Have a nice day…

My day got off to a lousy start by backing into another car after dropping the kids at their bus stop so I thought I would spread the wealth and ensure you readers an equally sorry break out of the gate this morning. Enjoy!

An Engineer in the Making:

I could use something like this given our soggy weather today.

As the son of a mechanical engineer this sort of thing is all too familiar. Seems like an adult sized hat would solve the problem nicely but that’s just me I guess over simplifying things.

Soap Lake, The Oracle, and The Worlds Biggest Lava Lamp

I,ve got nothing today so here’s another one from the past.

Just as ancient Greece had what it considered to be the center of the universe in Delphi, home of the Oracle, the state of Washington has a cosmic center in the town of Soap Lake. Located on the high desert exactly in the geographic center of the state, Soap Lake also had an oracle like figure in one Sam Israel. Born in the early 20th century in Rhodes, Greece (coincidence?), he immigrated to Seattle shortly thereafter, establishing himself as a modestly successful shoe maker before making his fortune buying dilapidated downtown real estate during the Great Depression.

Seattle has one of the most finely preserved collections of late 19th century buildings of any large urban core in the country. Pioneer Square in the heart of the city is nearly perfectly preserved just as it was constructed after the Great Fire of 1889. This was not due to any altruistic do-gooding on the part of the city, who tried for years to condemn these buildings, but was attributed entirely to the sheer stubbornness of Mr. Sam, who owned many of these buildings, and his refusal to let the powers that be bully him into doing other than what he pleased with them.

As a landlord of these at the time unloved buildings, his overhead was low due to the poor maintenance and upkeep he practiced on them and he cheerfully passed this on in generous lease terms to his tenants who rightly held him in high regard. Many a successful restaurant, gallery, or watering hole were established in these beautiful old downtown buildings due to these low rents. To the city official or bureaucrat however who attempted to coerce him into improvements, he was decidedly less generous in word and deed. In an era when property rights had a little more bite than they do today, his pat answer to threats of eminent domain or condemning his buildings was “Fuck you, I’ll see you in court”. And in court he mostly was in the 60’s and 70’s, fighting the do-gooders and their urban renewal until public perception, and finally the politicians, came around to the position that maybe these old buildings might be worth saving. When he wasn’t fighting the pinheads he could usually be found at his compound in Soap Lake, which leads to the cosmic angle of this story.

Now, I’m not much of a woo-woo guy by nature. I think that pyramids are great for burying mummies in but probably won’t keep your razor blades sharp. If someone tells me that they are employed as a “lifestyle coach”, I will regard them as I do someone with a diminished mental capacity. There was a definite vibe however upon entering Soap Lake for the first time like only a few other towns I’ve been in. If you’ve ever been to Bizbee Arizona, or maybe Key West before it became a “Hemingway slept here” kind of town, you’ll know what I am talking about. 

In the summer of 1992 a friend of a friend who had emigrated from Chicago to Soap Lake with his entire clan had invited us to the Greek Days festival there. After fueling ourselves with Margaritas at a Belltown bar in the days when drinking and driving was still marginally tolerated as acceptable behavior, we headed east. Arriving at the city limits around 11:00 pm, it occurred to us as we looked down the length of Main Street that we hadn’t given our friend fair warning that we were taking him up on his invitation and had no idea of where we might find him. Just then at the far end of town we saw a single headlight come around a corner and head toward us. As the light approached us we could see that our friend, somehow anticipating our arrival, was piloting a Vespa scooter equipped with a sidecar and was riding heeled over on two wheels so that the side car was suspended in the air. Wearing an old bucket helmet and goggles and sporting a leather jacket with a “Real Men Ride Hodakas” patch on the back, he dropped the sidecar while coming to a stop and said “follow me” in an unpracticed deadpan. We did.

Our first stop was the Notaras Lodge where we were sworn in as members of the Soap Lake Businessman’s Club. There was no initiation or anything, just a fee of seven dollars and the personal vouching of our local friend as to our good character and high moral fiber. After receiving our membership cards, we descended a set of stairs out back of the lodge where our friend knocked on a large imposing basement door with a small hatch located in the center. The hatch opened, cards were checked and we were in! The place was constructed entirely of huge Douglas Fir logs and was packed to the rafters with “local color”. We grabbed a stump at the bar, an enormous old growth fir of about forty feet sawed in half lengthwise and started tossing them back. Our friend grabbed a beer and serving as the evenings emcee,  jumped on stage to introduce the entertainment. ”Bonnie Guitar” he said simply before hopping back to the floor, and she and her band immediately launched into a rollicking Texas Two Step. She couldn’t have been younger than eighty and rumor has it used to play with Hank Williams Sr. back in the day. About half way through her first set, our friend leapt back on stage and launched into a fine harmonica solo, which the headliner apparently took as an unwelcomed breech in etiquette, as Ms. Guitar took a run at him and knocked him off the stage and into the first row of tables to the cheers of all in attendance. Untangling himself from a chair and now convinced that Bonnie was a solo act, our patron steered us to a table in back and introduced us to a few of the locals. First up was Bobcat. An old broken down ex rodeo clown armed with a pearl handled six shooter whose holster he constantly fondled, he couldn’t see two feet in front of his face and for some reason called everybody Wayney as in “Is that you Wayney? I can’t see you!”. There was the owner of the florist shop who according to our friend was the only gay guy in town. He kept squeezing my drinking buddy’s biceps and sensually expressing his feelings that he must have done some wheat farming with arms like that. Also sharing our table was a guy who had scandalized the town and couldn’t show his face anywhere other than after dark in the club as he had cheated on and then left his beautiful young wife for her mother, who had a face resembling a well worn leather Harley bag with eyes and a mouth that spewed obcenities like a veteran longshoreman. They say that love is blind but after seeing both mother and daughter I can say with certainty that in this case it was deaf and dumb as well. We were all getting pretty soused when the locals started speaking in earnest tones of how their dream of building “The Worlds Biggest Lava Lamp” would be just the ticket to put the town back on the tourist map after the interstate had bypassed them years before. Us city boys had a good laugh at that one but the stern looks from all at the table told us that maybe a more stoic approach might serve us well as long as we were in town. At some point the motherfucker’s ex-wife/daughter in law/whatever, tracked him to the club and got in a chair throwing dust up with him while Bobcat, shouting “Is that you Wayney?” put a couple of .38 slugs point blank into a poster of John Wayne lacquered to the lodge wall. We scrambled for the exits but I don’t remember much after that. I hope nothing weird happened.

We woke the next morning under the tables at a Greek restaurant owned by our friends aunt, who was the spitting image of a 1960’s Elvis Presley, where we had ended the evening about three hours earlier with shots of Ouzo and further discussion of how the “Worlds Biggest Lava Lamp” was sure to revive the fortunes of Soap Lake. After a good stiff Bloody Caesar or two to ease our well deserved hangovers, we proceeded to walk in small quiet steps to Main Street where the Greek Days parade was just kicking off. It was the usual affair with high school bands from around the area and local dignitaries riding in new convertibles provided by the Ford dealer in Ephrata. At the head of the line riding in a big ‘68 Cadillac convertible, in his position as Grand Marshall as he had been for as long as anyone could remember was Mr. Sam and Miss Grant County. Our friend, having just enough of a buzz from his Caesar’s shouted out upon seeing the Grand Marshall slumped in the back seat of the Cadillac, “To what do you owe your success Mr. Sam?”.  Sam smiled and right there in front of moms, the kids, and Miss Grant County said “Fuck You! I’ll see you in court!”
Wise words from the Oracle of Soap Lake.

Mr. Sam died shortly thereafter and was buried on the lake shore on the grounds of his compound. Most of his old downtown buildings reverted to corporate hands and have since been fixed up and utilized to their “highest and best use”. A few years later I heard the lodge and businessman’s club had burned down and that ”The Worlds Biggest Lava Lamp” remains unbuilt and a still distant dream to the folks of Soap Lake.

 A couple of years ago I found myself in Ephrata attending a baseball camp for my two boys and thought I would take a quick detour and see how the town of Soap Lake was faring. I drove up Main Street past the Del-Red Tavern and what was left of the lodge, past the Greek restaurant and the businessman’s club, and reflected on how quiet the town seemed in contrast to my memory of it. I got the feeling that the vibe that I had experienced, that feeling of being in a cosmic hot spot on first entering Soap Lake those years ago had long since gone, maybe diverted to some other town, in some other place. As I turned and slowly drove back down Main Street, reminiscing on adventures of long ago, I got to thinking that perhaps the vibe I had felt on that summer evening was not due to the towns location but rather a reflection of the people who called the town home. That maybe the exhilaration and feeling of anything being possible that weekend was due in no small part to the unreasoned optimism of the folks living out here off of the Interstate rather than the percieved cosmic geographic location of a town that appeared to me now as it probably had been all along.  A small rural town off the beaten path, it had seen its ups and downs and was insignificant except for those who called it home. Hoping again for renewal, this time in the form of “The World’s Biggest Lava Lamp”.

“You Fucked Up…You Trusted Us!”

The health care debate in one act staring ”Flounder” in the role of  hapless moderate voter. With Joe “Bluto” Biden performing his well known zany comic relief and Rahm “D-Day” Emmanuel typecast once again as the guy with the connections you don’t want to know about. Got a problem that needs disappearing? He’s your man.  And of course smooth talking Barack “Otter” Obama reassuring Flounder that all will be well if only he keeps the lie alive. “Hey, It’s gotta work better than the truth”.

From the Wall Street Journal, the worst bill evah!

“Respondez s’il vous plait”

 

RSVP

A friend of ours threw a Halloween bash Saturday night and she really went all out. Smoke machines, scary decorations galore, two days worth of cooking and preparing that even included a pair of coffins that she constructed by hand from old pallet boards. Martha Stewart would have retired from public life in shame had she seen the lengths gone to in turning this home into a Day of the Dead set piece. She sent out around eighty invitations and sixty responded with a positive rsvp. That is to say, they indicated by phone, email, or in writing, that they would in fact be attending.

Ten people showed up. 

Perhaps people have somehow lost the nuance of just what an rsvp is and why it might be important to the host in planning such an event. Not only did the party wrap up early, I mean who really wants to hang around at a party staring at four couples that you don’t know dressed in rented vampire costumes, but our friend was left holding about a thousand bucks worth of leftover food and booze even after she loaded up the ten of us who showed with bags and bottles to take home.

Or maybe people are just assholes.

If I had thrown a party and been subject to this lack of the most common of courtesies, I like to think I would have tracked down each and every one of those lazy, thoughtless dip shits and presented them with a time honored Halloween tradition from my youth. The Flaming Bag ’o’ Dog Shit. Rather than lighting it on their door step, ringing the bell, and running off behind a shrub to witness the stomping out of the fire and the resulting hilarity of the homeowner tracking feces onto their white carpet however, I would pound on the door with both fists until they opened up and then hurled the shit, sans bag or fire, onto the first interior wall that presented itself, expressing loudly for all the neighbors to hear my sincere thanks in doing their small part in helping to make an event weeks in the planning an EPIC FAIL!

What the hell is wrong with people!?

Transcendence:

I’d give your left testicle to do anything this well.

From the always faithful Dr. Bob.

The Demon Rum:

 

From before: “Now edited for additional flavor!”

“Work is the curse of the drinking yachtsman” read the small plastic plaque on the lower helm station. As a young man with a taste for distilled spirits and a less than stellar work ethic, I immediately fell in love with the old girl. By “old girl” I mean a 34′ Stan-Craft Express Cruiser that I stumbled upon for sale at the old Newport Yacht Basin east of Seattle. Built in 1955 on Montana’s Flathead Lake, she was ten meters of solid African mahogany with the shape and style that watercraft of a more contemporary nature sorely lack. Her best years were clearly behind her as evidenced by the peeling topside varnish and the frequency with which the automatic bilge pump activated but love is not to be reasoned with and I bought her on the spot.

Going below to get acquainted with my new mistress I spied a small toggle switch in the galley labeled Cocktails. Never one to hesitate at the bar I pushed the toggle and to my surprise a circular aluminum disk in the center of the galley counter started to slowly rise exposing a rack containing various glasses and a 3/4 full bottle of “Old Vatted Demerara Rum”. Wiping the dust from one of the glasses with the tail of my shirt I poured three fingers and sat down to reflect on my good fortune. After four or five reflections in the span of thirty minutes or so I re-racked the now considerably drier bottle and decided that it was high time to get the old girl out on the water and determine if her beauty was merely skin deep.

If you’ve ever heard the sound of the old inboard motors in these vintage wooden boats you’ll know what I mean when I say heads all over the marina snapped ’round when the twin Chrysler Hemi V-8’s caught a spark and roared to life. Idling out and clearing the end of the marina, there was a small voice on one shoulder telling me to start slow and take it easy as the old power plants probably hadn’t been run hard in who knows how long. On the other shoulder however was the slightly more insistent voice of “Old Vatted Demerara Rum” saying “Pour the coals to her!” Throwing caution to the wind, I pushed the throttles forward as far as they would go and the old wooden boat surged out of the water and was at top speed as I passed the last dock in the marina and burst into the open water of Lake Washington.

When something of a mechanical nature goes sideways on a boat running at speed, you feel it more than hear or see it at first. Imagine it as a person suffering the early symptoms of a stroke or heart attack. There is some minor numbness or maybe weakness, often followed by a denial of anything being wrong until it is too late. With the big mahogany hull on step and the twin engines thrumming perfectly in sync, the first sign of trouble was a nearly imperceptible slowing of hull speed without a reciprocal slowing in engine RPM’s. Probably just my imagination. Just a little paranoia. Nothing to make a fuss about said the voice of “Old Vatted Demerara Rum”. Right about then the port engine hatch blew off, followed by billowing clouds of smoke and steam exiting the engine compartment.

The first thought an un-inebriated person has when there is any kind of explosion on a boat is wondering in what proximity it is to the eighty gallon cylinder of gasoline below decks and wondering whether you have minutes or seconds before this question answers itself. The first thought that I and “Old Vatted Demerara Rum” had, was that if my new found love was going to jilt me by burning and sinking to the bottom of the lake, I was sure as hell going to pry something loose to remember her by before I jumped and swam for shore. Seeing as the plaque stating “Work is the Curse of the Drinking Yachtsman” was the initial spark that set in motion this passionate affair that was looking more and more destined to be a one night stand, it seemed just the ticket. Setting to work with a small key chain pocket knife, I earnestly went about the job of separating the plaque from the ancient glue fastening it to the helm. I just about had it loose when to my disgust it snapped in two and fell to the galley floor. After reflecting on my disappointment for a moment, the thought occurred to me that the breaking of the helm talisman might be a bad omen. It was about then I noticed that the port engine was no longer belching smoke. The fire had luckily been quenched by the quickly rising water in the engine compartment.

Lake Washington is a very deep lake but not particularly wide at any point. The shore is tightly packed with waterfront estates easily visible from nearly anywhere on the lake. I determined that the only hope for saving my beloved was in restarting the starboard engine and getting her as close to shore as possible before the rising water drowned this remaining operating motor and sealed our doom. It also didn’t escape my fogged senses that as the authorities tended to frown on drunks running their boats up on the lawns of these waterfront estates, I would, out of necessity mind you, have to polish off the remaining rum and dispose of the incriminating bottle. These two tasks I accomplished in short order. Most of these lakefront homes have stone bulkheads or large docks running the width of the lots making them unsuitable for a high speed beaching. Cruising perpendicular to the shore and after passing eight or ten such places I finally spotted a beautifully sloped lawn that extended right down to the waters edge. I brought her hard about, pushed the throttle forward and aimed the bow directly for the center of the lawn.

As luck, or fate would have it, the beautiful rolling lawn was only so due to the fact that the boulders and rocks that previously occupied the lot had been bulldozed into the lake and right into the path of my future beaching attempt. With a great grinding and snapping of planks and ribs, she came to rest where I had planned, though not quite as I had planned, at the point where the lawn and water met. Of course such a commotion immediately caught the attention of the home owner who rushed to the waters edge just in time to witness me leap from the bow, drop to my knees, and vomit all over his freshly manicured lawn. Not my proudest moment as a mariner but certainly one of the more memorable.

It so happened that the Earl of the estate was a fellow wooden boat owner and for reasons I have yet to fathom took pity on my predicament and neglected to alert the authorities of what could have been interpreted by less imaginative souls as a pre-meditated menacing of the public safety. Upon recounting my story of the previous hour it turns out he was an aficionado of fine Rum himself and over the course of the two weeks it took to remove my boat from his lawn, we became friends. Over time he became somewhat of a mentor to me in the intricacies and hard rules that must be followed by those who take on the stewardship of old wooden boats or indulge in the occasional heavy drinking of liquor.
“Slowly” he would say, “Slowly, methodically, and you will accomplish your goal”. “With your eyes always focused on the horizon rather than the passing squalls of the mundane and irrelevant.

It seemed like silly advice but his stern tones let me know he was serious and that perhaps I should consider that his words had some validity. As I grow older, taking on the responsibilities of being a husband and father, I have given up the “Demon Rum” (mostly) and no longer can afford the time and expense of owning a wooden boat yet his words seem to apply equally in other areas of life as well.

“Slowly, methodically, and you will accomplish your goal”. With your eyes focused always on the horizon”.

Life will throw unexpected obstacles in your path. Try to see the big picture when faced with these obstacles for in hindsight they are the forgotten details. 

So far, so good.

“So come on down and go fuck yerself”

We were having a discussion the other day over at Andy’s place on the proliferation of bullshit in our culture and how no one seems to say what they mean anymore.

This guy apparently didn’t get the memo.

Thanks to Maggie’s Farm for the video.

IOWAHAWK ENDORSES HOFFMAN AFTER WILD WEEKEND AT HEFF’S!!

I’m not going to guess what went down in the grotto between famous blogger Dave Burge and the owner of a ‘55 Chevy 210 2 door sedan who shall remain nameless in the first half of this sentence, but if Conservative Party candidate Douglas Hoffman is good enough to get the holiest of  holy grails in political endorsements, he is the man I will certainly be voting for in the upcoming NY23 Congressional election. While I live in Washington state and have actually never been in New York’s 23rd district, I’m thinking that maybe Acorn can help me with my Obama given right to cast my ballot in the Empire state and perhaps at the same time help me with some of the more sensitive logistics in sticking it to the “man” and setting up that dog fighting ring that I have long dreamed of and that it turns out (who knew!) is one of my fundamental rights as a soon to be fraudulent voter.

Once you are safely ensconced in your Royal Congressional Seatee, you and Dave are cordially invited to the grand opening of our “canine entertainment enterprise”. I picked up a Staffordshire/Boxer mix on the cheap from  a certain professional athlete and role model to our youth, who was foolish enough not to employ a well regarded community organizing…organization… for his “gaming” start up, and boy can that bitch fight! Uh….I mean…entertain.

Call me.

BR-549 or email at ww.k9gamingadventures/acorn.dog

“Hey boys, We’re from Seattle and we’re lost…Can you help us out?”

 

 

There is a common perception among people that the western half of Washington State is entirely composed of civilized city types while the eastern half of our state, consisting mostly of sparsely populated farm and ranch land, is home to their cultural opposites. The conventional wisdom holds that the areas surrounding the urban core of Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett are uniformly urban or boringly suburban and that our more “independent” personalities reside for the most part in the burghs and hamlets east of the Cascade Mountain Range which divides our state neatly between red and blue. While there are exceptions here and there, for the most part this observation holds true in my experience.  

One exception to this conventional wisdom is a geographically substantial portion of the state that lays between the western shores of Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean. Consisting mostly of the vast wilderness that is Olympic National Park, the folks who inhabit this part of the state have acquired the nickname of  mossbacks due to the area’s prodigious amounts of rainfall. If you have ever travelled the back roads of Appalachia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and thought to yourself that the people who inhabit the wilds of West Virginia were the poorest and most proudly destitute people in the country, you would be mistaken.  

For those unfamiliar with our state, Jefferson and Clallam Counties are a land of stunning natural beauty. The Dosewalips River Valley. Dabob Bay. The Duckabush River. The Hoh rain forest. The rugged Pacific coast as it was millenia ago. You would be hard pressed to find such primordial wilderness anywhere in the world. That it is in such close proximity and easily reached from our major cities and their throngs of hikers and mountain bikers, a culture clash unlike any I have witnessed occurs between a people among the most stereotypically coastal urban progressive in the country and the denizens of such waterlogged towns as Quilcene, Chimicum, Liliwaup, Humptulips, who regard anyone not sporting red suspenders and hob nail boots, or lacking a severely underslung chin and prominent brow ridge as suspicious at best and meriting outright hostility if they perceive you as a threat to their long held cultural norms. These  cultural offenses can range from the minor, such as the wearing of a North Face pullover, to highly provocative acts such as piloting a Subaru Outback sporting a Thule rack through their territory. 

If you’ve ever seen the History Channel series Ax Men, filmed in and around these counties, understand that the foul mouthed, hot tempered, illiterate rednecks featured on this show are the creme de la creme of mossback society. Supported mostly by what is left of the logging industry in these parts, they live largely in dilapidated singlewides surrounded by clearcut woodlands and collections of the rusted remains of every car, truck, motor, transmission, and assorted piece of machinery or scrap metal that have been handed down through generations from father to son. To a city boy like I was at the time, they were suspect in every way. Which leads me to the proverbial hole in the donut of this tale.

A few years back while still a member in good standing of polite progressive society, my then future wife, myself, and a very gay (nttawwt) hair dresser friend of hers, growing bored one Saturday morning with the thousands of choices available to us in the city as only a city dweller can, piled into future wife’s car and in a couple of hours found ourselves travelling in this part of the state. Just passing through. Killing some time. Seeing the sights.  Now when I say ”car”, I mean that we were driving a 1960 Rambler American. Not exactly state of the art automotive engineering when new, this vehicle had lost most of its starch around the time of the Johnson administration and now served more as an ironic fashion statement than form of reliable transportation. When we saw the small dirt road that temptingly offered the prospect of leaving the banality of the highway in the rear view mirror, and not being experienced in the challenges involved in navigating roads marked on forest service maps as “un-maintained”, we probably should have hesitated on leaving the pavement behind while piloting such a “classic” and called it a day.  Future wife however, prone to making rash decisions in search of adventure, insisted we forge ahead. Her friend, a pragmatic and rather cautious type strongly suggested we not, as we were in unfamiliar territory with darkness a couple of hours away. After bickering for a few minutes and getting nowhere, they turned to me and requested my services as a tie breaker.

Our fashion statement already having over heated a couple of times on the drive, my instincts for survival were telling me in no uncertain terms that heading back to town was probably the wise course of action. Cool reason and logic were not however to be employed in this particular instance. One look from future wife and our course was settled. You guys know the one. The “Well?…. I came over here to have fun, so if you have any interest in getting laid you’ll see to it that I get some.” look. As she was young and beautiful and I was neither of these, I made the only decision any man in my position could make and over loud protests from our cautious friend in the back seat, I cranked the wheel, hit the gas, and in a spray of gravel our fate for this weekend was sealed. 

I’ll skip the part about hitting a large rock miles away from the end of the pavement and snapping off the driveline of the fashion statement. Watching with a strange detachment in the rear view mirror as it rolled behind us down the steep narrow logging road, it picked up considerable speed before it hit another rock, turned 45 degrees, and then launched itself over the side and into the abyss. I’ll also skip the tirade that our now vindicated friend launched in the direction of the two of us regarding the situation we now found ourselves in. As he let us both have it, I was tempted to now express my earlier unspoken doubts about our vote to take the road less traveled and belatedly join his side in asking future wife just what the hell she was thinking, as the prospects for my rationale in casting the tie breaking vote in her favor were now starting to look rather slim. I held my tongue however, less I am now ashamed to admit out of principal, but in the hope that should we ever get off of this mountain my loyalty would, while perhaps not today, in time be duly rewarded. By the time he had concluded informing us of what a couple of fuckwits we were, it was quite dark and getting fairly cold. About this time we noticed a single dim headlight approaching from above us on the switchbacked road.

While the photo above does not exactly capture the look and demeanor of the pair of brothers that we now found ourselves face to face with, who had just exited an old pickup truck that looked like it had been through an auto crusher and then partly unfolded and returned to the road, it is close enough so that you get the general idea that they were not the type of fellows that we were accustomed to encountering in our work-a-day lives two hours to the east. As they approached, one of the brothers, looking I assumed at our trendily dressed cautious friend stated matter of factly “You look like a queer.”  Sensing his alarm at their initial observation, I immediately jumped to our friends defense and in my best progressivese attempted to explain that I found it offensive that they make such a snap judgement based on someone’s appearance alone and that while he was indeed gay, where we were from it was a common thing and not something to be afraid of.  At this point both brothers quickly moved very close, focused their gaze directly on me and said “We’re not afraid of nuthin’ and we’re not talkin’ to him, we’re talkin’ to you.” As they looked me up and down, taking in my black North Face fleece vest over a moss green long sleeve poly T,  baggy cargo shorts over blue poly long undies and my very expensive gore-tex lined cross training/ mountain biking/ hiking/ multi use/condescending/ I’m better than you all purpose boots, I came to the realization that the snap judgement they were making was to be at my expense and at this time, in this place, in this git-up, I was the queer. I readied myself for a fight to the death or a re-inactment of Ned Beatty’s performance in Deliverance. I was very much hoping for the former. Future wife, playing the strategic long game, remained slumped down and silent in the passenger seat of the Rambler.

As luck would have it our cautious friend was, as I have mentioned, a very trendy dresser.  In the Seattle gay community at this point in time that meant flannel shirt, Levi’s, Carhart jacket, and heavy leather logging boots.  Understanding the peril I was now in due to my lack of good judgement regarding acceptable dress in mossback territory, and apparently forgiving me my vote in favor of getting laid at the expense of his safety, he immediately jumped to my defense, stepping between us and saying “We’re from Seattle, our car’s broken down, and we’re lost…Can you help us out?” “Well…sure” said the bigger of the pair, turning his back on me completely now, regarding our more appropriately dressed cautious friend as obviously the man in charge of this outfit.  The three of them then arranged to tow our rig back down the mountain with the unfolded pickup truck.  Once off the mountain with the Rambler safe and sound in a makeshift lean-to on the property, they invited us to their doublewide for many shots of bourbon late into the night where future wife, having earlier abandoned her strategy of slumping her way to invisibility was a big hit, due in no small part to the two brother’s enthusiastic approval of her choice in rundown vehicles. Our cautious friend turned out to be the life of the party after a few shots. They had never been exposed to someone as thoroughly gay and drunk as he and they laughed hysterically at everything he said. He took it all in good humor as did the brothers. 

After much good story telling and many laughs, they put us up in a vacant singlewide surrounded by clear cut woodlands and collections of the rusted remains of every car, truck, motor, transmission, and assorted piece of machinery or scrap metal that had been handed down through generations from father to son.  It turns out they had a driveline for a 1960 Rambler American in one of their piles of inherited junk and spent most of Sunday installing it, no charge, and then sent us on our way. I like to think that over the course of the evening and the next day I had won them over as well, but I think that they still were suspicious of my motives by the time we expressed our thanks and headed back to town. Our cautious friend was safely on his way back to the city, future wife had the fun and adventure she was seeking, and I learned an important lesson.

The notion of  “the other” being judged as a group rather than as an individual is a very strong component of human nature and cuts in all directions. The two brothers and I had our minds made up about the other before we so much as spoke. Our cautious friend, while perhaps thinking to himself that he knew who these two were, spoke to them as individuals and found that they indeed were. If we would all leave our group think comfort zones from time to time, to simply speak our minds and then listen to those with whom we might be suspicious of politically, religiously, culturally, we might discover that we, and they, may not have all the answers, and that maybe we are not as infallible as we all think we are.