“Expect the unexpected.”
“Adventure is out there.”
"Help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” All quotes to live by when traveling, but none that could have prepared me for this past week I spent in California. My Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday still have me spinning as I write this.
Thursday: work eight hours and then fly to Connecticut in the wee hours of the morning for a Friday wedding in Massachusetts.
Friday: Carpool up to Massachusetts for friend’s wedding, drink with friends from high-school, and crash in my hotel room.
Saturday: Afternoon flight to Los Angeles where I meet up with friends and drink at LA bars and fall asleep at 3 a.m. on Sunday.
Sunday: Wake up at 8 a.m. and drive north to San Francisco with a friend. At this point, we’re headed to San Francisco, the Redwood Forest, and Portland. All in a week. We arrive in San Francisco late Sunday night with the plan to be back on the road Wednesday. We park the car by our hostel, eat falafel and a dessert of wet baklava, go to bed.
Monday morning. I awake to my alarms going off. I wake-up to my friend bursting into our room crying-out that our car has been broken into. Our possessions stolen. So this is that romantic life on the road I dreamed of.
Now we’re scrambling with questions: What is the fate of the car? With the cost to replace the rear windshield $700 for a $1700 car, was the investment worth it? If we sold, who would buy the car?
Why didn’t the hostel we were at warn us of this? Walking around during the day we realized that we wouldn’t have left the car on the street if we’d seen what the neighborhood was like during the day. Crack-pipe smoking was on every corner and in between each was a person selling items they had probably stolen out of naive cars like ours. We saw the amount of broken window glass that littered the street. The answer is “a comical excess.” One street had a stretch of 500 ft of broken window glass on the curb, a perverted Yellow Brick Road that led to Golden Gate Bridge. It was evident that these break-ins were routine in San Francisco.
What of this would our insurance cover? Was the trip over? Were we still going to make it to Portland? Was it too late to ask our parents to take us back their homes and feed and take care of us for the rest of our lives so we’d never have to make a decision again?
The worst part of the burglary was feeling vulnerable. The break-in stabbed that feeling into my heart at a time I felt most free. An early-twenties student road-tripping with his friend in a part of the world he had never been in. 24 hours ago I had my bare feet kicked-up on the dashboard as we weaved down the California Route One highway. The land was full of possibility and adventures. We certainly found both, just not in the form we expected.
Walking down the streets and seeing the splintered window glass, it hit me how weak that glass actually was. Designed that way so that in-case of a crash the passengers would be safe. Because I’d never been in a car crash I had no idea how weak the windows actually are.
Walking around made us realize how unsafe we felt. My friend and I have both lived in Chicago for four years and nothing in that time has come close to the danger we felt in San Francisco. Chicago, the city that is the media and political poster-child of urban violence. San Francisco, the city everyone tells you is hip and gentrified. Turned out we were in the corner of San Francisco that all that gentrification had herded the street people too. They hadn’t been pushed out, just pushed to the side.
And we looked around and saw lives that faced harder realities than us: pregnant women smoking crack under closed strip clubs, a man who slept out on the sidewalk in broad daylight only to be rewarded after two hours with a bottle of water by a pedestrian. Of course, people will break into cars if you corner them into an isolated neighborhood. Of course, crime goes up if they don’t have opportunity in a city so priced-out.
As we connected these dots we realized how lucky we were: though our car was dead, we were still alive (and with all ten fingers). We still had a car to sell. We had our wallets, laptops, and keys in the hostel so our essentials were safe. We hadn’t lost our work or ideas or projects. Only money. Instead of three days in San Francisco we sold the car and spent the entirety of the week we had planned in the city. The vacation didn’t end. It was just different.
After the break-in, we spent five hours of phone-calling and shuffling plans to solve our problem. After we found a solution we burst onto the city of San Francisco, determined to enjoy ourselves. We ate excellent Chinese food, stumbled upon my Dad’s apartment when he lived in 1961, found a record store whose basement was stocked with a collection that would make Spotify’s library blush and made some excellent friends at the bar. We didn’t salvage the day: we made one.
11 p.m. that night: five gunshots rip through the night. A 25-year-old lies dead in the street 40ft from where we were drinking. We were indoors, several thousand dollars short from the stolen possessions in the car and $8 short from our beers, but still alive.
