Getting Out : TIRED OF SIGALERTS? FED UP WITH SMOG? AFRAID TO GO OUT AT NIGHT? PACK YOUR BAGS AND JOIN THE GREAT CALIFORNIA EXODUS

Up near the top of the “How Brandt and Shanon Vroman Came to Loathe Their Native Southern California” list has to be that nightmare trip to Santa Barbara three Thanksgivings ago. The sun was shining, the skies were clear. They took the Rabbit so they could put the top down and soak up some rays on the drive north. Big mistake. “It should be a two-hour, 15-minute drive,” Shanon recalls, still shuddering from the flashback. “It took us four and a quarter hours. It was totally stuck. No accidents, no construction. Just people.”

Brandt, a laid-back child of the Orange County beach culture, is a pretty relaxed individual. But behind a steering wheel on an overpacked freeway, he suddenly transforms into a vicious, snarling mongrel. He rides the bumper of the car ahead, figuring that if there is even the tiniest of gaps, some jerk will surely swerve in ahead of him and close it off anyway. Signaling a lane change is an act of self-defeating lunacy, he fumes, because the fiend in the next car over would see the flashing blinker as an invitation to speed up and cut him off.

After hours of crawling, tailgating and deceptive lane-hopping maneuvers designed to psyche out enemy automobiles, Brandt and Shanon arrived for holiday supper at Shanon’s father’s home sweating bullets. Their nerves were so frayed that had either of them been handed the carving tools, something much larger than the turkey might have been sliced into. “I was going to kill someone,” Brandt gasps, recalling the drive.

“When you’re spending four hours to get to Santa Barbara--the whole four hours, every minute of it--you’re thinking back, “This drive used to take me a couple of hours. What in the world is wrong?’

“That’s what really makes you start thinking: ‘I got to get out of here; this is starting to kill me.’ ”

And so they did. Not immediately, to be sure. But eventually, after enduring hundreds more hours in traffic jams and shelling out tens of thousands of inflated mortgage dollars on a cracker-box condo and sucking in millions more gasps of foul, smog-laced air, Brandt and Shanon Vroman finally mustered enough chutzpah last year to take this country’s glitziest, most drooled-over polyglot megalopolis and shove it.

Destination: suburban Portland, to a home complete with an acre of tree-shaded yard and a mortgage this side of the stratosphere. They report that the air is clean, the natives are friendly, commutes are a breeze, water is plentiful, and life is now a bowl of cherries. Like generations of the humble folk who once flooded California and then incessantly snickered at the poor, shivering wretches they left back East, the Vromans aren’t above gloating. What’s there not to like about Southern California, anyway? “Don’t like the people, don’t like the smog, don’t like the traffic, don’t like the lack of water, don’t like the attitude, don’t like the lifestyle, don’t want to raise kids there,” says Shanon, not skipping a beat. “All that, plus.”

IN SIMPLER TIMES, THE WORLD WAS SPLIT into two classes of people. There were Californians--and people who loathed Californians. The Californians always suspected the California loathers were just a wee bit jealous. The California loathers always thought the Californians were just a wee bit wacky.

California-bashing is a long and time-honored tradition among those who haven’t lived there. What’s surprising, though, is how fashionable it’s become among those who have. The Vromans are not alone.

Ask Janet Nagel, a 37-year-old bank loan officer, who took a pay cut and a lateral career hop to escape the high cost of housing and maddening traffic of Orange County. Unable to afford her Tustin apartment when the complex went condo, Nagel chose to go where she could afford to buy. A year ago she fled to a new life and a new job in Atlanta, where she has relatives. “When I was disconnecting the phone and utilities, the clerk would say, ‘You going to move? I wish I could,’ ” Nagel recalls. “This from complete strangers.”

Not exactly the sort of stuff that chambers of commerce boast about. After all, for so long, California, especially the southern end, was the nation’s hot spot--the place to be for countless would-be stars, sun worshipers, entrepreneurs, navel-gazers, hustlers, job seekers and just about anybody trying to escape the cold, crime, congestion and hard luck they’d experienced in the East, the Rust Belt or, in days of yore, the Dust Bowl. Southern California may have been built on dreams, but these days the dream of a significant number of longtime residents is to get out.

Immigrants from Latin America, Asia and elsewhere continue to flood the region and are expected to push the population to astronomical heights. But as a major draw for the rest of the nation, California was demagnetized long ago. According to the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, migration from the rest of the country was responsible for up to three-fourths of the rapid L.A. population boom of the 1940s and ‘50s but accounted for only 10% of the growth by the ‘60s. In a 1988 study, the latest available on the subject, the Southern California Assn. of Governments concluded that the migration seesaw had finally tipped, and more people were actually leaving the region for other parts of California and the United States than were moving in from elsewhere in the country. Perhaps the most startling part of the study was that it covered the period 1975 to 1980--before the worst of the geometric run-up in traffic congestion and the price of housing. Getting out as a phenomenon limited primarily to Anglos and is not without some disquieting overtones. “You have to admire these people,” says Ruth Oney, a recent transplant to Kentucky, explaining the ambivalence she feels about the burgeoning immigrant population of L.A. County: “They’re such hard workers.” On the other hand, she observes, “They took over all the small businesses. Here you are living in America and you go in to do some shopping and you can’t understand the people who are waiting on you. Sometimes you felt like you were a stranger in your own country because they were just everywhere. . . . That bothered me. I just can’t help it. I kept trying to say this is the land of opportunity, the Statue of Liberty bit and all that. But you just don’t like it all the same.”

To be sure, the exodus from Southern California is fairly small and would hardly register a blip on the ever-rising population charts. Still, demographers expect that coming analyses of the latest U.S. Census will show a trend that is intensifying. “Generally what I see going on is a process of population redistribution within the state as well as across state lines,” explains RAND demographer Peter A. Morrison. “A lot of people are heading out of heavily urbanized, congested California, which means they may go as far as the outskirts of Sacramento, the Sierra Nevada foothills, or they may go to Nevada, or they may go all the way up to Washington, or they may go to Arizona. But what they’re moving away from, I think, is the manifestation of population pressure.”

In other words, urban California is choking on its own success--at least in the eyes of longtime residents. A Times survey a few years ago found that nearly half of the Southern California residents questioned had at least considered moving out. L.A. historian Mike Davis sees such sentiment as evidence of white, middle-class disillusionment with the old image of Los Angeles as a metropolis somehow apart from big cities such as New York, Chicago and Detroit.

“I think that people are propelled by exaggerated fears about strangers, people of other races, about crime, about urban problems in general,” Davis says. “Los Angeles always had that quality of being a city/non-city, a place that (had a) suburban, if not almost rural, lifestyle right in the heart of what became the great urban region. (But) L.A.’s anti-urban ethic is proving to be self-defeating in a period during which Los Angeles has developed a lot of urban problems that aren’t in any sense atypical.” Among those, quite clearly, are jobs and money. A humming, richly diverse economic base that local boosters had wishfully thought of as recession-proof has suddenly gone south, defying the pundits. Aerospace is hurting, high-tech is hemorrhaging, and manufacturing has soured right along with the national downturn. Even real estate, the Holy Grail of the Southern California experience, has turned flabby.

Southern California seems increasingly unlivable to people whose roots here go back to the 1960s, ‘50s, ‘40s and ‘30s, argues Bill Seavey, who runs a Sierra Madre relocation consulting service and distributes a newsletter called “Greener Pastures” to more than 1,000 Southern Californians. “Those generations saw this place as a land of opportunity--literally, a paradise,” he explains. “The bottom line is that there’s simply way too many people here. By 2010, they speculate, there’s going to be 18 million in L.A. and Orange counties. Eighteen million people! Just in the southern half of the state. Saturation has occurred.”

Janet Nagel’s thoughts exactly. She had to drive a lot for work, and the freeway hassle just kept getting worse and worse, so much so that the thought of fighting traffic in her off-duty hours as well became unbearable. Gradually, she quit doing many of the things that made life in Southern California special. “I started thinking twice about getting into a car,” she says. “I didn’t think about it before. I’d just go. Now I had to plan the right times to go to the beach, had to plan ahead to go shopping at South Coast Plaza. I couldn’t just go visit a friend on Saturday mornings in San Clemente. I stopped going to L.A. as much. I used to go to museums or to dinner with friends. Everything was crowded wherever you went--getting to the beach in the summer, to Big Bear for skiing on weekends. It took hours to get up there, then hours in line for a ski lift.”

Not that she hasn’t experienced withdrawal in Atlanta. Nagel misses some good friends, and her phone bill is soaring. She loves to visit art museums, but the number and variety available in Atlanta pale in comparison with Los Angeles. But at least she can get to them with little hassle. She’s still on the lookout for good Mexican food and craves light and lean California cuisine instead of heavy Southern cooking. And though Nagel never thought of herself as a liberal, she does now--at least by Georgia standards.

Believe it or not, she’s even suffering with Atlanta traffic. She’s already been sideswiped, which is ironic. “I managed to get through California without a scratch and came to Atlanta to get hit,” Nagel says. “Driving’s just not as organized as in L.A. They jump around lanes more here. L.A. traffic, for all its congestion, seems to flow better. Everybody’s into the rhythm.”

But she’s been thrilled by the change of seasons, mild as the Southern climate is. And the air. Georgians complain about it, but to someone with California-scarred lungs, it seems like an ocean breeze. And then there’s the house. She bought one--it’s kind of a California-style place. “The thing I love most is to look at the house and think that in a suburb like one in Orange County, it would cost three times as much as what I paid here,” Nagel crows. “My payments are less than the last rent I was paying in Orange County, and I have twice as much room. I won’t be going back.”

THERE’S A DEFINITE HOLLYWOOD TOUCH to the Buck and Ruth Oney story: Small-town boy grows up next door to small-town girl, they go their separate ways, only to find each other decades later in that big city of dreams, Los Angeles. The only problem would be the ending. Instead of strolling into the sunset on a romantic Pacific beach, we’d find Buck and Ruth packing up a moving van and fleeing their Southern California love nest in frustration.

Buck and Ruth were kids together in Depression-era Leon, Iowa, a poor but peaceful farm center about 65 miles south of Des Moines. Buck’s dad was a farmer, and Ruth’s ran the feed and seed store. The youngsters were never sweethearts, but they were good buddies. After high school, though, Ruth took a job in another Iowa town, met a guy and got married. Buck was an usher at the wedding.

When the war broke out, Buck answered a newspaper ad for welders in the shipyards of Long Beach and San Pedro. By early 1942, he was there, had enrolled in welding school and was waiting on tables at Clifton’s Cafeteria in Hollywood. One day Rudy Vallee walked in with a starlet wearing green fingernail polish and green eye shadow. That was really something to a farm kid from Iowa, and Buck was quickly hooked on the excitement of living in L.A.

Flash forward to 1962. Buck is now a banker living in Santa Monica. He’s divorced and has three sons. Ruth, meanwhile, is a widow with two sons of her own. She lives in Jackson, Miss., but decides to take a trip to Seattle to see relatives. Along the way, she stops to look up her long lost childhood friend, Buck. Next thing you know they’re married and living in a two-story, four-bedroom home in La Mirada. They become active in the Methodist church, spend weekends at the beach, become avid Dodger and Angel fans and take frequent outings to a special getaway spot in Palm Desert. All in all, a pretty comfortable existence.

Except something went wrong. Ruth developed a funny kind of urban claustrophobia as the sprawl of Los Angeles gradually devoured every bit of open space. She called it the concrete jungle. Often on weekends she’d get in the car and drive east to Brea, because it still had a bit of country flavor, with cows and pastures and the like. One Sunday afternoon, she drove up to her favorite spot only to find a squadron of bulldozers flattening the hills and ripping out the trees to make way for a new subdivision. She pulled to the side of the road and sobbed.

“It was the same thing when I drove to work in Tustin,” she recalls. “I used to go by all those beautiful orange groves. Then one day all the trees in one area were down. The bulldozers came in. And then pretty soon that whole road was lined with office buildings, one right after the other. They just took away anything that gave you a feeling of beauty.”

“I used to sit in traffic sometimes and just try to picture another part of the country and remind myself. You’ve got to force yourself to remember there are places with open fields and great big houses with big yards and shade trees like we had when we grew up. I’d still see that on TV sometimes, and I’d just ache for it.” One day she turned to Buck and pleaded: “I don’t want to die in California. Please don’t let me die in California.”

Buck was more sanguine about his surroundings, but even he had to admit that life was becoming a chore. And then, three years ago, he had triple-bypass heart surgery and suffered a slight stroke. After that, he found himself ready to leave Southern California behind. “It used to be fun,” he says, but it no longer was. “Why fight the battle anymore?”

So the Oneys began scouting for somewhere to retire. Eventually, friends passed along a Times clipping, a story by staff writer Charles Hillinger about an idyllic little university community called Murray in the rolling hills and lake country of western Kentucky. It was said to be a “slice of heaven,” picked by Rand McNally as the best place in the nation to retire. The housing was cheap, the people warm and the fishing, boating and golf opportunities splendid. Buck and Ruth went to see for themselves and quickly decided to stay. For $5,000 they bought a half-acre wooded lot a few miles outside of town, and for another $116,000 they built a 2,500-square-foot home flanked by a huge California-style deck.

Though the point of moving was to escape California, once Buck and Ruth settled in Murray, the strangest thing started to happen. They began running into ex-Californians, many of whom had been attracted to the place by that same Hillinger article. Last summer, Ruth decided to find out how many there were. She put a notice in the local newspaper announcing a California picnic, much like the annual Iowa picnics in Long Beach that once lured thousands of transplanted Iowans. Ruth expected a dozen or so families to show up, but the final count was 56 families. The Rand McNally designation notwithstanding, several were well shy of retirement age and still raising children.

For example, John and Ginger Goodell were Orange County schoolteachers and lifelong Californians. But after they received a small inheritance two years ago, they quit their jobs and moved from Huntington Beach with a teen-age daughter. The primary reason: In Murray, they can afford to live off their endowment without working, an extravagance their money could never buy in California. John spends his days painting, and Ginger writes.

Tom and Barbara Tompkins are Redondo Beach transplants. Tom, 54, is a retired Air Force major who had been working as a consultant on terrorism for RAND. They passed through Murray on vacation three years ago and became so awed by the housing values that Barbara immediately went on a real estate shopping spree. In the course of a single weekend she snapped up four three-bedroom houses and a duplex for a grand total of $220,000. A few months later, Tom and Barbara returned to Murray for good, bringing with them Tom’s mother and Barbara’s 12-year-old daughter by a previous marriage. Since then, Tom has started a new career as a local stockbroker.

Not that everything is perfect in Murray. Decelerating from the fast lane takes some getting used to, even for those who are looking forward to it. There isn’t much in the way of structured entertainment, so to keep busy, folks do much more old-fashioned visiting and socializing. In a metropolis of millions, it’s easy to live anonymously. But in a Bible Belt town of only 15,000, everybody knows your business. Walk into Rudy’s cafe on the courthouse square, and you’ll be asked two questions: “Where are you from?” and “What’s your religion?” The movers and shakers in town are either Church of Christ or Methodist. Taboos include drinking in public and swearing in public. Calloway County is dry, but it’s only a 45-minute drive up to Paducah to stock up. The second prohibition requires a little more discipline, especially for Tom and his military-trained tongue.

Both the Goodells and the Tompkinses worry that they may have culturally shortchanged their children by leaving a rich and diverse metropolis. The Goodells’ son, Jon, was old enough to strike out on his own when the family moved to Murray and refused to come with them. “That’s fine for you all, you’re old,” he told his parents. “I’m staying here.” But their daughter, Jennifer, was a high school freshman at the time and couldn’t make such a choice.

The adjustment was tough. Jennifer was heartbroken at leaving Huntington Beach, and when she got to Kentucky and enrolled in Murray High, she had trouble fitting in. Most of her new classmates had lived in Murray all their lives and grown up with one another. Jennifer was definitely an outsider. Things went a little better in her sophomore year, but she is still itching to leave. “My daughter at this moment will tell you there’s no way she’s going to stay here,” Ginger acknowledges. “As soon as she finishes high school, she’ll go back to California and get a job.”

The Goodells are aware of the pressures the change of scenery has put on their daughter, but they are also mindful of the advantages for both her and them. For example, Murray High School is small enough so that any student who wants to can participate in the band, the chorus, the playhouse or any other extracurricular activity. The drama coach even writes extra parts into plays so that nobody gets left out. There are no gangs. Teachers have their numbers in the telephone book and don’t mind being called at home. The same goes for doctors. John’s insurance agent leaves his keys in his car and brags that he hasn’t had to process a claim for a stolen vehicle in 10 years. People say the only time you have to lock your car is during zucchini season, because there’s so much of it that everybody tries to pass their harvest off on somebody else.

“It’s not perfect here by a long shot,” Tom says. “But it sure beats the hell out of graffiti and crime and hour-and-a-half freeway commutes and water shortages.” Or, as they might put it in Murray, “It sure beats the heck out of graffiti and crime and. . . . .”

JAY AND LINDA WAGENER ARE OFF TO THE movies. Tickets are $3 a head. The feature is “The Doors,” Oliver Stone’s tribute to the 1960s rock group. It gets them talking afterward about the avant-garde arts scene, the creativity, the constructive restlessness of Los Angeles, qualities that somehow seem far more alluring now than when they packed up their four children and returned to Jay’s Midwestern hometown a year ago.

The next night Jay goes to a stag game dinner, upper-crust menfolk bragging about all the geese and ducks they’ve bagged over the years. He’s known many of these men since childhood. His father was friends with their fathers, and his grandfathers were friends with their grandfathers. This is what he came back home to find--a sense of belonging, a sense of community that was missing in the broadly impersonal world of Southern California. But Jay feels oddly out of place. He can’t relate to these people anymore, their values, their interests. He goes home complaining to Linda that he’s suffocating here, that maybe coming back was a mistake and they should return to Los Angeles. “Oh, jeez, we can’t move again,” she screams. “I just moved. I can’t go through this again.”

And so it has been ever since the Wagener family arrived in Lincoln, Neb., on April Fools’ Day, 1990. Week after week, Jay and Linda have had the same running argument: Should they stay? Should they return? They have a foot in both places and can’t decide which way to go.

The Wageners are both 37-year-old clinical psychologists who had a thriving practice in Pasadena and a nice home just east of the Rose Bowl. From their back yard there was a good view of the 18th green of the Brookside golf course, at least in the mornings before the smog set in. Work was a five-minute commute, the kids went to a top-notch private school two blocks from home, and they had the money and time to dash off for a weekend to Santa Barbara or spend the evening at a trendy West Side restaurant or the opera. Even by Los Angeles standards, the Wageners had it made. So why leave?

“We started to feel this sense of doom,” Jay says. “I think people feel that a lot in L.A., as crime gets worse and you have freeway shootings. You just start to think, ‘Gee, what’s it going to be like in 20 years if it’s like this now and everything seems so crazy?’ ”

To some extent, the psychologists admit, they bought into a kind of group hysteria. Not that fears of crime, traffic, smog, earthquakes and the like aren’t genuine. But there had been so much media analysis about the entropy of Los Angeles, so much cocktail chatter about decline, that the atmosphere of gloom and doom might have been worse than the reality. Virtually all their friends said they had thought about leaving. So did most of their patients, and some did leave. “I don’t know how to determine how much of it is realistic fear and how much of it is just everybody talking about it all the time,” Jay explains.

Regardless of motive, the Wageners left, too. They chose Lincoln because it was familiar, because they had family and friends there, and because they thought those connections would make it easier to build a new patient base. Their decision is not without irony. For one thing, when Jay graduated from high school in 1971 and enrolled at Stanford, he left Nebraska vowing never to return to a place he considered the dullest in the world. From Stanford, he moved to Massachusetts for graduate work. There he met and married Linda and later wangled an internship at UCLA.

The other odd thing about the move is that Jay now must endure the ultimate commute, and before he had virtually none. To keep money coming in while he and Linda build a new practice in Lincoln, he has been shuttling back to Los Angeles each week to see old patients. He catches the 7:45 United Airlines flight to Denver each Tuesday morning, transfers there to a Burbank-bound flight and, with the time-zone difference and a bit of luck, makes his 11:30 a.m. appointment in Pasadena. He sleeps at an apartment adjacent to the office, has appointments through Thursday morning, then heads back to Lincoln.

That grind has infected Jay with a chronic case of jet lag and an even worse case of geographic schizophrenia. When he’s in Pasadena, he’s bombarded with all the stimuli that made him want to leave: cars, crowds, dirty air and patients grumbling about same. Back in Lincoln, though, he’s sometimes overwhelmed by a sense that he’s regressing, that his surroundings are all too familiar, too static. “One can easily underestimate how much L.A. is in them, and how it would feel to come back to a place like this,” he confesses.

For the children--especially 12-year-old Jack, the eldest--the shift from cosmopolitan California to more staid Nebraska has had some surprising impacts. Now in the seventh grade, Jack finds school boring. He’s studying mythology in English, the same thing he studied in Pasadena two years ago. Math classes, too, are old hat. “It’s just a lot of review work,” he complains. “It’s not very challenging to do something over again.”

Actually, Jack is being exposed to a more diverse cultural environment than before. In Pasadena, he went to a private school, but in Lincoln he’s in the public system. Though Pasadena has a significant black population, Jack didn’t have any black classmates or friends. Now he has several. In Pasadena, “you had all the white kids going to these private schools where they were getting great educations, and children of color were going to the public schools where they were not getting a great education,” Linda says. “There was this class system developing that made us real uncomfortable. We didn’t like the idea of sending our kids to private school; we would have much preferred to use the public system. But we just didn’t feel like that was an option back there.”

For her part, Linda finds Lincoln a breath of fresh air, both literally and figuratively. Both she and the kids were always coughing and hacking in the Pasadena air. A native of Minneapolis, she never quite got used to the freeways and ever-present strip malls. Los Angeles seemed ugly. “There’s just a way in which you feel alienated from nature in Los Angeles that you don’t feel in the Midwest,” she says.

Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is the work. Lancaster County is home to nearly 200,000 people, the state capitol, the University of Nebraska and a major medical complex. Yet there are few female psychologists in town and fewer still, who, like Linda, work with children. She feels much more needed in Lincoln, and her practice has grown rapidly.

If there’s one thing both Wageners agree on it’s that psychotherapy is a much different business in Lincoln than in Pasadena. The Wageners found Southern California a psychotherapists’ dream. Patients are more sophisticated about the process, more stress-ridden and much more willing to spend a lot of disposable income on therapy. “A lot of people’s attitude in Los Angeles is that if you haven’t been in psychotherapy, you haven’t tried the L.A. thing, which is growth,” Jay says. “As a psychotherapist, it’s a great attitude to have, because you have people who are always challenging where they’re at and want to be something different. I feel it all the time. People are constantly pushing for more. That’s neat, in a way, and yet it also creates a lot of stress.”

Therapy is almost a status symbol in California, but in Lincoln there’s still a stigma attached to it. “The people who come to see us here need to be in psychotherapy,” Linda says. “The people who come in Los Angeles want to be there.”

THE VROMANS HAVE oodles of great things to say about the move from Irvine to West Linn, a Portland suburb, but one of the best is that it’s helped transform Brandt from highway phobic to highway friendly. The man who used to sputter and fume and hiss behind the wheel has suddenly become a pussycat.

“Up here I have to get on his case because he just sort of cruises in the slow lane,” Shanon says. “He’s just so relaxed, checking everything out. I have to say, ‘Hon, are we going the speed limit? Can we pick up the pace just a tad?’ ”

In retrospect, of course, it wasn’t the traffic that drove the Vromans north. It was values. And it was their children--Hunter, barely 2 when they moved, and the new baby, Karleigh, who at the time was on the way. Brandt and Shanon wanted their youngsters to enjoy the same quality of life that they had enjoyed when they were young and growing up in Orange County. Unfortunately, they concluded, that kind of free-spirited, socially conscious, easygoing lifestyle was getting harder and harder to realize in Southern California.

“I would love my kids to have the same kind of upbringing that I did, because I had a really great childhood,” says Shanon, who grew up in Whittier and Westminster. “I loved my schools and my friends. High school was just a wonderful experience for me. But I don’t think that would be a possibility for either one of the children or any others we may have. That was a real issue in deciding to move, not wanting to raise kids there.”

To Brandt, it’s a matter of perspective. He spent most of his boyhood in Laguna Beach. Hardly a day went by when he wasn’t out in the water, fishing or diving and having fun. It’s a legacy he realized he could never pass on. “I would love to have had my son grow up in the period that I grew up there,” Brandt sighs. “There was a lot of open space; there was less traffic. It just got to the point where what I could remember of growing up was a lot ‘greener’ than what I was living.”

Back in Orange County, Brandt was an area manager for a La Habra landscape contractor. Shanon ran her own part-time business taking care of plants in offices and homes. They’d talked about an escape plan for years, but one day last September Brandt came home from work and announced that it was time for them to actually do it. Nothing special had happened. Just another heat wave and another bad day on the freeways. Brandt had had enough and wanted out. He called a friend in the landscaping business, Shanon called a few other contacts, and within a couple of weeks he was heading to Portland to interview for a management job with another landscaper. Six weeks later, they were California history.

The 958-square-foot condo in Irvine sold for $155,000, more than enough to buy the $125,000 four-bedroom, two-bath house with attached garage in West Linn. And that comes with an acre of yard for the kids to play in and lots of trees. Brandt lives 20 miles from work, the same distance as before. But in Orange County he spent at least two hours a day commuting. In Oregon, the commute time is less than half that.

The best part comes on weekends. An hour’s drive from home puts the family at the ocean, a secluded camping spot or a great trout-fishing stream. “I can take my son out there, and there’s not going to be another 25 people at the same fishing hole,” Brandt brags.

One man’s euphoria, however, can be another’s despair. Brandt’s co-workers, those who grew up in Oregon before it was “discovered” by disenchanted Californians and the like, are grumbling about all the newcomers and the crowding. “This seems a lot nicer to me, but to the guys that work with me who are natives, they think, ‘In the last five years this place has really gone downhill.’ I guess the best thing I can do for the guys I work with is to let them know it could be worse. A lot worse.”

Perhaps the grass is always greener, Brandt says. He has a vision that someday, years from now, their son, Hunter, will go down to Southern California to visit relatives and come back complaining about how dull and boring Oregon is. “He’s going to end up wanting to go down there, because that’s where it’s all going on,” Brandt predicts. “That’s been the pendulum since the beginning of time. My dad grew up on a farm and moved to the city. I think the reason he moved to the city was that he was tired of the farm. The city looked better to him. And I grew up in the city, and I’m tired of the city now.”

Not long ago, Shanon had a vision, too. It was a real vision, or at least a television version of a real vision. She had the TV tuned to a Portland station when a commercial caught her eye. It was a California tourism ad. There were pictures of pretty mountains, clear skies and wide, empty beaches with blue water and big surf. There was a big amusement park with short lines and a big, happy mouse greeting all these smiling folks.

That looks like a great place to vacation, she thought. Someday, she said to herself, we’ll have to visit. And then we can come home.