s for sure.
My last fill-up before entering Oregon, where I knew it was illegal to pump your own gas? Weed, California. Great name for a city and area that years later were ravaged by wildfire. I bought a snack, something called a Cutie Pie, because I loved the name. And off I went.
Somewhere along the way, I picked up the radio broadcast of a baseball game between the Minnesota Twins and the Oakland A’s. This was another cool reminder that, yes, I am on the West Coast. This is where I live now.
I plopped for a night in a Courtyard by Marriott in Medford, Oregon, I was about to experience driving through Grants Pass, which I am glad I did in summertime and not icy, stormy winter.
The Sunday entry:
Miles so far: 2,871.
I’ll finish the drive late Monday morning and early afternoon, stop by the paper to say hello, then get to where I’ll be staying before I find a more permanent place to live.
One of the reasons I left the South was to escape the heat and humidity. The temperature could hit 100 today at my new home. Nice. Ah, but it is cool at night. That just doesn’t happen back home.
I was not yet an Oregon resident and still referring to Louisiana as “back home.” A shift in point of view was closer than I could imagine.
Made it
Before getting in my car for the final leg, I checked my digital recorder to flesh out the details of my unexpected brush with Casey Kasem. Here, with a coupled of corrections, is what I added to my travel journal:
“American Top 40,” to be more accurate. What I heard:
28. Three Dog Night “Shambala”
27. Isley Brothers “That Lady (Part 1)”
26. Carpenters “Yesterday Once More”
25. Donnie Osmond “Young Love”
24. Seals & Crofts “Diamond Girl”
23. Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water”
22. Lobo: “How Can I Tell Her”
21. Aretha Franklin “Angel”
20. Elton John “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”
19. Grand Funk Railroad “We’re An American Band”
I even found a link for one of the stations that played it that day, although it no longer works. KLUV, why can’t I count on you anymore? Anyway, I found the full playlist in case you’d like to travel back in time just a few more decades than August 2010.
I stopped at the newspaper office in McMinnville to check in and let them know I’d made it. To get there, my car and I had to wait a long time because of road work that had traffic stopped. So close and yet so far, I thought. When we were allowed to drive on, I took the Wheatland Ferry across the Willamette River, but somehow I knew it by another name, too. As I wrote a day later in my online travel journal: I took the Matheny ferry yesterday. I thought of Pat Metheny, despite the different spelling.
The GPS I borrowed from one of my sisters took me the rest of the way to the 3rd Street office of the News-Register. “Can I tell him what this is regarding?” the receptionist said to me after I asked to see managing editor Steve Bagwell.
“Tell him his new sports editor is here,” I told her.
Then I drove the last 14 miles to Newberg, moved my stuff into my upstairs room in my friends’ house, ate a spaghetti dinner with them at a charming restaurant and then saw a spectacular view of Mount Hood before calling it a day — and a trip.
My journey was just starting, really.
Total miles: 3,140.
That’s a lot of miles for a 1999 Honda Civic to add in eight days during a hot August 2010. Accordingly, I have given it a lot of rest since then.
To drive home the point, let’s look at some odometer readings:
August 7, 2010: 114,092 miles.
August 2015: 145,347 miles.
August 9, 2020: 165,618 miles.
Since May 6, 2013, when I formally switched my car insurance to reflect that I had moved to the state of Washington, I have driven 37,626 miles, or only 432 miles per month.
Miles driven since August 29, 2019? A whopping 1,656! This is what happens when your car is 21 years old — and totaled — and your workplace is half a mile from home. And since mid-March, I’ve worked almost exclusively at home, so there you go.
A story with holes
There are huge gaps in this story. There’s almost nothing about why I decided to leave my home state for a new life. You’d have to know more than is written here to know just how much of a new life it has become. It was hard to write this post and “delimit the topic,” as one of my teachers was fond of saying. There were so many parts of me that wanted to throw themselves into this retelling.
My first day on the job, August 19, 2010, was a whirlwind. I arrived to inherit coverage of a medical crisis involving the local high school football team, and it was quickly turning into a national story. The New York Times, CBS, other national news outlets, and even Nancy Grace, wanted our photos or some information or our time in one way or another. There was no time to be tired after the long trip.
There was much to learn. Amity, the small town in Oregon, is different than Amite, the small town in Louisiana, I had to keep telling my brain. You live somewhere else now. Prineville, not Pineville. There is a Terrebonne in Oregon, but it’s not Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana. You live in Oregon now. Yes, there is a McMenamins in McMinnville, but not everything in town starts with Mc.
The part of my ADHD brain that turns a 60-second story into a 30-minute soliloquy because of tangents so easily triggered? It worked overtime in 2010 to reassure me that I was seeing signs that this was where I was meant to be. As I passed highway signs reminding me that I wasn’t in Louisiana anymore, the instances began piling up on an already tall stack.
Eugene? That was the name of my mom’s other brother!
Gervais? My Baton Rouge roommate’s name!
George looks like Santa Claus and plays Santa every December, and by letting me stay at his house for now, he’s my Santa!
His wife, Lucy? Lucy is the name of the daughter of my nephew, my godchild, the one who recommended the purple tape!
Mount St. Helens? Helen is my mom’s name!
And on and on and on it went.
If this blog post had an odometer, I’d have broken it by now. It’s time to turn the key, engage the parking brake and call it the journey complete.
Well, what do we have here …
But, you see, looking back on it after weeks of research and prep, I realize that as much as anything else, this anniversary post is a love letter to my car. I bought it in September 1999 after a Saturday blowup that I’d rather forget. Almost exactly 21 years ago, I set out one hot, humid August morning to drive from Shreveport to Baton Rouge to look for an apartment. I’d just accepted a new job, and I was about to pack up and move (I’ve done that a lot, you know). Then, an hour into the trip, my car died. Dramatically.
The Honda Civic that replaced it has been with me since my first week of living in Baton Rouge. We’ve been through a lot together. I’ve poured more money into it than most people would have, but it’s paid for, and Hondas are famous for having long lives, so …
In 2014, I had a close call on my way to work, just a few blocks from where I now live. A car was speeding through downtown on a Sunday, going at least 60 or 70 mph in a 25 mph zone, and to this day my brain can’t logically process how it didn’t slam into me and make me a part of the newspaper’s police-blotter roundup I would edit that night.
In 2018, the car was totaled — parked at work, minding its own business as I sat at my desk and did my job — in a plot twist that led to my moving six blocks from the office. It’s been broken into and left largely unscathed, except for someone smoking a cigarette halfway and then leaving it on the floorboard before leaving and closing the door. Hey, weird things happen to your car when it’s parked next to a highway offramp and street near the downtown bar area — and places where homeless people sleep and look for cans, bottles, food and discarded anything they can use. Around 5 a.m. July 29, I saw someone looking into it with a flashlight before dawn in my apartment building’s parking lot. It wasn’t until after they rode away on a bicycle that I was brave enough to walk outside and check on it. No damage, no theft, but another reminder of how vulnerable we can feel when we are in any way violated.
After my surgeries in spring 2019, I often limped outside to sit in my car during my recovery, tired of being inside after 12 days in the hospital and weeks of recovery. I’d roll down the windows and let the cool breezes soothe me, with I-5 traffic my entertainment and soundtrack. It was a place, however small, that was mine. I own this car, and I rent this space, and you’re not taking either of them away from me without a fight.
Oh, and how do I know the odometer reading from August 7, 2010? My plan to drive to Oregon was nearly ended before it began. Heading back to work after one last visit to my doctor’s office in Baton Rouge that week, I got caught in a flash flood and made the rookie mistake of trying to get through an intersection to higher ground, to wait it out. Total repair bill? $1,408.31. That wiped out a big percentage of what remained in my savings account. The receipt is how I know how many miles were on my car 10 years ago.
So, yeah. Ouch.
Somehow, we are still together, the car and the Carly.
There is a line from one of my favorite movies, “Seabiscuit,” when Seabiscuit’s eventual caretaker and trainer explains to his eventual owner why he’s nursing a rundown horse back to health.
“You don’t throw a whole life away just because he’s banged up a little.”
When the line is repeated later in the movie, you know that it’s not about a horse. Heck, it could even be about a car, or a car’s owner.
For reasons surpassing my understanding until now, I have been thinking of the late Kelly Preston and her character in “For Love of the Game” when she is describing leaving the hospital after giving birth and becoming a single mom. “You and me. You and me, little girl.”
That’s how I feel about my car, and why I still have it, as beat up as it is — like its owner.
“And then I rigged out my backpack like those babies things they have now, and we walked out of there — two kids together.”
That’s a callback for me to 10 years ago today, the two of us heading out into the great unknown.
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I wish I still had the photos from that BlackBerry. You would be able to see my car next to the gas pump in Weed where I filled up the tank before crossing into Oregon, land of no-pumping-your-own-gas. You could see the corner in Winslow, Arizona, as I saw it that day. You could see how much trunk space in my Honda was occupied by the purple and gold sombrero that four co-workers bought for me and that Nick Saban presented to me in 2003 after I made one of my famously terrible predictions. The photos are long gone.
The memories remain.
Part of me wants to tell you that the person I was 10 years ago today, setting out on a trip out west with only a vague sense of confidence that I was on the right path, would not recognize the person I am today. But there’s enough of my story on this website to reassure even that part of me that, yes, deep down, in the heart fires that drove me and still drive me, it would be like 2010 Carly looking in a mirror and finally seeing herself.
It’s no Tom T. Hall “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” but that’s how I got from Louisiana to Oregon. The why of it all is still unfolding in unexpected ways, but mostly I know now that I drove a long way to find the person inside of me who was waiting to be set free.