The choice I made in 1983, as a young woman of 18 years; to get on a Red Trailways bus the day after Christmas and move to San Francisco from Orem Utah, was a decision I made that had the biggest impact on my life—up to that point.

Here, I would like to say that having children is the 2nd decision I made in my lifetime that created a paradigm shift so severe, I could not even begin to imagine it beforehand. As they say so sweetly on those commercials that make you cry: “a baby changes everything”—“except it’s own diaper”—They edit that line out in the TV ad.

The decision to move to San Francisco was an upshot of my secret struggle and lack of faith in the Mormon religion, which had been part of every aspect of my life to that point and would be if I did not leave.

Boarding that bus in the winter of 1983, I was full of hopes, dreams, curiosity, a complete lack of comprehension of my own mortality, pride and innocence.

It was a fellow passenger as we started across the Salt Flats that gave me my first glimpse of what lie ahead. He was newly homeless and told me he had no bank account. We were just pulling into Wendover when he informed me he had just been released from prison for burning his nephew to death, which begged the question: Was it manslaughter? Shouldn’t burning a child to death put someone away for life? Ah, but that is our over-burdened legal system at work and not to be discussed in this essay.


In hindsight I realize it was a combination of things, but mostly my pride that kept me from high-tailing it back to my single bed at my parents home. My pride (or was it ignorance?) that kept me from getting on a bus in Wendover heading back the other direction; back to homemade chocolate chip cookies, to the mountains, back to my beloved desert, familiar friends, Stake dances, back to attending BYU (the “Harvard of the West” they told me), back to my job the Provo Theatre, church on Sundays, Monday night family night, back to a fore-ordained Temple marriage, then about 6 kids and a Doctor husband who might become a Bishop (or even a Stake President) but would dump me for his secretary even though had I worked to pay his way through medical school.

I vividly remember the first night in San Francisco praying for forgiveness and promising God I would go home in the morning, as I lay scared to death in my sleeping bag on the floor of a cheap hotel at the entrance to The Chinatown tunnel. My first experience with cockroaches was that night as they skittered on the floor around and over me.

There were homeless people in the doorway to the hotel-also a first for me if you don’t count my seatmate on the bus ride out.

At any rate, be it pride or curiosity, I woke the next day to the excited vibrancy and movement of the City. People hustled around like…cockroaches and I was among them, a survivor of the first night. In the bone-chilling, cold, foggy, light of morning the whole idea became palatable again, even doable.

I had no idea at the time how steep the learning curve of that part of my life would be. Now, as I look back on the experiences I had, I realize I am lucky to have survived and I am grateful for that pride or innocence-whatever it was that gave me the impetus to stay. This was the beginning of my great adventure--I wouldn’t want to re-live it but I wouldn’t change a thing.