On the Pacific Northwest and other places I have not yet gone
Snowstorm driving, insulation cutting, custard eating, and memory excavating through landscapes foreign and familiar
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A swirling white and black portal worms on the wall behind my little brother, a disco ball kaleidoscoping the wallpaper from trippy into full-on disassociation, and I am for the eleven-thousandth time in as many weeks wondering what Offset once asked: How did I get here? When did my little brother became a 20-year-old Atlas, Iggy Pop moving through his body parallel to wherever he houses the spirit of Leonard Cohen? Didn’t I just wake up in a small house in County Cork with my independent, enrapturing wife and our stupid, wonderful cat?
It’s like I stepped off the plane in New York this February and that first foot fall tripped a portkey, flying through time and space at warp speed. It’s been beautiful. Almost every second of it. But I swear there are moments when it’s like I wasn’t gone six months, but years. Like I’m seeing the tippy top of the Statue of Liberty cresting the sand and realizing I’m not only on Earth, that it’s changed and, now I have, too.
Missives from liminal spaces encountered in the last 10 days. Because of Winn Dixie shit, teased out and, like Heaney, blown open.
In Sunriver, the first road trip stop for dad and I this time. We sail past Redmond and the house where two friends totalled their marriage. We go further south on Highway 97, past the Bend apartment where things seemed rosier for them. We get to a timeshare Pops bought with his ex-wife; the last time I stayed here I was 23 years old and I gave my now ex-girlfriend a stethoscope for her birthday. She thought it was hilarious, to listen to my heartbeat. I don’t remember the bit. She sailed on toward the Bay Area. I’ll never know if she already knew she would leave me or not. My friends joined me in Sunriver and we agreed it didn’t matter if she would or wouldn’t. We snorted drugs, played Settlers of Catan, and snowboarded, Mount Bachelor renamed “the Slar” and tobacco funneling out of our ears.
In Ocean Park, and not the same the Migos oft-spat about, Pops and I drive to meet his brother and a man who may as well be his brother at Washington’s oldest hotel. We bicker and fight; I think or hope we both feel this sweetness is worth the cavities. We brave a snowstorm through the Cascades while Josh Brolin cants his new memoir by audiobook; His voice embering charcoal. I have not driven this pass since a bachelor party in Astoria for one of those now-separated friends. It was only three years ago. It took as much time as waiting for a light to turn green for weddings to turn into divorces, children sprouting up like yellows. There, we listen to Otis Redding and Waxahachee as I move my arm in the same semi-circle for some nine hours, pilloring pink insulation into 12-inch sheets. I am reminded I was never good at these measurements, just like when I worked sheetrock and concrete jobs in high school. I am reminded that in my 60s, like these three men, I, too, will have collected lint and laugh lines and debts and I’ll have moved mountains to see my brothers for just a day or so, oysters writhing on red fire, cleaving toward whatever outlives bickering, fighting, sweetness.
In Portland, I sleep alone. Through the years I’d hit Portland to get weird then leave my body someplace warm. It’s no good to leave the function alone on those ventures. It is a gray and green place. Pops and I stay at the same quirky hotel where an ex-girlfriend and I crossed our fingers hoping the two friends we took that trip with would end up together. When the two of them snuck off, my partner and I took the chance to screw wildly on the murphy. It is no surprise that those are the friends who ended up divorced, is it? It is no surprise my girlfriend and I did not last, right? I already wrote about my wife and my cat, my stopping in life like Dr. Manhattan to wonder how I came to this observational position. I notice how dad laughs telling me stories of abuela yelling “Honey, I’m an attorney!” at meek department store employees who invoked her ire and how, when he finishes casting that spell, the memories of her saying those same words unlock in my mind, that treasure chest unhinging its Zelda melody. He orders Mexican chocolate custard and I get peanut butter jelly when we head to wrap an article I’m writing. He reminds me of Leon’s Frozen Custard in Milwaukee, the first place I ever ate custard. Lita lived in Miltown. I notice how this eggy treat wipes my mind clean from the past or the future or even the present. Driving away from Portland I am only observing a spoon-licking temple served by the cup. It is pink and white.
In Seattle, steam exhumes the air as my brother who towers over me even while he curves his spine chatters with me as we bump north on I-5. We drive to Greenwood. We eat at a pizza place that has lingered near my periphary as long as I can remember. I was diagnosed with celiac in 2004 and this restaurant, both cavernous and cozy, has three different gluten-free crusts. We order them all. We can’t help but compare them to the hulking gluten-free pizzas Grandma Floy made back home. We laugh and laugh. It’s a part of Seattle I always thought I might find: the one where David is an adult and neither of us is concerned, burdened, and instead are elbow-deep in stupid slack-jawed joy. At Pike Place Market a few days later, I walk alone with one of Cinnamon Works’s oatmeal raisin cookies in my hand. I remember leaving nearby water park Wild Waves in fifth grade and crying that I couldn’t eat the same M&M cookies from Safeway I could the summer before. The ferries I once rode between Bainbridge Island and Alaskan Way trawl the Salish Sea like errant beasts.
In Everett, David is a lightning bolt. He is electricity. He ducks and bobs, like a boxer in a tank top placing smiles and winks at girls and boys whose eyes lay on him like priest’s hands; devoted. It is all the more out of time feeling as I’m joined by a friend I haven’t seen in at least eight years. He called me last week. He said he’s been living north of Seattle, and I said I’d be there this weekend. He tells me he’s unsure of his workplace’s union, he’s unsure we can do anything about all the doom. He tells me this as I smoke then quaff a bag of vinegar chips with hummus, which hits right I this near midnight. Still, I am aware of my place in this part of the Pacific Northwest. It’s where I am from, a region I feel in my skin. And it is, today, a place I encounter in new, mystical ways.
In the artery closest to my heart, there’s Ellensburg. A first: A cocktail bar opened while I’ve been gone. My mom and both of my brothers join me at the Night Owl, on the same block as the Tav and the First and Last Chance Tavern, iconoclastic in the 509. This place is low-lit, almost artsy, and a robust list of nonalcoholic drinks are flanked by pork bao bites. My hometown is changing. I realize I am, too.
I want to be the ideal husband. I want to be a better son, a better brother. There are parts of the Northwest I know like I know how to climb the strafed pine tree in the yard near the sidewalk at my dad’s place, where to put my hands to avoid the sap. Then there are places still unknown to me. Foreign, like the at-once familiar and brand new country where Lucie and Kristofferson wake up without me.
I am blown open. I’ll go there and further.
Coincidentally read this as I sat at the new Ellensburg Unity Park - last time I visited the Tav, I astonishingly didn’t recognize a single person. But change is inevitable, even in a place like Eburg. Always appreciate your writings on the PNW, Paolo 🤠