LSA News

No. 87, February 2008

Jennifer Rowan
(continued)

It wasn't a hard choice to follow them to Oregon. I had moved back to Detroit from New Hampshire to finish my B.S and was trying to figure out what to do next. My partner John and I were living in the inner city of Detroit in what was then the most depressed county in the country (the second most depressed county in the country was actually Lane County, Oregon. Timing is everything). My daughter was turning five and needed to be enrolled in some school somewhere that fall. She also happened to be the only grandchild, and the pressure from my parents to deliver her to them in Oregon was relentless. John too wasn't sorry to give up his substitute teaching gig in the inner city, so when I graduated in mid-August of 1983, we sold every stick of furniture and loaded up John's rusted out 1974 VW Super Beetle with our five-year-old daughter and our few possessions.

Our worldly goods were indeed few, nevertheless they proved too much for the VW. We had left the backseat completely free for Madeleine (it measured exactly as wide as she was tall). With all the gear necessary to camp and cook out and the VW's limited trunk room, the only space available was in the rooftop carrier. It was a plywood box built by John and his dad that perched on a metal roof rack with brackets gripping the car's raingutters. We were quite proud that we'd managed to fit in everything, including two rolled up carpets wrapped in black plastic bags and stereo components complete with turntable and speakers, but on the highway heading towards Chicago, we couldn't get the car up to the then-55 mile per hour speed limit - it hovered on flat land at 45-50. Sure, we weren't exactly streamlined, but it became evident that our aging Superbeetle, battered and overloaded, was running on only three cylinders. Not much we could do but keep driving, on past Chicago, where we decided to keep going through the night to take advantage of lighter traffic. At some terrible dark hour, we crossed the Mississippi, a dramatic moment that under more benevolent conditions I could have fully appreciated (and perhaps commemorated with sprightly song or dramatic verse).

Somewhere in Iowa at about 2am, an ominous grinding noise commenced over our heads and quickly became a shriek of twisting, scraping metal. The brackets supporting our overladen overhead rack were succumbing to the combined forces of velocity, weight and cheap manufacture in the industrial third world. The entire arrangement was beginning to slide off the roof of the VW. Visualizing camping gear, carpets and stereo speakers strewn across the highway, we hit the emergency blinkers and slowed to a timid crawl along the shoulder until we reached the exit for West Branch. It appeared to be little more than an intersection with a gas station (closed for the night) and a roadside honkytonk lively with teenagers energized by hormones and cheap domestic beer. We considered our options. Either we set up camp for the night in the grassy, trash-strewn hummock behind the honkytonk, or we could attempt to relocate ourselves to nearby Iowa City where, we presumed, there would be better resources for problem solving in the light of day. Off we drove, oh so slowly, easing down one of Iowa's dark, rural byways, each of us with an arm out the window of the VW, gripping the edges of the roof rack for dear life! In Iowa City, we parked under the bright lights of an all-night donut shop and spent the rest of the night in the car, sitting upright with our knees against the dash (the front seats were pushed as far to the front as possible so we could squeeze more of our belongings into the footwells). Needless to say, there was no rest that night for the grownups in the car; only Madeleine snored peacefully in the backseat.

The next morning, we located a Kmart, bought replacement brackets (likewise cheaply made in the industrial third-world, but at least they were spanking new) and shipping boxes. We boxed up the stereo components, found a Greyhound bus station and shipped the boxes at tremendous cost (we should have left them in the 24-hour donut shop parking lot - the tape deck and receiver never worked again). Then back on the highway, nerves completely jangled, listening with grim attentiveness to the whistle of the wind singing in the roof rack.

The rest of the trip was an endless daze of endless hours of driving on too-little sleep. This was interrupted by the occasional flat tire and alternated with moments of stunning beauty: a campground near the Black Hills where we saw jackrabbits and our first herd of buffalo; driving down through miles and miles of canyon in Wyoming; drinking coffee in a roadside café filled with cowboys; a day in Yellowstone, pretending to be carefree tourists; and finally, eastern Oregon and the long approach to Eugene from our campsite in a juniper-clad canyon near Juntura. We drove through high desert yellow with flowering balsam root and then passed over the Cascades where we noted with relief the switch from dry ponderosa pines to Douglas fir rainforest. Yes, this was beginning to look like the Oregon my parents had promised! Their credibility restored, now all we had to start worrying about was how and where we would find jobs and what kind of a life we could make for ourselves. Almost twenty five years later, we're still in love with Oregon and the Pacific Northwest and marveling at our good fortune.

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