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From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Tue Jan 8 09:48:03 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: Part 9 of CAA #2
WINDOWS ON WASHINGTON
#9 in the second online CAA series
by
Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Centralia, WA (Mile 295)
October 24, 1986
It was dark, late: after midnight. The town -- Montesano, Washington;
the brain -- mildly giddy on local beer and the fuzzy exhaustion of a 54 mile
day. I lurked in the wet grass behind the Osterberg Motel, Maggie standing
beside me and looking more than a little worried.
I tried the bathroom window and found no handhold. My now- useless
Sawmill Athletic Club membership card was tattered from the attempt to jimmy
the front door latch, and no lockpicking tools were handy. I dug quietly into
the wood around the window with a key, trying not to make a sound, but only
managed a small pile of sawdust. This was getting us nowhere.
I dropped to my knees, shivering slightly, and groped in the clutter that
lay about the old building like the archaeological echoes of a dying culture,
my fingers finding and quickly rejecting crumbled wires, rusty bolts,
bottlecaps, and things unnamable lying there in the dank shadows. Somewhere a
door slammed and I stiffened, frozen in the haze of a distant streetlight,
waiting for the shout. But it was only a guy walking his dog, and he passed
quickly out of sight.
My hand closed around an ancient bracket -- something vaguely automotive.
"Ah," I whispered. Prying carefully, wincing at the amplified crunch of old
wood, I eased the window open. Giggling sotto voce, I stepped on an old bucket
and squirmed through the opening, finding sink and toilet more or less where
expected, both creaking under my weight as I lowered myself headfirst to the
floor. Ah, travel. I completed the entry, found my way around the bicycles
jammed into the stuffy room, and let Maggie in the front door -- number 5 --
the one with the broken lock that had resisted every attempt to use the key
given us on check-in.
It had been a day of northwest autumn images... of woodsmoke curling
white-on-white through thick morning fog. Of ducks, startled by our passage,
scrambling across the Hood canal watertop making tracks on the surface with
frantic wingtips and flapping feet. Of herons and gulls, Christmas tree farms,
dogs breathing micropuffs, giant mushrooms like pumpkin pies, tiny ones
scattered across logs like storybook colonies -- and the unnatural quiet of
off-season tourist culture. A brisk morning.
Later, on route 108, I pedaled in sadness -- bracing myself against the
blasts of logging trucks hauling the carcasses of once- beautiful trees and
leaving an ugly ravaged landscape like a botanical war zone invented in
Hollywood. Now I understood the tree-spikers, as my surroundings alternated
between disaster and grandeur, each underscoring the other. I passed from
lifeless mountainsides of blackened stumps to great rustling valleys touched
with the muted ochers and somber umbers of autumn... from harsh wreckage to
quiet perfection with man alone the mediator. Anger. But through every
mini-hurricane of a 60 mph logging truck -- at once fragrant with fresh-felled
fir and rank with diesel fumes -- I tried to remember that the man at the wheel
was just doing his job. Those aren't the villians at all... they only LOOK the
part.
They're only villians when they blow me off the road.
We're southbound for real now; I'm writing from the 295-mile mark, two
days from Portland. Puget Sound is way back there somewhere -- the people who
made it feel as home now fond memories and database records. No more Paulsbo
bread, ferry horns in morning fog, midnight milling machine madness, or sunsets
over Manzanita Bay. Home is the road. I'm re-experiencing the major
adjustment that has to be made when you switch from stasis to nomadics: a
redefinition of "home" that lets a modular phone jack, bicycle, and the
cluttered livingroom of an overnight host touch all the places in your heart
that were once owned by your old hometown. Yeah, this is a qualitatively
different lifestyle, and when I look into the eyes of people here in Centralia
I try to remember that I'm even more alien than I look -- for reasons that have
nothing whatsoever to do with speech synthesizers and blinking consoles.
Anyway. The weather is holding, a record for rainlessness they tell me,
and we're slipping away from winter on back roads, so far unnoticed. Oregon
tomorrow, I think -- or at least the Columbia River -- then on down through the
land of contrasts, the state of being, the place where most trends start and
most wanderers stop. California will be like glue on our wheels, but there is
so much more beyond... wherever that may be.
-- Steve