Duke Diercks - Small Town Ho: The Hilarious Story of Moving from the Big City to North Idaho

Small Town Ho

Duke Diercks

Small Town Ho

Duke Diercks

Copyright 2016 by Duke Diercks.

For Monique GallegosDiekroeger

The stalker without whom this book wouldnever have happened

CHAPTER ONE

Go Small or GoHome

I blame my adulthoodon two people.

Bingo.

Joseph Campbell and RobertFrost. To be fair and accurate, I do not blame my entire adulthoodon these two men; rather, I blame them solely for the decisionsIve made. Robert Frost encouraged me to take the road lesstraveled. Joe Campbell encouraged me to follow my bliss. Frostneglected to mention, perhaps due to poetic confines, that someroads have potholes so there may be a very good reason that peopleavoid them. Mr. Campbell left out the part that if your particularbliss entails long hours and little pay, perhaps bliss might bebetter off purchased . They should not shoulder the blame by themselves. My wife,Kim, is also complicit, if only as a willing accomplice.

All three weighed heavilyon our decision to uproot our family that has only lived incitiesand warm ones, at thatand move to the North IdahoPanhandle. That is correct: two college-educated adults made such afantastically ignorant decision, and brought their three childrenalong for the ride. The added bonus? This would be the secondcross-country move for our family within five years. The first movecame after a dozen years in the California Bay Area, and the secondcame after only three years in Austin, Texas.

We wound up in the Texascapital thanks to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Iwas there to renew my drivers license. While I did not deludemyself that this was going to be a painless exercise, I wascautiously optimistic for two reasons. First, I had made what theDMV euphemistically refers to as an appointment, a new customerservice initiative for them at the time. Second, the appointmentwas mid-morning, well after rush hour. However, California didntreally have a rush hour any more: any part of the day on the freeway wasa shit storm. And this was the California DMV, where time standsstill. After spending an hour on the 101 freeway to trudge only afew miles, I arrived to find several hundred of Californias finestcitizens had also booked an appointment at that time. As I aged inline, focusing simultaneously on the backs of people in front of meblocking access to the Promised Land, and the department clerksdirecting this symphony, a thought dropped from the ether like ananvil in an old Warner Bros. cartoon: Weneed to get out of here. Out of here, outof this city, and out of this state. Iflipped open the black brick that was my cellular phone, calledKim, and we agreed that yes, my experience that morning wassufficient cause to move.

Of course thats silly.The DMV was not the reason we moved to Austin. It was just thetrigger that started our thought process. No, the real reason wepicked Austin is because we really liked a hotel there. Ourdecision-making was as scientific and logical as thatwe moved ourgrowing family thousands of miles because we enjoyed staying in theAustin Four Seasons Hotel. Two things about that statement jump outat me now: it is amazing to me how little thought weve given tolife-changing decisions yet how much thought to what we are going tohave for dinner, and it is astounding how logical our thoughtprocess seemed at the time.

Texas also was an enticingoption because for me, it was home. I grew up in Houston, and whileI would not move back to that swamp, despite my fond memories,Texas itself had a magnetic pull. For Kim, whose father isex-military and whose family moved more times than most peoplechange socks, moving anywhere wasnt that big a deal. Shed had noreal home other than California, and was game for most anything.Ultimately we decided that moving to Texas from the Bay Area was inthe cards only if one of us could land a job before we actuallyleft. We were at least that rational. Quick employment for me wasgoing to be dicey, since in California I had followed theaforementioned Mr. Campbells advice and followed my bliss into therestaurant business. However, a few years running a smallrestaurant with a friend had burned me out, and I wanted to switchcareers. So, even though I was optimistic, the smart money was onmy wife.

Enter: Mrs.Magoo.

I refer to my wife as Mrs.Magoo in reference to that golden oldie of a cartoon that I used towatch at YMCA day camp in Houston, on an old-timey 8mm projector.The main character, Mr. Magoo, is horribly myopic, and would walkperilously close to fatal accidents only to be rescued at the lastminute. Obviously its a cartoon, so theres not much plot, but atypical episode went something like this: Mr. Magoo is walkingacross skyscraper girders. Never mind how he got up there. He iscoming to the end of the girder. What will happen? Why, anothersteel beam magically appears via a crane that was nowhere to befound only seconds earlier. And, in the nick of time, he keepswalking.

And so it is with mywife.

Her girders are careeropportunities. As one job or career ends, another job comes alongby providence, or the situation itself has a silver lining. Iwitnessed it time and again in the early stages of her career. Shelikes to say she puts positive thoughts and requests out to theuniverse and then just waits for good things to happen. I find thattype of subversive thinking deprives you of a lot of needlessworry. Mrs. Magoos girder arrived on a quick trip we took toAustin to get the lay of the land and say hello to some friends Ihad gone to high school with, and who were going to house us untilwe could find an apartment. During the visit, she stopped by thelocal headhunting office specializing in Certified PublicAccountants. (After college, Kim had taken the road well-traveled , one ripewith career opportunities: she was a CPA.) She met with theregional director, they hit it off, and she was offered a job onthe spotnot one as a CPA, but as a corporate recruiter. I balancedmy annoyance with husbandly pride. The move was on.

The fact that Kim landed ajob first didnt just mean that Austin was going to be a reality,it also meant that I had to care for the kidsat least until Icould find gainful employment and we could then plop them into daycare. Our days were filled with the Teletubbies and Sesame Street.We had regular bath times and trips to the park. On rainy days webuilt forts constructed of overturned chairs abutting tables, withblankets stretched over the top. We made swords, shields, andhelmets from an entire box of aluminum foil. It is, they say, themost difficult yet rewarding job in the world.

I hated it.

They never mentionedthat it is mind-numbingly boring. Not boring in the classic sense.No, there is always something going on. The little ones arespilling something, or knocking each other down, or asking whyafter your every utterance. It is boring in the sense that yousimply dont have thoughts other than survival. No deep thinking,just counting down the clock until nap time. And with two kids,heaven forbid one of them is not tired. There is also no verbalengagement using more than 100 words of your vocabulary. In a senseit is Twitter come to horrible life.

At first, my thoughts werethat I was doing something wrong. After all, women happily sign onto this lifestyle all the time. However, mothers also tend to bondwith each other at the park and strike up conversations, usingtheir adult vocabularies and making play dates to share the burden.When I tried that, despite having toddlers in tow, those samemothers moved to the other side of the park, or left altogether.Then my thoughts turned to wonder. I wondered, How can you love two little beings so much and at the sametime entertain the thought of slipping them some Benadryl in theirsippy cups?

I was not cut out for it.No wonder I was such an asshole when my wife got home.

Eighteen months into ourrelocation we became aware that indeed we were not living in a hotel. We were, infact, living in a custom home in a new development on theoutskirts of the city, at least technically still a part of Austin.It was a cookie cutter home sitting on a large, treeless lot that,in the middle of summer, looked like a lunar landscape. We movedthere after our apartment became too small to house us and our twoyoung sons, apparent after a very brief conversation.