I was able to get my site working, after a painfully long day. With so many great laravel tutuorials on the web, and such great documentation everywhere, it's disappointing that the "final" step (deployment) to building a laravel site is lacking.

In the end, it was a few simple permissions that were preventing my site from working. I'm not sure if this is normal, but my permissions had to be:

777 for the entire storage directory

775 for the rest of the site

Once I recursively changed perms (chmod -R 775 /var/www/project; chmod -R 777 /var/www/project/storage), then I was getting easier errors I could troubleshoot.