1: Going to California

Made up my mind, make a new start
I'm going to California with an aching in my heart
— Led Zeppelin, Going to California

“Decided” may be too generous a word. It suggests two calm adults sitting across from each other at a sensible table, perhaps with tea, making a thoughtful list of pros and cons. What actually happened was more like life dismantled itself around us piece by piece until California began to look less like a destination and more like the emergency exit. First came the closure of Rowdy Mermaid. Then came the end of Jamba’s role as CEO after the brand’s acquisition. Thirteen years of work, friendships, ambition, identity, and the deeply held belief that if you built something from nothing, surely something of it would remain.

Very little remained.

Then came inflation. A trip to the grocery store became an exercise in courage. Limes were a dollar. Avocados were five. Lettuce had apparently joined the luxury-goods market and was now ten dollars a head. Every grocery run felt like entering a casino where the house always won and, inexplicably, the jackpot was salad. Everything around us had become impossibly expensive and slightly detached from reality. We could no longer comfortably make the mortgage payment. Our health insurance nearly tripled after a long period of having no insurance at all. The new insurance somehow made prescriptions more expensive than buying them without insurance, which felt less like healthcare and more like performance art. Doctor visits cost more. Gas cost more. Energy cost more. Property taxes cost more.

Breathing remained technically free, although by then we had begun to distrust the arrangement. Then Jamba lost his office and gym. He had loved working at Basecamp, where through what appeared to be an administrative accident, he was allowed to use the kitchen workspace for one hundred dollars a month. Eventually, someone noticed this was far too reasonable. The rules were changed. To use the kitchen, one first had to purchase an office plan, and even then one could not use the kitchen every day. It was a small thing compared with losing a company, but morale does not always collapse from the largest blow. Sometimes it is the quiet humiliation of being told you can no longer sit at a kitchen table. Our beloved marriage therapist then suffered a stroke.

There are people who witness your life so closely that they become part of its structure. Losing access to her, even temporarily, felt like another support beam had been removed. Thankfully, she is recovering, and we are profoundly grateful. But at the time, it was frightening and deeply sad. Then Jamba sold his Porsche because we could no longer justify the payments and insurance. This was practical, responsible, and financially necessary. It was also tragic in the particular way that selling a beautiful car is tragic for a car lover, particularly when you are already questioning every choice you have made for the past five years. And behind all of this was the heat and the changing weather patterns.

We were no longer simply leaving Colorado. We were running from the increasing heat, the smoke, and the constant possibility of wildfire in Lyons and the surrounding foothills. Since we left in July, temperatures there have climbed as high as 103 degrees, while fire risk continues to rise. It is difficult to mourn leaving a place while also feeling relieved to have escaped it. Erin still had work with Next in Natural. Jamba did not. Worse, the professional network he had spent thirteen years working alongside turned out, when the company closed and he needed help, to offer almost none. There were kind words. There were vague promises. There were many people who said, “Let’s definitely stay get together soon.” No one has yet discovered what this phrase means.

It was time to go.

The first idea was San Luis Obispo, where Jamba had lived during the 1990s and where California still seemed to exist in its most persuasive form: golden hills, ocean air, eucalyptus, good coffee, and people wearing fleece and cashmere in weather that did not require it. We committed ourselves to moving there. Unfortunately, one million dollars in San Luis Obispo purchased approximately one of the following:

:: A house with a cracked foundation

:: A new build with no yard

:: An older house in a fire zone

...Or a property already surrounded by twelve buyers waving cash and promising never to request an inspection. Everything seemed destined to become student housing at two thousand dollars per bedroom. Houses were no longer homes. They were yield-producing containers with quartz countertops. So we broadened the search. Cambria, Sant Rosa, Sonoma, Sebastopol, Santa Cruz...

There were many towns, many houses, many inspections, many disappointments, and several moments in which we considered abandoning the U.S. altogether. Eventually, we found a property in West Sebastopol. It was on Sexton Road. The name felt meaningful, although our yongest didn't want to say the road name because it contained the word sex. A sexton, we understood, was someone who cared for religious buildings, grounds, and sacred objects. This seemed fitting. We would become caretakers. We would tend the land. We would exchange suburban open space for fruit trees, walnut trees, a greenhouse, and a stand of liquid ambers. Our new home sat along the edge of a green corridor in wine country, thirteen miles from the ocean, drenched in morning fog. It represented everything our life in Lyons had stopped being.

There would be freedom. There would be lower costs. There would be land. There would be fruit. There would perhaps be chickens and bees. There would be a greenhouse full of improbably verdant vegetables. There would be solar. There would be ADUs a plenty on what seemed to be a never-ending property. There was room for our parents' RV and a side entrance for them to come and go and this could eventually become an ADU. We would become a different kind of family. A family that tended the land. A family that repaired things. A family that composted. A family that knew what to do with walnuts. The property felt like an opportunity to live more independently, more simply, and closer to the land. We imagined ourselves as caretakers, not merely homeowners. We imagined restoration. Transformation.

Possibly figs and actual tea growing in the greenhouse alongside rare tropical fruits. On July 5, we drove west in a twenty-foot U-Haul towing Erin’s truck. Somewhere along the way, I asked Google to explain the meaning of the word “sexton” again, this time so Grey could hear it.

"You're not going to believe this," I said to him excitedly. Google responded: A sexton is an church official responsible for maintaining its grounds, and often its cemetery. The role is closely associated with endings due to three primary duties: Grave preparation, The tolling of the bells signaling death, And the keeping of burial records. There was a brief silence in the U-Haul. In the back of my mind was the question rising: had we purchased a graveyard?