Commuting Sentences

They told me about the larger staff, and the larger budget, and the very competitive environment, and, of course, the raise.

They did not tell me about the commute.

The Hiserman family recently left Ventura County and moved to Mission Viejo because I was promoted to sports editor of The Times’ Orange County edition. I took the new position in May; the rest of the clan joined me last week.

In between was five months of commuter hell.

A few words most husbands have never thought about, let alone said: Thank goodness for my mother-in-law. Really.

She lives in Buena Park, and for a time her extra bedroom was my sanity-saving crash pad. Because of her generosity, I usually commuted only three times a week instead of five during the first four months--before the company sprang for a month’s stay in corporate housing.

I’d get to her place between 9 and 10 at night and she’d sit with me--sometimes watching baseball, sometimes the news--while I wolfed down my Jack’s Spicy Chicken, a side salad and a slice of double-fudge cake. Then she’d go to bed and I’d watch Leno before retiring myself.

For 15 years, we lived in the tranquil, sleepy and safe city of Moorpark. And all that time I never gave my 22-mile, half-hour drive to work a second thought.

Traffic on California 118 flowed between Moorpark and The Times’ San Fernando Valley edition office in Chatsworth. Never knew road rage. Never listened to AM radio. Do now. Depending on the route, it’s 80-something miles between Moorpark and the office in Costa Mesa.

I made it once in an hour and 18 minutes. Then again, I once made it in something more than 2 1/2 hours.

Sometimes those radio traffic reports help. There are times when the best you can do is wait, something I should have known from experience. You see, I went through this once before.

Back in the fall of 1984, my family left Orange County to move to Moorpark when I got my first job as a sportswriter a little more than two years after joining the paper.

That promotion, too, required a transition period of commuting to the San Fernando Valley and back. And that was worse, because it was during the fall and winter when it rains and most everyone on the freeway forgets how to drive.

Boss, this job will be just fine for a while.

MORNING

Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Distance: 88 miles

*

EVENING

Time: About 1 hour, 30 minutes

Distance: 83 miles

Cost: $12.35 in gas