The garage door tilts open and Tricia Himber emerges from her tidy tract house, steaming Starbucks coffee mug in hand. She puts down her hefty red shoulder bag and sighs, bracing for her marathon commute to Silicon Valley. In Modesto, Brian Scott already has begun his 80-mile journey along a ribbon of solitude that stretches to Santa Clara. Another silent soldier from Modesto, Michael Campbell, will take to the pavement a bit later. As he negotiates crowded freeways, frontage roads and country lanes, he'll resist thinking about his life slipping away with each mile.
Silicon Valley has the well-paying jobs.
The Central Valley has the affordable homes, thousands of them, in sparkling neighborhoods with cocktail-sounding names like Pacific Sunrise, Belle Terra, Coral Ridge and the Mirage. Here, the houses are big, the yards immense and the mortgages low. And even with only one spouse working, there's money left over for gardeners, swimming pools and hot tubs. Real estate agents say hordes are moving out to far-flung regions, a phenomenon they hadn't seen since the last exodus to the Central Valley in the late 1980s. The migrants are tech workers and secretaries, midlevel managers, teachers and construction workers.