highpandemia

[highpandemia]

Pandemia s1e3: Roof of Wrack

I am growing a decision tree. The fruit is very expensive and all of it tastes bad. Let’s dive in.

To ship three bikes and three guitars is about $1300. That’s with two trips to the UPS store, not including insurance or packaging. So, probably closer to $1500.

An extra U-haul U-box shipping pod, from Inglewood, California to Portland, Maine is $1699. That would take two trips to load it up, and would ship three quarters empty.

A cargo carrier on top of the car, is about $500, and would solve some problems, maybe. I call three different shops, including two specialty “auto rack shops.” Typically I would never dream of calling places like these because I know specialty roof rack shops with names like RACK AND ROLL and RACK SOLID cater mostly to rich sport hobbyists with $8000 to spend on a hybrid kayak dirt bike s “exo-storage” system for their adventure tech nomad lifestyles. I drive a five year old Lexus and don’t own a mountain bike. But Brett from RACK OF AGES picks up, and knows just what I need.

“Yeah man, you’re gonna need a Yakima or Thule system,” he squeaks between gurgling bong rips. “I’m thinking EVO-Wing and either a basket/bag set up or hard topper. Let’s talk rails, you got flush or cross or what?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“Tight. What’s the make and model?”

A lighter flicks. I give Brett my details. He exhales. Keyboard clicks. He chats to someone named “Dunbo” off stage, about Darren’s rig, and how tight it is. He puts me on hold. Then he comes back with a litany if branded items and components I will need. All of which comes to a grand total of $859.00. I ask him if I can come get the whole package. There is a pause.

“Dude, literally everything I just said is backordered 12–16 weeks.”

Apparently, the Pandemic has wiped out everything. It’s Boomtown for specialty auto rack retailers in Los Angeles. It’s the roaring twenties. It’s the Rack Renaissance.

“I don’t even havea pair of straps to sell you, my dude,” earnest empathy and reggae coming through the receiver.

“Everyone is getting out of dodge.”

More calls. I get creative. Turns out, Lexus has factory roof rails I can buy and pick up at a dealership on Lincoln. And not two miles away, RACKS ON, RACKS OFF, has a Thule sport auto carrier I can buy. They have one left.

Decision tree has bloomed into a stress spiral.

Jess and I were supposed to leave hours ago. Now we’ll be lucky to get out of the city by 6pm. We’re sniping at each other, both tired and frustrated. I feel like it’s my fault things haven’t gone as planned. I should’ve gotten 4 pods. I should’ve planned for an extra day. Now I’m panicking because Not So Positive Mover Malcom packed my tool box, so I don’t know how I will even be able to disassemble the bikes once I have my roof cargo solution. I don’t even know if they will fit. I don’t know where the guitars will go. I was worried about the amount of luggage we we bringing the car anyway, but this is over the top. Renting a truck is out of the question. I don’t fancy driving alone and I know Jess doesn’t either. The cleaners are coming in an hour. Everything has to be out of the apartment. The property manager wants to do a walkthrough. Our new cargo carrier won’t let us fit into the Tenant Section of the parking garage, so I have to park in Guest Parking. Neighbors I’ve never met before are giving me strange looks as I sit among greasy bike parts, luggage and musical instruments.

I feel like I am going to cry.

[highpandemia]

Pandemia s1e2: The Move

The difference between good movers and bad movers boils down to that one moment after they walk through your pile of stuff, your life crammed into boxes and awkwardly stuffed into bags and taped together. The moment when they look around and say, either “oh yeah, we’ll bang this out,” or “this is a lot of stuff.” Good movers are positive. They manage your anxiety. They pack it away and safely guide it to your final destination.

Move day started at 7:30. I’d stayed up late the night before breaking down furniture and collecting boxes and items from around the condo. It was a mid-80s two bed, two bath, two floor, layout with updated kitchen and primary bath. We liked it. Throughout the packing process both Jess and I lamented leaving it, wondering if we were making a mistake. If it weren’t what was on the other side, family, the baby, cheaper cost of living, we probably would have stayed. But as the pandemic wore on, and especially after Jess became pregnant, we realized how isolated we had been since adventuring out West. The advent of our first child brought about a predictable late thirties yearn: for home.

My younger sister and her family had escaped New York right before the Spike. Now living with my parents, I heard Mom and Dad’s evolution into their final form: Grammy and Grampa. I was old enough to miss home, having built something outside of it, and found myself excited to test my Western self against an Eastern history. I wasn’t excited to trade endless summer for longer winters, but wanted to see how I’d fair this time around. If Colorado had made me different, a barely perceptible shift from my rural Maine roots, California had made me an alien. At least, that was my hypothesis.

As moving day carried on, I found myself with odd pockets of downtime, as my Positive Mover Malcolm and team worked through rooms, carrying strategizing and eliminating. I wandered on too little sleep and too much coffee, taking down curtains and looking for odds and ends to consolidate. Jess stowed away, working through the immovable meetings of her relentless work day. Which was okay with me. The afternoon sun shone on my plant littered patio. I ate a lime popsicle and thought about where these plants would go, what friends homes they would live on in. And why there wasn’t a plant shipping service because while I rarely took care of these plants, I liked them and don’t want to give them away.

“Oh well,” Jess would say, fondling her terra-cotta potted snake plant. “I guess the baby will have to be my LA souvenir.”

In the meantime, my Positive Mover, Malcolm, was getting a little less positive. He shook his head in the half cleared living room.

“I dunno, man.” I held the popsicle mid-bite as he spoke. “I don’t think this is all gonna fit.”

Which part of the bed do you keep? The part in the living room or the part already on the truck? Because according to Malcolm, both, was not an option. In the end, when he and his helper pulled away with my stuff, still more stuff remained. Three bicycles, three guitars, and a college dorm room’s worth of junior varsity furniture we forgot we’d had. I tore through the Department of Sanitation’s website looking for immediate salvation in bulky curbside pick up.

Congrats, Los Angeles, you got us for one more day.

[highpandemia]

Pandemia s1e1: Boxes

I counted on my fingers how many times I’ve moved in the past ten years. I didn’t know dates or lease terms, I knew streets.

North Street E Huntingdon Shepleigh Street Whitney Ave Ricker Park Ray’s View Kalmia Drive Century Drive Lafayette Street Lafayette Street (same building, one floor down) Grosvenor Blvd. Pershing Drive

I’d moved twelve times since 2010. I counted again. Between taping boxes and packing, I’d recount. Twelve seemed like a lot. Those addresses had taken me from Maine to Georgia, to Colorado and finally to California. I hadn’t done it alone. I had help. Inspiration, so to speak, in Jessica. That first move was just two twenty-somethings trying to get away. We packed up a car and drove without a destination. Everything we owned was in the sizable trunk of a 1988 Caprice Classic. We’d come a long way since then. We got married. Our moves, while frequent, felt like they had purpose. In Maine it was about growing up. Getting places that felt more “adult.” In Colorado it was survival at first, moving to Estes Park one week after the 1000 year flood and falling down the canyon into the Boulder rental market, which we could scarcely afford. But Boulder built us up. Careers shifted. Friends were made along with a bit more money. First it was a condo Louisville, a little suburb of Denver and then Denver itself. We lived off Cheeseman Park in a character filled brick Victorian that had been cut into four units. Over time we knew each tenant well enough to have dinner parties, drinks, shoot the shit on the patchy back lawn while Neurotic Terrier (NT) barked at people in the alley. We moved from the second floor to the much bigger first floor unit...whose address was whimsically “1234” after the departure of some neighbors that bought a condo. Then the lay offs, then Los Angeles, figuring out where people actually lived in Los Angeles, to now. 12:30 at night, and I’m wondering if I can wrap a television in couch cushions.  

Again.

Each move had been a little different. A rotating cast of IKEA furniture morphed into things we actually felt were worthy of a moving truck. Our stuff got a little nicer. We went from DiYers to hiring as many services as we could afford responsibly. This time, Jess and I agreed that having strangers pack our kitchen would relieve a disproportionate amount of stress. So we did it. But the most unique layer about this move was something else. Something bigger.

•••

“What did you say?”

“Sorry,” the young man adjust his mask. “Moving boxes are up front by the cashiers.”

I hated Home Depot. But here I was. Surfing for those last five moving boxes you didn’t know you needed until it was too late. One more stressed set of eyes in a sea full of masks. That’s what made this move different. The Coronavirus COVID-19. The Pandemic. We were moving across the country, from California to Maine, in the middle of a flaring sickness, an ailing economy, and rising unrest spurned on by systemic racism.

“Do you have any of those giant rolls of plastic wrap? The kind you wrap furniture in?”

“Yeah, boss, we got that too, all at the very front. Right when you walk in.”

The line to check out was long. People standing six feet apart, waiting to be called to a cashier or self-serve terminal. It felt weird walking in front of everyone, but I stepped to the large wall rack that said “moving supplies.” There was a cavity. A place we’re many boxes had been. Now, just a few scattered “extra-large” were stacked at the bottom, torn where a packing strap had dug too tightly. I took what remained and walked back to the end of the line. I had a long way to go, but I was going.

[highpandemia]

Birds I’ve Seen: Great Blue Heron

An ornithological field guide in parts. 

I was 32 years old when I left the United States for the first time. We were going to visit one of my wife’s friends in Amsterdam. The byzantine cobblestone streets, briney air and overcast skies reminded me of New England. I strolled down the open air market in the De Pijp neighborhood, feeling instantly at home. Behind the fishmongers, was a side street lined with parked cars. Upon these cars were several Great Blue Herons. The strutted and jutted atop luxury sedans and tiny European classics. These little cars, with names that sounded like aged chocolate liquer, looked as though they would be lifted up by the huge birds. I noticed one particularly ruffled crane perched atop a late modle BMW M series. The black roof was scratched and covered with fish guts. The heron’s eyes darted from passerby to passerby. 

“Who wants some? This your car? Fuck your car. Fuck your city. Fuck your fish. This is my fish.”

Jess pulled me across her, away from the ornery birds. 

“Don’t listen to them,” she said.

[highpandemia]

Birds I’ve Seen: Blue Jay

An ornithological field guide in parts. While my Mom talked to his wife in the kitchen, Harold would let me tag along in chores around the farm. I don’t think it was really a farm, but I was eight and Harold kept a very large garden and had a small tractor. They had a large cat named Jerry that would always sleep in a rocking chair in the living room. “Don’t touch Jerry,” Harold’s wife Sara would warn. “He’s old and mean.” One I was watching Harold weave the wicker seat of a wooden chair. I asked him about a sword hanging on the wall near some tools. “That’s not a sword,” he said, sliding the dark metal blade out of its metal sheath. “It’s called a bayonet.” “Where did you get it?” I asked. “Somewhere in Germany,” he said. Later, I was helping Harold sweep the barn. He pulled aside an old table to sweep underneath. On the floor were the brilliant colored body parts of several blue jays. Heads, wings, tails, perfectly laying there as though you could just put them together again and they would fly away. Harold placed the head of his large broom and the bird parts jumbled in the dust. “Looks like Jerry’s been busy.” 

[highpandemia]

Birds I’ve Seen: Mourning Dove

An ornithological field guide in parts.  These birds used to roost near my second apartment in Los Angeles. The property manager warned us that the spacious two bedroom two bath condo was directly under the flight path of LAX. An Airbus roared by, banking over the beach. “It’s not so bad. The sound really depends on which way the wind is blowing,” he said. A statement I tried several times to prove/disprove in the year we lived there, listening extra hard to the jet engines on overcast, sunny and windy days. The property manager did not warn us about the Mourning Doves, however. Their constant cooing was deafening. I’d come home, ask Jess how her day was. “These birds,” she’d yell. “They won’t shut up!”

[highpandemia]

Birds I’ve Seen:  White Throated Sparrow

An ornithological field guide in parts. 

I’ve seen this bird quite a lot. It is fairly common. It looks like a little baseball perched on a tree branch.