stasis
noun formal or technical
1 a period or state of inactivity or equilibrium.
When I left Austin, Texas last month for Bozeman, I had no idea that I would be getting first hand knowledge of the meanings of the word “stasis”. When I left, everything was planned out, would work great, and I would only have a couple days of downtime before I would be back up and running. It was going to be the easiest move I’ve ever had.
Ha. The best laid plans of mice and men…
The drive itself was uneventful. Fire Girl Jess (just so we are all clear here, she’s my sister. Not my wife, not Mark’s wife, nobody’s wife. We’ve had to clear this up before on several occasions) was kind enough to tag along too. Austin to Bozeman is right around 1,740 miles or so, a trip most people would break down into two or three days. Not our family. We got there in about 28-29 hours or so. The only time the car was stopped was for gas and a half hour nap in a gas station parking lot on the north side of Salt Lake. Safe? Hell no. Fast? Damn straight.
The plan started falling apart about 15 minutes after we rolled into town. After cruising Main Street and driving around a bit, the car decided to break down. It was still drivable, but the throttle at idle kept skipping. By an act of God I was able to get into a shop late on a Friday afternoon and get it fixed. I figured that was my glitch for the trip.
Not so.
The next day, the buddy I had been planning to move in with for a couple months, who said he would find us a place to live, bailed on me. Since Mark and SWMBO (in other words, mom and dad) left about the same time for Olympia, WA I just threw all my stuff on their moving truck and planned to fly over and get it. Suddenly my flight was in four days and I had no place to live. Have you ever tried to find a one bedroom apartment in a college mountain town on extremely short notice? The short answer is don’t.
But fishing buddy Sockboy Shane offered to let me use the couch in his house for a while, and I locked up a storage unit, so it all worked out. Things weren’t going as planned, but hell, I was in Bozeman so who really cared? The streak of bad luck continued on the day I flew to WA to get my stuff. It was going to be simple: fly over, load up, and leave the next morning. But one of the biggest storms of the season rolled in the day I got there, dumping four feet of snow on the only pass headed east. Damn.
There are a lot worse places to be stuck than Olympia, Wa. We drove around a lot, oohed and ahhed at the famous steelhead water, and ate some great food. Finally after three days the weather cleared. Your first cross country solo move is kinda a rite of passage in our books, and this was mine. 718 miles of open road with a loaded 16′ Budget truck. Fun stuff. Everything was going fine until about 30 miles west of Butte I heard an almighty thump and lost pretty much all power in the engine. Now 30 miles out of Butte is a bad enough place to break down as it is, but this was the night before Saint Patty’s Day at 11:30 pm. I was up shit creek. After pulling over and thoroughly cursing everything about that damn truck, I waited a bit and tried it again. After that, it worked fine. See, there is a God.
Once I reached Bozeman, I began the day to day routine of a full time retail job. It could be worse, at least I’m talking fishing all day. But the housing market is damn tight here. I finally found one, but was told it would be almost a month before I could move in. So, the feeling of stasis set in big time. Three weeks of all my stuff in boxes in a storage unit. Three weeks without internet access or being able to write or work at all. Three weeks of sleeping on an inflatable mattress that would deflate at about 4:30am every night. Three weeks of stasis.
But now it is over, and life can resume it’s normal patterns. I can work again, write again, and maybe one day finally unpack all the boxes sitting in my living room. So there you have it. The long winded trials and tribulations of a cross country move. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s a gorgeous day and I have fishing to do.
