Lillie's Valley: In Search of the Good Life - Part 1 of 3

In the summer of 1975, I painted the word “Horace” on the side of our car. We named our vehicle after Horace Greeley because he had famously said, “Go west, young man,” and that’s what we intended to do. With little money and even less common sense, Marcia and I loaded an old Ford Maverick with two dogs, a bulky portable television, and whatever else would fit into the trunk and left Detroit to relocate in Seattle, Washington.

If you were creating a checklist for what not to do when relocating, we would have checked almost every box. Lack of financial resources? Check. Not having work lined up in the destination city? Check. Unmarketable liberal arts degrees? Check. Pets that would make it harder for us to rent? Check. You get the idea.

But we were determined to start a new life in some place idyllic. In the previous twelve months, we had been living in Detroit, which in the aftermath of race riots, white flight, and economic downturns was a high crime hellhole. A friend was to finish his last year of law school, and he and his wife were miserable. The thought was that, if we pooled the resources of two couples, we could rent some place pleasant and make his final year of being in the Motor City at least bearable. We ended up living in a terrible neighborhood and driving each other crazy. Still friends, though, the four of us decided to move somewhere the exact opposite of Detroit. That was Seattle, a place that a newspaper had recently chosen as the country’s most livable city.

Before leaving Detroit, we sold everything we could sell. Then we headed down to Ohio to say our farewells to relatives in the Cleveland and Springfield area. When I said goodbye to my maternal grandfather, he wept, and I was taken aback. We saw ourselves as embarking on a great adventure and his tears seemed an overreaction. In the common self-absorption of youth, I couldn’t understand his distress. He was then 74 years old and must have wondered if he would live to see his grandson again.

In Iowa, we picked up my younger brother Wayne, who had been visiting a friend. He didn’t mind sharing the backseat with our TV and our mutts. He was going to fly home from Seattle. Our Detroit living companions, Mary Clare and Randy, were going out to Seattle separately. Randy had landed a job in a law office and flown out and secured us a rental where we could all temporarily stay. The place was owned by a guy who had his own tow truck business: Big B Towing. He was Big B. He told Randy that all the rooms would have a fresh coat of paint.

Along the way, I bought a touristy postcard to send my parents. I wrote: “It rained so hard the day we left. The weather it was dry. The sun was so hot I froze to death. Mom, please don’t cry.” Reportedly my father turned to my mom and said, “I don’t get it.”

Our car was old by the car life expectancy of those days. It was so rusty from Midwest winters that a Seattle motorcycle cop once pulled up next to us and said, “Where have you been parking that thing? At the bottom of the ocean?” My sense of adventure would flag whenever I would think about the car, an anxiety that was increased by my lack of automotive know-how. When we got into the mountains, the engine began to tick loudly. We found a Mobil Station with an old mechanic who looked at the car for us.

“Well,” he said, followed by the sort of torturous pause that mechanics must practice, “the water pump is going.” He then explained the unfortunate result of the water pump dying.

“How long does it have? When will it go? How long do we have?” I asked in a panicked voice.

The mechanic looked at me and said, “Son, your heart is going to go before that water pump.” Having put matters in perspective, he continued, telling us that there was no forecasting when the pump would quit on us and strand us on the highway. Marcia, being the eternal optimist, was sure that we would make it there “just fine.” So having little money and eager to get to our destination, we decided to try our luck and push on.

For economy’s sake, the last night on the road, after a long day of driving, we pitched a tent at a campground. We had only been asleep three or four hours when I could hear the wind furiously howling. “I think a storm is coming,” I said to Marcia, curled up in our sleeping bag beside me. “Let’s pack up and go.”

“Now?” she mumbled. “We just got to sleep.”

“Yes! I don’t want to pack during the storm. Let’s just get to where we’re going.”

So with the wind pounding us, we loaded up and drove into the storm and into the morning.

When that day ended, the engine was ticking loudly, and we were exhausted but finally there. Searching in a tight rental market, Randy was quite proud of his find. When Mary Clare, his wife, arrived, she was less than pleased. When we arrived, we could see why. The rental wasn’t actually in Seattle. It was in a less attractive suburb of Seattle, a place called Tukwila. Near the Seattle airport (Sea-Tac), it was an area of factories, warehouses, and trucking. Randy had boasted that there were three bedrooms and a garage, but it turned out that the third bedroom was the garage converted into living space. The small, boxy, unfurnished rooms with their high placed awning windows were not very inviting. It turned out that Big B was about five feet tall and repainted the walls in the same color but only as high as he could reach. You could see the line where he stopped.

The entire time Wayne was in the area, it was rainy and cloudy. He flew out of Sea-Tac airport never having seen the surrounding mountains. Mary Clare was eager to find another place where she and Randy would have privacy. Marcia and I had to find work and look for a place of our own. On June 26th, our shared birthday, Marcia came home from a nearby mall. Seeing me, she began to cry.

“I wanted to make you a cake for your birthday,” she explained. “I searched all the pay phones at the mall, hoping to find enough change to buy a mix. But… but… I couldn’t find anything.” More tears. We were broke.

THE END