Moving west, looking for work: A new take on an old story

Me, an economic refugee?

OK, so "The Grapes of Wrath" it's not. The decrepit Hudson Super-Six has been replaced by a U-Haul truck in good repair, and the only wasteland I can see is the job market for aerospace engineers. It's not the Great Depression. But it's still depressing.

I'm not prepared to describe myself as a casualty of the recession. My husband is an engineer, for God's sake. He doesn't work on a manufacturing line. He's one of maybe 50 people in the country who perform his particular specialty.

And for the second time in less than two years, he's unemployed. The pattern is becoming routine. He survives repeated rounds of layoffs, until the last one -- the one that marks the elimination of his department, or the death knell of the entire company.

It feels terrible to say it, but we're giving up on Minnesota and moving back to Denver. I don't think it's Minnesota's fault. But my job here isn't anything to brag about, and it certainly isn't enough for us to live on. So along with job opportunities for my husband, maybe in Denver we'll find more job opportunities for me.

Denver is our destination only because we lived there before. When we left, we couldn't sell our house for a price we thought was reasonable, so we kept it and rented it out.

I'm not fond of being a landlord, and between the mortgage payments, homeowners' association dues and property management fees, we're losing money on the deal. So our renters have been given their 30-day notice to vacate, and we'll be moving back in.

When I tell people we're leaving, they ask, "Oh, did Jason get a job there?" To which I have to truthfully answer, no. No one has been impolite enough to point out that while Denver might have more jobs, it also has more people vying for those jobs.

Some days I think we're choosing between unemployment in Minnesota and unemployment in Colorado. I don't really know which is better. I'm hoping that heat will be less expensive in Colorado this winter.

But it is hard to disengage from this community. When we moved here, I went overboard with the networking. People scared me into thinking that I wouldn't have any friends or anything to do. So I joined committees and went to meetings and volunteered and talked to everyone. I said yes to every opportunity. But my fears were unfounded; I was welcomed. Nobody spit on me because I hadn't lived here for three generations.

Now I'm spending my last weeks as a Minnesotan resigning from committees and disengaging from the community, frantically finishing projects so I won't leave anyone high and dry. I'm checking those commitments -- and presumably those people and those relationships -- off the same list that reminds me to forward the mail and shut off the electricity.

The process is more painful than I thought it would be. Once, I worked hard to tether myself to this place. Now I go around unsnapping the bungee cords, one by one.

Still, we're not Steinbeck's fictional Joad family; we have choices. So why, if job prospects are thin, and uprooting our lives is such a hassle, are we still moving west?

Because moving is something I can control. I've become conditioned to our national notion that when things are bad, you take some action. Waiting around for things to get better feels irresponsible. Moving is something I can do.

You can find Tom Joad "all around in the dark." You can find me in Denver.

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Shannon Watson-Borden is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

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