One fine Monday in October we set off on one of our biggest adventures yet: relocating the family from our comfortable Midwestern life to a new start in the San Francisco Bay Area. We considered driving ourselves across the country in one of those massive U-Haul trucks with our car towing at the back, but as even the thought of having to maneuver the speedbumps at the end of our street let alone 3000 miles of road had me in severe fits of anxiety, we ended up shipping everything and driving ourselves across in our reliable Nissan Rogue. (Hey! I hear you say. You are a lesbian living in Madison, WI! Where is your Subaru? Calm down. I did have a Suby for years but I traded it in for the Rogue when they came out with a really cool burnt orange color. Yes, I bought my car for its color. So?)
After a quick final goodbye stop at Culvers we made our way across the Dakotas, through Yellowstone Park and Wyoming, where we got caught in a snowstorm, ran out of gas, and almost hit a deer. It was a fitting goodbye to life as we would fortunately no longer know it! We traveled through Idaho (nice hot springs!) into Utah and across the Nevada desert. We were truly amazed at how long we could be driving without hardly seeing another car or in fact any particular anything at all, and started to feel faint sympathy with Trump’s base, fed on Fox News and corn and not much exposure to anything else. The “how can anyone vote for that man?” gave way to “I guess it makes sense if this is all you know but that’s still not an excuse”, quickly followed by the truly horrifying “imagine being queer in this part of the world”.
After a quick final goodbye stop at Culvers we made our way across the Dakotas, through Yellowstone Park and Wyoming, where we got caught in a snowstorm, ran out of gas, and almost hit a deer.
There are many great things about life in the Bay Area, or at least so I imagined as I pondered over my choices from the comfort of my single family home in Madison. The cost of living is not one of them, and even while I was excited about the new life I was going to build for my family, I was very anxious about how we were going to afford it. The child of true boomers (note to my son: I am NOT and never have been a boomer, and stop saying OK when that is not at all what you mean), I was raised in The Netherlands with the frugal spirit that colored the lives of those who had their childhoods interrupted by the Nazi occupation in WW2. Much to my very practical stepmother’s annoyance, my father would drive 10 miles out of the way if it meant cheaper gas. (Even he knew it made no sense but he could not bring himself to support what he saw as overinflated prices.) In that spirit, I was determined as we made our way towards the state line to fill up our tank one final time in Nevada, before we hit the insanity of California gas prices. Negotiating the curvaceous roads around Lake Tahoe I missed my chance and ended up having to get gas in Tahoe itself, probably the most expensive gas available in the entire country. I was beyond upset with myself, and in that state I managed to leave my wallet on top of my car at the small roadside gas station where we stopped off. (If I was going to spend $5 a gallon I was darn well going to spend it at a family run place and not the multi-billion dollar corporations that pollute the entire planet.) By the time I realized I had sent my wallet spinning into midair as we had driven off, we were 30 miles ahead. We turned back, scouring the sides of the road, but the wallet had gone. In one fell swoop I had lost my driver’s licence and literally every single credit, debit, and giftcard I possessed, all packed together neatly in one wallet as we moved our home across the country. Cancelling the cards was hard as we did not have the numbers ready (PSA: write down the fucking lost and stolen numbers IN YOUR PHONE, they are no good to you ON THE BACK OF THE CARD you have just lost) but the real challenge was getting the cards reissued. I had dozens of conversations that went like this:
“Sure, we can reissue your card, we just need to verify your home address”. “Well, I actually moved home just this weekend so can you send it to my new address?”. “Mmmmm. We will need additional security checks. What is your driver’s licence number?” “I can’t give you that as I lost my licence along with the credit card”. “OK. Not a problem. [You know you are in deep trouble when a call center worker tells you something is “not a problem”. It is code for “hahahhaha and good luck to you!”]. We will just send a verification code to the phone number we have on file for you”. “That is my old number. Just before I moved I already obtained a new California number and I had not yet had the chance to let you know. Can you send the code to my new number?”. To make an already very long story short: one of my credit cards took 3 months to be re-issued, and another one has been cancelled: I have no way of letting the credit card company verify my identity and so they simply cannot replace the card. I can apply again as a new customer in 2 years.
The endless phone calls, inconvenience, and sheer frustration of trying to replace my cards has made the $5-a gallon gas price seem minor by comparison. The moral of the story: make peace with reality as it will always have the upper hand, and whatever you do, never put anything on top of your car, however nice the color.
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