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Funny how necessity recalibrates your intentions. Back in California I’d do almost anything to avoid long drives to trails — it seemed like a crime against nature to spend more time driving than hiking. The reality, though, was there were so many excellent hiking trails in the Bay Area that I could always find an excuse to pair a long hike with a short drive.

On our current end of the country, the situation is almost entirely reversed: it’s crazy to make do with local trails when excellent ones are just a couple hours away. Case in point: Saturday’s hike at Grayson Highlands State Park paired five hours of driving with five hours of hiking. While the Appalachian peaks seem scrawny by Western standards, they are nevertheless mountains that stretch for 1,200 miles from Georgia to Canada. There’s nothing like it within 50 miles of Winston-Salem.

The route up to Grayson Highlands twists, climbs and dives though at least 50 miles of remote two-lane blacktop; I’ve always loved taking these kinds of drives. Seems I now have two reasons to head for the hills.

(I’m sure it’s just a coincidence — not karma or anything — that my luck seems to have been continually improving since my departure from the daily-dose-of-doom industry.)

This is the Yadkin River, taken from Tanglewood Park. Used my iPhone camera.

We moved all the furniture over today and Melissa had the place looking like home in five hours flat. A few images:

Entry hallway.

Dining room.

Office.

Bedroom

Living room.

Fireplace.

Hildy says hi.

Bathroom.

Melissa was in here painting and cleaning every day for the past four weeks; I expect she’ll be sleeping for a week.

I’ll gab more about what’s happening in our lives later; just wanted to satisfy the curiosity of anybody who wanted to know what the inside of the place looks like.

Looks like we’ll be setting up housekeeping here in the Triad — we’re in the paperwork phase of acquiring a condo in the burbs west of Winston-Salem. Yeah, there are burbs here. This’ll be the fourth address change in 12 months; we’re hoping it’ll be the last in several years.

You’ll be pleased to know I’m as sick of kicking the corpse of my newspaper career as you are. This morning I awoke from a dream in which my editor in San Jose was instructing me to redo a page for the paper in Tampa. Enough, geeze.

I’ve always liked the South, though I confess I’ve read none of Faulkner’s novels (did enjoy “All the King’s Men,” a great Southern novel if there ever was one, however). North Carolina has become so prosperous and populous (10th most people in the U.S. now) that it’s unfair to think of it as one of those Old South states like Mississippi or Alabama. The state parks have no entry fees, the recreational opportunities are just about endless, the scenery is breathtaking if you know where to look. The tallest mountain in the East is here (but you knew that if you’ve been reading my hiking blog).

Now that we’ve decided to kick back here for awhile, I’ll have to start visiting some of the locales that don’t entail walking on dirt. The triad has museums, musicians and movie houses like any other place. History’s a big deal, seeing as how the region’s most compelling stories predate the Civil War by over 100 years (when the original settlers came here from Pennsylvania and set up shop in an abandon trapper’s cabin — see my hike at Historic Bethabara if you missed it). A man credited with inspiring the beliefs of Salem’s settlers was among the world’s first Protestants; naturally the pope ordered him burned at the stake. We’re talking early 1400s here, so yeah, the stories go way back.

More to come. Here’s hoping it’s interesting in a good way.

(I wrote this as a Christmas gift for Melissa. It was inspired by moment when we were packing our things in California and my darling wife held a rolling pin aloft just before stowing it and said “you know where I’d like to shove this” and I knew exactly what she had in mind and where she wanted to put it. I thought I might add more chapters but if I don’t get inspired, this little ditty stands on its own).
…

“… And I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole…”

It was their song, Merle Haggard’s classic account of an angelic mother and her demonic son who rewarded her goodness with shame and scandal. Neighbors of a shabby studio apartment on the seedy edge of Hickory, North Carolina, knew every syllable by heart. The guy in 228-J played it at 10:13 every Thursday night for the past 13 years, four months and 21 days.

“… no one could turn me right but Mama tried…” she heard through the apartment’s thin door. A wave of warmth pushed back the Christmas Eve chill.

She was the Rolling Pin Killer, and she was on the lam. She was right where the authorities would look for her first, the filthy warren of her soulmate, a failed newspaperman who devoted his every waking hour to securing her release from the Joliet Prison for Women.

She couldn’t remember ever being this excited as she began to rap upon the door, but remembered to pause till 15 seconds after the last guitar chord faded. The time he threw the landlord’s puppy through a plate-glass window for interrupting their song became the stuff of legend once the tabloids got ahold of it.

It took two sets of hard knocks before she heard him picking his way through his personal junkyard on the way to the door. She stepped aside as a plume of dust poured from the opening apartment door. He didn’t get out much.

“Honey, it’s me!” she cried, jumping toward the doorway and crashing into his sunken chest.

Can’t be a dream, he thought. I haven’t slept in five days. CNN was running updates on her cunning jailbreak every 12 minutes. He’d watched it all. They knew about as much as he did, but unlike him they had 24 hours of airtime to fill.

“Wow, she’s really bulked up inside,” he thought as her muscled arms nearly squeezed his breath away. Reflexively, he threw a hand between their lips, knowing her reunion kiss would drain his last ounce of sanity.

“Aggie, what are you doing here?” he demanded with his first strong breath. “For God’s sake, the Supreme Court is hearing your case on Tuesday.”

Agnes Butterfly was the name on her birth certificate, but everybody knew her as Aggie. Her conviction in the diabolical slayings of 17 corporate executives (each one felled by a fatally impacted bowel) had transfixed the nation.

Two trials and four appeals could not sway the U.S. justice system from its insistence that she was the Rolling Pin Killer. As far as he was concerned, though, the case was all circumstantial and ripe for appeals. After all, the one person she did vow to violate with a rolling pin was very much alive.

He updated his blog, AggieWasFramed.com, 17 times a day with fresh allegations of judicial missteps and police wrongdoing. He threw all the revenue from the site’s 17 million hits a day into Aggie’s defense fund, but $314.42 a week didn’t buy much legal advice.

But in classic Hollywood style, a determined gaggle of law students took on her case and smothered the justice system with every imaginable legal ploy, and many previously unimagined. It all paid off six weeks ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take on her case. What on earth, could have pushed her to this, he wondered as his breathing returned.

“It’s Mom,” Aggie blurted. “She knows everything and we have to stop her.”

(To be continued if I get inspired… suggestions for further chapters welcome.)

There’s no teacher like misfortune, and I’ve learned plenty since last Christmas.

Mainly I learned that time punishes the dawdler, but luck can rescue the patient.

I gave 22 years of my working life to a doomed industry. I had an excuse for the first few years before the Web exploded on the scene, but everything after that came down to my natural attraction to the path of least resistance. Plain old greed played a role, too: Sure, I’d have loved to have taken a job working on somebody’s Web site, but they all seemed to require huge pay cuts that didn’t interest me.

So I talked myself into believing it was OK to stick it out with my reliable union job with its reliable 2% pay raises and better-than average health benefits. I had a job which came so naturally to me that I could’ve kept at it every day till I drew my last breath or they dragged me away from the computer screen, whichever came first. I had my 37.5 hours a week, five weeks paid vacation, and days off on my birthday and anniversary of hire. It seemed like plenty.

Only one problem with plenty: it never lasts.

Signs that the pool of plenty was drying up started emerging about five years ago, when they stopped replacing my copy desk co-workers after they moved on. By the summer of ‘09, the last of the pool could fill a teaspoon.

What happened next has already been told here, but to summarize: I learned in August that the paycut I had long avoided was going to happen after all, and that I was on the list of newsroom expendables. Learning I wasn’t the go-to guy I had imagined myself to be was one part sucker punch, one part wake-up call. Hurt at first, but when my breath returned I knew that in hard times, the expendable go first. With newspapers facing nothing but hard times in the years ahead, I knew that even if I kept my job this time, I’d lose it the next.

So I bailed. I had no prospects beyond a cash cushion, good credit and a few connections. Melissa and I moved across the continent, rented a cheap two-bedroom apartment down the road from her mom’s place, and dug in for a long stretch of austerity that seemed certain in light of how everybody else was faring in this economy.

Fortune smiled within weeks, it turned out. There were two reasons why I lucked out: a) somebody I knew needed to hire somebody, and I was in no position to get picky; and b) while I was lazy all those years, I was not blind.

I started my hiking blog to prove I could build a niche Web site that might attract people interested in my skills. When the job offers did not start pouring in, I started looking for ways to make the site pay.

One of the things I learned along the way was that a site called Trailspace.com was offering this nifty gear-comparison feature and using affiliate marketing links to pay the freight. I tried adding affiliate marketing links to my hiking blog and barely made a dime. Every time I turned around, I was seeing evidence that everybody in the affiliate game in the outdoor world was in line behind Trailspace.

In the past year or so I calculated that I could starve for the next 10 years trying to catch up with Trailspace, or simplify things by getting hired there. What I’m doing is a lot like copy editing — making sure certain rules of usage are applied uniformly and accurately across a publication — but there’s one essential difference: the most important part of my job is not just burnishing my boss’s prospects for respectability. It’s putting money in his pockets.

So what’s this got to do with Christmas? Well, yesterday I learned I’m getting my first holiday bonus since 1992. The bump in my bank account is nice, but the real bonus is knowing that the folks who pay my salary appreciate my work. I never had this in 22 years of newspapering. The work was fun and interesting, but we were interchangeable cogs in a vast news mechanism. They cut our staff by 75 percent and the paper still came out. We were not worthless, but we were not worth replacing, either.

That’s no kind of business for any Bob Cratchit to be in; none the Scrooges who own newspapers will ever wake up on Christmas morning determined to rescue Tiny Tim. They’ll be lucky to be able to keep the lights on.

My Christmas wish for 2009 is that all my old pals in the newspaper game find the will and the means to contribute their work to companies that deserve it, wherever that work may be. I’m proof that it can be done.

It was sobering to emerge from my newspaper cocoon and find all the skills I developed there were worth precisely zilch. I got my new job because of my hobbies, not because of my chosen craft.

My last day at the Mercury News concluded much like the first — same job, same desk, same daily dose of depravity. In the good old days of, say, 2004, a job at the Merc was resume gold; folks were always leaving for sexier gigs at the L.A. and New York Times. Five years later everybody I knew at every talent level was in the same bind: eminently qualified for a job at at somebody else’s dying newspaper. Heck, I got passed over for a job at a paper I’d have never considered applying to except as an alternative to unemployment (I gave this away when I got the paper’s name wrong during a conversation with an editor; I think it was my future talking).

I don’t have any regrets for my lost decade at the Merc. It was a good job; we had more joy than grief. For the last couple years I felt like Rhett Butler finally reporting for duty after the war was lost. I tried my damnedest to suck it up and take one for the team, doing work somebody had to do even when it was doing nothing to freshen up my moldy CV.

Didn’t matter, in the end: I was “on the bubble” to be bounced in the latest reduction in force. Ten years without a merit raise (much less a promotion) should’ve clued me in as to where I stood with my so-called superiors, but I was having such a fine time with my non-working life that it didn’t really matter.

What did matter was filling the hours of my non-working life with stuff I enjoyed doing. I was never a shirker at the Merc, but I made no sacrifices to get ahead in the newspaper biz. Turns out it was wiser to twin up my obsessions with hiking and blogging.

My new job is still a job — I wouldn’t do it for free, any more than I would slap headlines on stories about dead babies for free — but it has a future, unlike my previous one. We live in an unremarkable apartment complex in an unremarkable mid-size U.S. metropolitan area, but it’s cheap to live here and we’re near Melissa’s family and only a day’s drive from mine.

If you’ve been reading along at my hiking blog, you’ll have noticed the remarkable natural beauty in the state of North Carolina. It not a 365-day vacation like living in the Bay Area; weekends are fine, though.

For now I’m liking the way things have shaped up. My Mercury News years were were good while they lasted, and things got better after they were over. Hard to get too worked up over that.

A couple of daring young Internet entrepreneurs have smiled upon the Mangan household, extending an offer of full-time employment. All I have to do is play on a computer and think of ways to make hikers’ lives happier. The commute is about 20 feet, I can set my own work schedule, I even get the federal holidays off.

I was born with a bleak outlook — I’m never surprised when stock markets or airliners crash — so I had prepared myself, financially and mentally, for six months to a year of idling and fretting till I found another job. Well, get this: I qualified for exactly one week of unemployment benefits; the rest of the time I had free-lance projects lined up. So much for the blissful freedom of being out of work.

One of the first things I did after arriving in North Carolina was interview for a newspaper job 120 miles up the road in Roanoke, Virginia. I spent a whole day trying to convince the good folks up there that I really had this one thing I needed to accomplish in the newspaper biz. Good thing I’m such a terrible liar.

When I got home, I had an e-mail in my in-box asking if I’d like to help out with a slightly technical free-lance job at a website that promised a fair amount of drudgery in the short run but held a world of promise and full-time potential in the long run. Then I asked myself: do I really even want to work at newspapers anymore? I knew the answer, and that’s the moment I knew my newspaper life was over.

At some point I may assemble a post-mortem on my newspaper career, but there’s no way it can be written without kicking my long-suffering brethren still working in newsrooms. All the people who mattered in my newspaper life — the grunts within earshot of my F-bomb explosions — were good to me for every day of the 20-plus years I worked on sending pages to the pressroom. As Dylan said in one of his songs, “I have nothing but good thoughts of those who sailed with me.”

The thing was: I was hired on at my first paper in 1987 to copy edit and lay out pages. In 2009 I was still copy editing and laying out pages. Newspapers that did everything right still lost readers. Didn’t seem to matter what we did, the answer was always the same: fewer readers this year than last.

After 22 years of things never getting better, the prospect of six months to a year of sloth and worry seemed like a step up.

So maybe it’s true what they say about luck being where planning and opportunity collide. Five years ago I did a presentation for copy editors called “The Future Doesn’t Need us Anymore.” In the next three years our copy desk staff shrank from 40 to 15. In the final indignity, it got shifted to a lower-cost locale 60 miles up the road, with a 20 percent pay cut as thanks for everybody’s hard work in these trying times. I had plenty of time to figure out how it was going to shake out, and I did do something about it.

The oddest consequence of all this is that my path into the future ran through the woods. People often heard me say a hiking blog was a contradiction in terms: bloggers don’t hike, hikers don’t blog. I never had more than 500 people a day stop by; most days it’s around 250. But enough of them saw something in my online musings to take a chance on me.

Right now I owe it all to a hiking blog. Who’d a thunk?

Six weeks ago today we arrived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

I suppose I should have a lot more to say about the place, but I’ve spent most of the past 42 days right here, tapping into my keyboard. Went on a few hikes, dutifully recounted on my hiking blog. We moved out of Melissa’s mom’s living room after a month. We like having our own four walls, even if it means having a landlord.

So what do I think of North Carolina? Liking it so far, mainly because it appears to be turning into California. It already has mountains on one end and an ocean on the other (while the mountains are smaller, the beaches are more welcoming than the bone-chilling shores of Northern California — fair trade-off, I’d say). It has a burgeoning high-tech sector and a growing population that’s getting more diverse every day.

Truth is, there’s nothing I could say about this place right now that wouldn’t come across as a caricature — either of me, the stranger in the new place, or the place itself, whose strangeness lies entirely in the eyes of the beholder. I still feel like a guest in somebody else’s state, so hatin’ on the hosts is not high on my to-do list.

Melissa and I have had 14 address changes in the past 20 years — from Tampa, to Peoria, to San Jose, to Winston-Salem. Seems like we’re always someplace new, so I’ve learned to distrust first impressions. We have all the Taco Bells and Outback Steakhouses and Targets and Office Maxes that everybody else has. The terrain here is rolling, green and generally pleasing to the eye. Are there hellholes? Sure. Is there crime, bigotry and unnecessary unpleasantness afoot? Yeah. Our suburban sprawl looks just like your suburban sprawl.

Nothing has influenced my conclusion that there is very little true diversity within our species. Biologically we’re almost identical. People in this part of the United States have digestive tracts optimized for hunting and gathering on the plains of Africa, just like folks in every other nook and cranny of our planet.

So right now my life doesn’t feel all that much different. I’m getting freelance work that requires me to move words around on a computer screen, just like my old job. I am thankful that I’m no longer obliged to chronicle the daily depravity we have come to think of as “news.” I think I earned a vacation after 20 years.

I figure no matter what zip code you live in, you’ve only got one true address: the corpus carrying your brain and bodily organs. It contains all the tools you need to survive no matter where you live, so long as you have access to water, shelter and warmth. We’ve got all that stuff.

My Aunt Bev, firstborn of the five children of Thomas Mangan (my grandad), died a week ago today. I spent a few days with family last week remembering what made her such a remarkable woman. My dad recalls how now and again he’d be reading a letter to the editor of the local paper “giving the politicians hell,” and then he’d see his sister had written it.

Bev Gibbs, Sept. 2006

Bev should’ve been a journalist — she loved to write, loved to spout on politics, and had a human touch that would’ve invited people to tell her their stories. Well, at least one of us Mangans got into the news biz.

Speaking of stories, my Uncle Mike recounted a gem: Back in the late 1950s, he hitchhiked all over the West; I think he knew every pothole in Route 66. One time he caught a ride to Sacramento and got dropped off on Interstate 5 in a boiling stretch of the Central Valley.

After a good bake in the sun, he finally got a ride from a guy heading southbound. On the way south toward L.A. the guy asked Mike where he was from.

“Peoria, Illinois.”

“Really? I spent some time there myself. What’s your name?”

“Mike Mangan.”

“You know a Bev Mangan? I used to date her.”

“Sure I know her, she’s my sister.”

(This is my all-time favorite “small world” story).

Anyway, about a decade ago I interviewed Bev for a web project called SevenQuestions. These are her Q’s and A’s.

ONE

What happened to you as a a teen-ager in the 1940s that convinces you teens haven’t changed much in the past 50 years?

The biggest thing that hasn’t changed much is that every teen wants to be popular in school, no matter how far back you go. We would all like to be the cheerleaders, the jocks, prettiest or handsomest or popular with the other sex in the “in”crowd.

The biggest difference is in the ’40s, nobody shot you for it.

TWO

Another Tom Mangan — your father (my grandfather) — was a traveling salesman always strapped for a buck. What was something he did to economize that makes you laugh when you think about it today?

In 1937, I was seven years old and an only child. My Dad was making about $15 a week selling refrigerators. The only economy he practiced that I can remember is that whenever we ran up too many bills at one address, we would move so that the bill collectors would have to search for us, slowing them down a bit.

We always lived in apartments and many times just moved next door or around the corner. I must have driven the school record keepers crazy!

THREE

What you were doing when you heard Roosevelt had died?

It was a pretty day in April 1945. I had just gotten home from school in my freshman year and was talking to some friends. A man came by shouting “Extra, Extra” selling papers from the Journal. We bought one and read the news.

Everybody was devastated. I remembered the last newsreel in which I had seen him, he looked ill. I took the paper to my parents. My father cried.

FOUR

Tell a story from your first days as a new mother with Randy, your oldest son, that made you wonder if you were cut out for the mommy business.

As Ran is now 47 years old, it has been a while.

As a lot of new mothers find out after all the embarrassing stuff is over at the hospital, they are frazzled and nervous and now must take this little package home and take care of it. Their nervous reaction is passed right on to the baby and the result is “nervous tummy” which translates into lots of screaming, which can go on for days.

I for one would have gladly returned him, but there are no exchanges! Oh, the first day I knew, about 24 hours after we brought him in the door!

FIVE

What did you think of television when you saw it the first time?

It was at a neighbor’s home and I remember wondering how on earth they got those pictures to travel through the air.

I knew it would be a long time before we had one. A little later on, my husband’s uncle got one and we would go to their house after work on Wednesdays to watch “Dragnet” and have a few beers.

SIX

Who killed JFK?

I believe Oswald was a patsy, but he was there. However, he was not alone.; the mafia, the U.S. government (CIA) and the hatred of so many important people had a lot to do with it.

It was a major conspiracy. The movie “JFK” with Kevin Costner comes closest to the truth.

SEVEN

Describe something you learned late in life that you wish to heck you’d known all along.

For all the young people contemplating matrimony, remember this. What you see is what you get. Don’t go into marriage expecting the things you don’t like about him or her to change. They won’t.

So the part where we move back in with the folks has been tried. Nice while it lasted, but we needed our names on a lease somewhere to remind us of the proper place for folks of our advanced years.

For those wondering about the difference in rent between the Bay Area and the middle of North Carolina, it’s about like this: twice the space for half the money. Groceries, however, are no cheaper.

I’m hoping to find more time for updates here … we’ll see.

“Let me guess, you’re looking for the wedding,” says the guy through my opened car window.

“No, I’m just looking for Hanging Rock State Park.”

Seems there’s a bridge out on the road to Hanging Rock, a state park highly recommended by local hikers. The guy standing by the road has been redirecting folks all morning. They’re all going to a wedding. Except me.

Well, that’s what I thought anyway.

So I take the detour, find my way to the park, get myself parked and all my gear strapped on, and set out in search of the nearest point of interest, Upper Cascades Falls. I figure the light might be good first thing in the morning and what the heck, it’s only .3 mile from the parking lot.

Then I wander down this wide gravel road, round a bend and see a large gathering of folks dressed oddly office-casual for a state park on Labor Day weekend. Of course by now I’ve completely forgotten about the guy on the road and all the folks looking for the nuptials.

So I blunder right up to the rail, look down at what everybody else is looking down at, and the first thing I hear is a male voice down there saying “now, let us pray.” On one side, a woman clad in white. On the other, a guy clad in black. Nearby, a bearded guy with a guitar.

My rule is, when the man says pray, you pray. In my case, I pray that these good folks don’t toss me down the ravine for crashing their wedding. Last I knew the preacher, bride and groom were breaking bread and getting ready for a Communion. I sorta slinked away.

As I’m making my way back up the trail, two women in heels are picking their way down the gravel trail, asking me how much further to the waterfall. “Don’t worry, it’s just around the bend,” I reassure them. They’re wishing somebody had told them to wear hiking boots.

The waterfall was lovely, by the way.

(More on the hike at Two-Heel Drive, if you’re curious).

Americans should have “traverse the nation by car” on their life list — the whole shebang of purple mountains majesty, amber waves of grain, obnoxious tangles of traffic (from the verse I would add to update the song for modern audiences) .

I wouldn’t recommend the method we employed last week, dashing across in five days. We went that route mainly to save money and reduce trauma for our cat, a full-voting member of the household. What I wish we could’ve done if unemployment weren’t a part of the picture:

Take two weeks

Aim for 250 to 300 miles a day rather than 600. You can do that in five or six hours, leaving time to get off the Interstates and take day trips to the really cool stuff. The only redeeming characteristic of a superhighway is its ability to get you from point A to point B. Everything worth seeing is on the state and federal highways that zigzag across the landscape.

Don’t use your own car

Driving your own car will encourage a major compromise: the drive to and from wherever you live. I think it’d be much wiser to buy plane tickets to and from the coasts of your choosing, and rent a car for your driving. Weekly rates are far more reasonable than dailies and you typically can get unlimited mileage. You save wear and tear on your own car and if it breaks down, it’s somebody else’s responsibility to get you back on the road again.

Don’t lock yourself in

Say you pull in for gas at a truck stop in Arizona and see a gift shop of alleged Indian artifacts across the street that you’d really like to check out because you’re into kitsch. A hard-and-fast itinerary leaves little chance for checking that stuff out. Some sites like the Grand Canyon simply must be seen, but if fun is the main goal of going on vacation, give yourself a chance to have some.

Time your travels around big city rush hours

The only thing worse than being stuck in your own town’s traffic jams is being stuck in somebody else’s. Left turns and lane changes that come naturally on home turf can be a white-knuckle nightmare in foreign cities.

Consider a criss-cross route

I’d love to do this in separate trips: San Diego to Portland, Maine, one year and Vancouver to Miami the next. These routes could add several hundred miles and a couple extra days of driving, but you’d get a far tastier range of terrain and weather.

I-40, I-70 or I-80?
I haven’t driven the far northern Interstates that go up into Washington state, but I can speak to the three middle routes.

I-40 runs from Wilmington, NC, to Barstow, CA, offering most of the southern United States from a single highway. It passes through must visit music towns of Memphis and Nashville and runs through Indian country through all of Oklahoma and much of New Mexico and Arizona, two states where you could spend months exploring the southern high desert.

I-80 goes from Chicago to San Francisco, crossing a thousand miles of prairie before the terrain gets interesting at the Wasatch Range dropping into Salt Lake City. The drive from Salt Lake to the Sierra is pretty dreary, but crossing the Sierra and driving down to the Bay Area is a wonderful drive (just avoid the weekends; the whole population of the Bay Area seems to head for the hills every Saturday and Sunday).

I-70 Goes from Baltimore to southwest Utah — crossing much of the Midwest farm country, which can be flat and boring, but it gets very exciting coming into the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains at Denver (the mountains loom dark and gray like a distant thunderstorm for several hours before you hit Denver; it’s one of the most impressive scenes in North America). I-70 continues through the spectacular Rocky Mountain heights and continues through the amazing canyon country of Utah.

Picking your route may be the hardest part. No matter which one you choose, you’ll give up something worth seeing.

Today is my last at the San Jose Mercury News. When I arrived in this crazy place of perfect weather and tolerant populace, it seemed I was on vacation from the first day.

All I had to do to remain on vacation was spend 7.5 hours a day doing something that came as naturally to me as waking when rested. The pay was not great, but it was good. The company was often cranky but excellent. What the people of San Jose and points beyond needed to know, we told.

Five days a week of playing on computers and fixing people’s grammar was all it cost to subsidize a 10-year vacation from blizzard winters and tornado summers. The weekends were mine; the mornings were mine. California was mine, at least my little sliver of it. It was worth having, full of things worth doing.

I once read you should live in Southern California but leave before it makes you hard, and live in Northern California but leave before it makes you soft. Either way, you don’t stay.

So, it’s back to working for a living (assuming there’s work to be had). Sure, I’m sad that the gravy train ran out of track, but the great thing about this world is they’re always building a new one somewhere.

Around this time 10 years ago I was wandering around downtown San Jose on a sunny Saturday. I had a day to kill after my interviews at the San Jose Mercury News so I roamed the city’s mostly empty streets. People work and raise kids here, they don’t hang out downtown. A couple weeks later I had a job offer from the paper, which paid all the freight to move me, Melissa and our two cats to Silicon Valley.

Back then the valley was booming; now we’re working through our second bust, which has pummeled the paper and put many friends out of work. In three weeks I’m joining them.

I had an option of staying on while the Merc outsources its design and copy desks to Walnut Creek, about 50 miles north of here, but we decided it’s time to move on. We’ve worked under a cloud of doom for the past four years and we finally crossed our enough-is-enough threshold. The paper’s offering a modest severance package, just enough to get us across the lets-try-something-new threshold.

In the next three weeks we’re going to donate or sell everything that won’t fit into the Hiker Hauler. A couple days after my last day at the paper we’re going to pack up the car, head east to North Carolina and ride out the recession at Melissa’s mom’s place.

When we got here I published a series of pages called “The California Experiment” and have spent the past decade testing theories and observing behavior. Prime operating theories:

• Vast wealth generated by the state’s abundant resources leads to delusional “we-can-have-it-all” attitude that generates government gridlock.
• Vast wealth also creates pervasive “it’s-all-about-me” thought patterns (and their corollary, “it’s all about money”). There’s a great band out here called Me First and the Gimme Gimmes; it could not be from anywhere else.

Fundamental observations:

• Staggering natural beauty encourages people to put up with aforementioned insanity. Just the idea of never hiking the trails around here makes my eyes misty (an improvement from yesterday, when the response was inconsolable grief.)
• People come here and never want to leave, leading to permanent overpopulation.
• If you put three Californians together, they will immediately start a suburb and a traffic jam.
• Keeping your money in your wallet and away from those with superior claims is a full-time job. A sign at the Santa Cruz Municipal Pier just before you pull up to the toll booth says it all: “Have money ready.”

It feels like a good time to close down our California experiment and do something else with our lives, closer to family and sanity.

California seduces just about anybody with a trace of mad passion in their veins. But eventually you have to get out of bed and start living in the real world again.

My days are numbered at the Mercury News. We just settled a new union contract that punishes everybody to the tune of hefty pay cuts in the next year, but a few of us were singled out for extra spankings. All production — copy editing and page designing — will be moved to our sister paper in Walnut Creek, which generously pays its people at about 20 percent less than we earn. It looks like half of our production team will be laid off and the other half will get to soldier on with smaller rations.

Great time to be in the newspaper biz, eh?

I could just put my foot down and refuse to go, but I figure 80 percent of my Merc wages drains my savings considerably more slowly than zero percent, so I’m putting in for one of the Walnut Creek jobs. Walnut Creek is a nice town in the East Bay, close to tons of great trails. It also has BART access to San Francisco, unlike my current abode, and the rents are cheaper, so I don’t have any issues about living up there if I survive the cut.

I once wrote that I wouldn’t give up on the newspaper biz till it gives up on me. Well, the biz has its chance; we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve heard it said that in combat, when a soldier sees a comrade killed, “better him than me” flashes through his mind for just a moment. Then he spends the rest of his life regretting that one-second urge for self-preservation.

What’s happening to the newspaper biz is nothing like a battlefield … people will walk away with their friends and body parts intact. Some are losing jobs but they are not losing their ability to earn a living.

Still, I can identify with better-he-than-me guilt. Today the Rocky Mountain News publishes its last edition. My employer, who also publishes the surviving Denver Post, will be in much better shape financially, and by extension my paper’s prospects have improved. So my job is probably 3.763 percent more secure than it was yesterday. I don’t feel the least bit good about it.

The Rocky paid good union wages to its newsroom of 230 or so. A few of the paper’s stars got hired on by the Post but the rest are in deep doo-doo, economically. There are no other newsroom jobs anywhere in the country that pay the kind of wages they earned at the Rocky. Really, none.

I figure they’ll do OK … getting a paper out every day requires resourcefulness that’s always in demand (except, perhaps, now). The economy will turn around eventually, though minus a few more newspapers.

I’ve been expecting this day for 15 years. I remember thinking in about 1995 that newspapers had about five years till Internet broadband rendered them obsolete. Here we are nine years later and I’m still working for one.

But my illusions are gone. The end is no longer near. It’s here.

What dies with the Rocky is the age of big-city newspapers that matter. Papers of some sort will probably always be around, but they won’t be able to attract big-time talent until they can offer something better than more work for less pay. Maybe in a generation, after all the trapped-in-the-old-era farts like yours truly have been shunted aside by new blood, young newsies will be content to earn their stripes on starvation pay like cub reporters always had to do in previous golden ages of newspaper journalism. It’ll probably be good for the craft.

It’s not much consolation to the folks in Denver, I realize, but endings always lead to beginnings. Something newer, cooler, smarter, etc. will come of all this in a few years. And if it doesn’t I will still have successfully delayed getting a real job until I had to.

A couple days ago I was at work putting together a couple items for our “star watch” celebrity column when a statement from Will Smith struck me: he said he’d told his daughter she could grow up to be president, but now he actually believes it.

Here’s a guy, Hollywood Movie Star and successful beyond most of our wildest dreams, revealing something I suspect a lot of black people are thinking today: America, finally, feels like our country now.

As a white guy I could never presume to know what it’s like to be black in the United States of America, but I suspect it’s been like this: everything we have, The Man can take away. The man dragged us here in chains and kept us there for 300 years. Fought a war that supposedly set us “free” but treated us like dirt for another 100 years. It’s their country, we just live in it.

Until today.

A single Ivy League-educated half-white paid-up member of the nation’s intellectual and financial elite will not fundamentally change America’s race equation. But Barack Obama’s inauguration will say one thing: we don’t have to be the way we’ve always been.

It’s probably dangerous to read too much into what’s happening today: to be the first black president of the United States, you have to be Barack Obama, a guy curiously unaffected by impossible odds against him. Think of what he was up against 18 months ago. Beyond being a member of a racial minority with foreign first and last names and a notorious dictator’s middle name, he had almost no track record in politics. He wasn’t from an established political family. He was a complete outsider.

A guy like him finding a way to become president forces us to widen our ideas about what is possible and impossible.

Obama had no chance, and yet here we are today. Cynicism seems pretty empty in the face of that.

Newsies read Jim Romenesko’s Media News page every day for fresh evidence of the demise of newspapers, journalism and all we hold dear.

I wonder how many realize that Romenesko is the future of news, and has been every working day for the last decade. What Jim did was vanishingly obvious: identified an audience with a shared self-interest and sent them a daily digest of news they were interested in. He doesn’t have millions of readers like Drudge or Perez Hilton, but I’m guessing he does have about 100,000 (roughly the number of people working in news, last time I looked).

What I’m thinking is: anywhere you can find a 100k audience, you can make a living as a journalist online. The hard part is identifying the audience. The good news is if you start writing about stuff they care about and send a constant stream of timely news via a blog, they will find you. It might take a year or two and you’ll have to bone up on developing a blog, learning search engine optimization and monetizing it via paid clicks (eg, Google AdSense) but the main thing is: those audiences are out there.

Awhile back my wife and I were talking about Caterpillar Inc., the world’s largest manufacturer of earthmoving equipment, which is based in my hometown. Cat runs everything in Peoria so it’s always creeping into the conversations of folks who grew up there. We reasoned that Cat has 100,000 employees worldwide who should be interested in a centralized site for Caterpillar-related news and links. Surely a company of this size with revenue in the tens of billions has a dozen blogs devoted to it already, right? Nope.

Now there’s one. I started Cat Stock Blog in mid-December with the idea of answering a simple question on the mind of everybody who works there: how’s the stock doing? I found a free service that provides free stock chart quotes, assembled a mass of links, designed my site logo and just started posting Cat news all within a week of coming up with the idea. The audience is small today, but over time people who work there will get in the habit of checking the site just as we newsies go to Romenesko every day. Here’s one interesting tidbit: Right now Cat workers represent a tiny fraction of my readership, meaning it could go well beyond the 100k figure.

I’ll be the first to admit that blogging about tractors is not the sexiest topic on Earth. I’d much rather blog about cars, movies, rock ‘n’ roll or walking in the woods, but the first three are covered to death and the last one has very small audience potential (hikers don’t blog, bloggers don’t hike; it’s just how it is).

Romenesko lucked out early on by securing a deal with the Poynter Institute, but I’m guessing by now his brand is strong enough that he’ll survive even if Poynter, which owns the St. Petersburg Times, decides he’s too expensive.

The rest of us will not be so lucky: we’ll have to fight, scratch and blog our way to financial security. It’ll force all of us to learn some things about the money side of the biz that we never worried about before. Maybe most of us don’t have all the aptitudes we need. But people in the news biz are curious by nature and addicted to the Next Big Thing.

The Romenesko Effect is simple: blog about something that hits people where they live — their jobs — and they start showing up, habitually. We can do it much better than anybody else can. If we let ourselves find that 100k audience, the future will take care of itself.

Times have gotten bad enough in the newspaper biz to force me to re-evaluate what I do with my non-newspaper time. I’ve had great fun combining hiking and blogging over the past three years … I even added some Google ads to my pages in hopes of picking up a few bucks. Well, the bucks are very, very few. It’s possible to make money blogging, but you’ll starve on daily hit counts in the hundreds. You don’t need millions, but you do need thousands, so you need a topic where thousands of eyeballs might reside.

Finding this audience vexed me to no end till last week, when just for the heck of it I decided to see if there’s a blog devoted to Caterpillar Inc., the tractor maker based in my hometown. Cat is a Dow 30 component with $46 billion in revenue and 100,000 employees worldwide. It’s the Microsoft of heavy equipment, so you’d think there’d be a blog or two covering the company. I looked: Nada.

Back when I lived in Peoria, the question “how’s Cat’s stock doing?” was pretty much on everybody’s mind. So this is my theory: Cat has 100k employees, all with an abiding interest in how the company’s doing. If I can get just a fifth of those people, I’ve got the 20k audience that’ll turn my $2 a day into $200 — a living wage even in the Bay Area.

I’ve started something at catstockblog.com. If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to the folks back home.