It's been exactly two weeks since my family and I were on the way down to this southern destination. I had happily spent the night with a dear friend and her family while my parents and subsequently all of my stuff loaded into a trailer were located at a hotel in Albuquerque just off the highway.
Let me back up. When packing all of my things to move out of my apartment in Kansas, we had decided to cram it all into a 12-foot Uhaul trailer. So in went the heavy furniture. My bed with box springs, headboard, frame, couch, kitchen table and chairs, book shelves, night stand, end table, dresser, chest of drawers, mirrors, basically everything you could use in a one bedroom apartment. My dad had found this 10 foot bookshelf for my new place and so that went along one wall with each of the 9 shelves stuffed with things from boxes of kitchen staples, bottles of wine, empty suitcases, small assorted boxes that would fit in the narrow space, briefcase functional purse bag (what do women call those? Oh yeah, practical and fashionable), totes filled with hangers, you get the picture. The couch went along the other wall, then the dismantled bed and bedroom furniture got squeezed between the two and smaller moveable pieces got piled or stacked on top of that. All of these diligently packed cardboard boxes which included everything from toiletries, glasses (like the ones I see through), contacts, jewelry boxes, framed art (some of which were gifts), boxes of letters I had received over the last two years in Kansas (I'm an excellent pen pal), hand made quilts, some suitcases including professional wear, sweaters, t-shirts, jeans, and last but certainly not least, all of my academic materials. Yes, that includes all of my notes from my master's degree including my thesis research, readings, and any professorial feedback all lovingly packed away in boxes to be piled in the trailer. To give you a visual description, this trailer was full, floor to ceiling, right to left, and any space besides. To have let a small animal loose in there would have doomed the poor thing to death by asphyxiation- not crushed by moving articles. There wasn't a lot of space to move, there also wasn't a lot of air.
We shut and locked the back of the trailer, with anything that didn't fit in there either in the back of my dad's pick up truck, or in the trunk/backseat of my car. For comparison sake, those things were mostly books (remember how I'm an academic by nature and pedigree), kitchen stuff like bowls, plates, mixers, cleaning supplies, some clothes, one end table, and electronics. Off we set, and little did I know, it would be the last I ever saw of the things wedged behind the padlocked door.
That was Friday. We made it to Oklahoma that night, then Saturday stopped in Albuquerque for the night. Sunday morning I woke up and joined my parents for breakfast. I sat in the little breakfast nook that hotels have these days sipping coffee and finishing off a bagel, mom across from me, dad putting things together for the last leg of the trip. Mom's phone started to ring, she answered, "What?! What do you mean it's gone?"
My stomach dropped. Just fell out of the bottom of my torso and hit the tiled floor under my chair. Black coffee now bitter.
Scurrying and frantic questions ensue, to the hotel staff, to the impatient cell phone, to the various corners of my skull. Stealing my nerves, I got up too, and walked out to the parking lot to see my dad's once heroic looking truck sitting naked of any Herculean feats of towing strength, all signs of a trailer gone. Completely lifted off the hitch, and nothing but an awkwardly parked vehicle beside.
"Some trip, huh fam?"
In his honest efforts, dad had backed the trailer up against the wall of the dumpster location so as any potential thieves couldn't open the doors of the trailer. Presumably, the pressure on the hitch from the trailer tires against the curb would make it difficult to wiggle it off the hitch or move anything else until morning. Sometimes our best efforts often come undone by ill-devices.
Within thirty minutes or so, the police arrived and soon a report of an abandoned trailer came through the radio. We followed the police officers to the described location.
There she was. Sprawled open and nothing left of the studious packing except for the 10-foot bookshelf and a crumpled piece of wrapping paper. Hollow, breathable, light.
Police report filed, a woman through a window in a nearby house mentioned that this was the second or third time a Uhaul had been abandoned on this road-ironically half a block from a Uhaul center. Of the two police cars present and 3-4 officers, I think each of them apologized to me, citing rampant heroin problems in the city, a recent uptick of theft by hotels, and a moral sadness that no one deserves this.
Unable to put much into words, I walked across the street to sit on a bench at the park there. No one to blame. At least no one I knew. Slowly recounting the things in the boxes I vaguely remembered stuffing into the trailer. I had labeled them, but couldn't read what they said now. I didn't have the energy or the heart to hold a grudge against the city as a whole. After all seeing my friend and her family had been absurdly good for my psyche. I couldn't harbor aggression at the police response, they recovered the trailer, but a few hours was not going to magically track my possessions as they scattered to the mountain winds.
One officer approached me on my solitary bench, "I'm really sorry about this miss. Is there anything I can do?" "Got any recommendations for sleeping bags?" Call it a defense mechanism if you want, but the options were laugh or cry and in my personal opinion, anything before 9 is too early to cry. With the report already on file, there was nothing left to do but hitch the much lighter trailer back to the truck and leave the sadly disappointing city.
For the next 7 or so hours, I mentally paged through the things that I had watched sealed behind those trailer doors roughly 40 hours before. The furniture I could live without, floors aren't super comfortable, but passable for a while. Then I got to the sentimental things.
The t-shirt quilt made of choir shirts.
The camera and memory card that contained my last images of college performances and last moments in Kansas. Not to mention the pictures I took on my Minnesotan road trip a few weeks prior.
The postcards friends had sent me from around the world.
The diamond earrings my dad had given me for graduation I had never worn.
That's when the tears fell. Facing some portion of Hwy-40, probably staring at the slowly changing landscape and the outline of a haunted trailer up ahead, I sobbed. I'm not a pretty crier to begin with, but this was the kind of convulsing, snotty sobs that end up wiped on sleeves and backs of hands. It doesn't get more poetically dramatic than driving on an unfamiliar road, following a hollowed out hope, and snotting on to my forearm. Some Indy film is going to recreate this moment and make waves at Sundance.
In fact, it's so dramatic, I had to laugh. Look at this plot twist in cinema scope. It's ridiculous, and uncomfortable, and there has to be something worth learning from this moment. Sure, it is only stuff. Some of it more poignant than others, but it's got to be more of a crippling blow to my ego or at least an assault on my pocket book than anything else. And besides, there's always the hope that all of my academic products would be prized by heartless thieves. Maybe instead of a life of crime, they would turn to interlibrary loan and APA nuance. It's probably a pipedream, but in some sad sick way it makes me smile. Almost everything in there was going to be replaceable. Not all of it, clearly, but I would still move into a new apartment with my 10-foot bookshelf that even thieves didn't think worthy of stealing, and whatever was left in the back of the truck, and my car.
Recovering and settling into an already strange place hasn't been a cake walk, but it's getting better. The cohort is fun, and amused by my dry commentary about the trailer. Friends have poured in support and the pen pal pipeline is up and running again.
Plus, once I figure it all out, I'll have a really great stand up shtick about Uhaul's slogan "America's Moving Adventure."
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