Late whiskey-fueled jams, a wedding, this giant squid bike rack.

The ride north out of Seattle is 30 miles of smooth bike trail in light rain. We are blissful singing impromptu songs and laughing for no reason. All wet as we roll into small town Mukilteo on the Sound.

Diamond Knot Brewery – possibly the best chowder in the multiverse, some pizza, a beer devised by Michael "Whip" Wilton of Queensryche.

The next morning we ferry to Whidbey Island and shortly after Z’s rear tire pops, the rains come thick.

Z takes off with her for half an hour and I stand on the roadside in the rain, smelling the trees and singing songs. When they come back, the woman gives us chocolate chip cookies, says something about how the island isn’t what it used to be, but helping people out is what you do on the island, and then dots away down the highway through sheets of rain.

We posts up at a motel in Freeland for the night, accruing just 10 waterlogged miles for the day. At the nearby China City, an ornate refurbished Victorian mansion gone Chinese restaurant and sports bar, we have noodles and cocktails talking to the bartender and a local who brings up conversation as we laugh out loud at the Whidbey paper’s police reports showcasing the mundane trespasses of the island: a twelve-year-old isn’t obeying his mother. Some teenagers are talking very loudly about how “high” they are. A man looks suspicious as he crosses the street. Someone almost drove over the speed limit.

“It’s a safe island,” our barmate says. “Every once in a while you’ll get a murder. Every few years.”

He goes on to tell us about a man who was found shot dead in his car one day on his way to pick up the kids from school. Found by a jogger on the roadside. No leads. Nothing. The wife moves away and the case sits for years until one day someone slips a few words and the story gets around and the scope of things comes together all at once. His wife is arrested in Nevada on a boat bought with the life insurance money called, no kidding, “Off the Hook.” The hitman was apprehended in Ensenada.

Then our barmate tells us about how his dog just dug up a mountain of jewels buried in the back yard of a house he was sitting for a neighbor.

“The jewelry belonged to my neighbor’s grandmother, who buried them three decades ago and forgot about it due to dementia,” he said. “Sometimes she'll look for them in her drawers for hours. So I figure we give her the old pearl necklaces and gold bracelets she buried thirty years ago and see if it rings a bell.”

And as an afterthought, “People are pretty honest around here.”

written by  chaddeal on May 26, 2012 from Freeland, United States
from the travel blog: Two-Wheel Heart Attack Fuck the World West Coast Bicycle Ride-A-Thon of the Millenium
Send a Compliment

---

comment on this...

The bartender, a raspy woman in a Harley Davidson vest, lists off the day’s specials – fresh cod caught this morning, chowder, mussels.

“The mussels are from Sequim,” she says almost apologetically, “ever since the boat thing...”

The boat thing turns out to be a 140-foot fishing vessel that caught fire and sank two weeks ago in the area’s famous Penn Cove mussel beds, which are now contaminated by over 1,400 gallons of leaked oil.

“We have to wait for the environment people to survey the wreckage before pulling the boat out of the bay,” the bartender explains, “and nobody knows what will happen to all the diesel on board once the boat moves. They’ve said the boat could split in half when they go to pull it up.”

The prospects are dismal for the small bayside town, their crown industry on hold, but the mood is festive in Toby’s as a local middle-aged couple posts up next to us and, seeing our bikes loaded with gear in the corner, remark “that sure looks tough!”

The half-drunk newlyweds are impressed and paternal when we explain our intentions, saying, “Deception Pass! There’s no way you can bike there today! It’s gotta be twenty miles! Just pitch your tent in the woods somewhere. Did you bring a flashlight? Do you have food? You need meat. Do you have any jerky? You goofballs are crazy!”

We tell them about our chat with the local at China City last night and the couple agrees.

“Oh yeah, there’s not much real crime on the island. The Barefoot Bandit was probably the biggest thing to happen here. That guy was a genius!”

The so-called Barefoot Bandit was a teenager from Camano Island, directly east of Whidbey, who is believed to be responsible for around 100 thefts in Washington, Idaho, and Canada, including bicycles, automobiles, personal planes, and speedboats.

It’s said that he flew the Cessna 400 he stole from Indiana in July, 2010 and then crash landed in the Bahamans with skills he developed from watching instructional DVDs and playing flight simulators.

The Bandit was captured a few days later on the islands and, just this January, sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison.

During his sentencing, bandit Colton Harris-Moore addressed the court, saying that it’s "no stretch of the imagination to say that I'm lucky to be alive."

We take off down Madrona Road, a scenic detour recommended by the bartender at China City. Between the red, glossy branches of the namesake madrone trees we see the floating wood flats of the mussel farm and, behind them, a large area quarantined with orange buoys where the sunken vessel rests on the Penn Cove floor.

At a crossroads, the Sheriff rolls up and my thoughts flash to Easy Rider – “I still say they’re not going to make the parish line” – but it turns out that, a cyclist himself, he just wants to recommend an alternative coastal route to get us away from the evening Highway 20 traffic.

“Look up to the trees on the right once you top the hill into the farmland,” he says. “There’s an eagle’s nest up there about the size of a VW Bug.”

The next morning we head north from Deception Pass State Park and romp around the towering bridge feeling goofy and elated.

The ten mile stretch to Anacortes is steep and the road is gravely, and we’re beat when we hit the ferry to the San Juan Islands.

In Friday Harbor we grab some supplies – salami, tortillas, a rotisserie chicken – and cut through the middle of the island rolling onto the bluffs of San Juan County Park as the orange sun is halfway set between Vancouver Island mountains six miles across the Haro Strait, where hulking cargo ships churn north to port in Canada. We are calm and hungry and everything looks like a screen saver.

In the morning we hitch into town for supplies. It’s Z’s half-birthday and we’re going to celebrate with beer and campfire quesadillas. An older gentleman picks us up outside the campground and takes us a few miles down the road to Lime Kiln State Park, where he works at the historic lighthouse – a popular whale-watching spot.

He points out the rideshare sign – a recycle symbol with a thumbs-up in the middle – and we catch a ride in no time with a couple from Sacramento and then a housing contractor listening to Philip Glass.

After a few hours in town we hit the road, catching a ride the moment we approach a rideshare sign. The man is enthusiastic about our bike trip and goes out of his way to drive us all the way back to the campground.

“I spend my winters in San Diego,” he says, “at Campland by the Bay. My cardiologist down there just bought our house here and we’re moving to Anacortes. It’s just getting too expensive on the island and when you get older,” he chuckles, “you need to be close to the hospital.”

We pass the evening chatting with our Canadian campmates and drinking the bottle of wine we bought, which is a bad batch, carbonated and acrid, but uplifting nevertheless.

We're the last to pack up and leave camp the following afternoon. Z and I have a sleepy synergy, and our pace tends towards the languorous. Slow, spontaneous, flexible, unassuming – it’s simply how we roll.

As such, we arrive at Roche Harbor some time later and eat bananas dipped in cacao nibs from Theo chocolate factory in Fremont - Jesse's new place of employment as a shop clerk and tour guide.

The harbor is a former lime production town gone high end resort where tourists go to eat ice cream and donuts. We have a donut and absorb not without a sense of humor the melancholie Native American flute music piped from a stereo by the copper jewelry vendors.

In the evening we ferry to Lopez Island. A sign by the terminal advises that “All at large dogs will be detained” – curious wordage in reference to canines.

We post camp at the Odlin County Park a short distance down the road, right on the water.

The landscape is flatter on Lopez, so we peddle the 4 or so miles into town to catch last call at the Galley around 11 p.m.

A few locals sit around out front talking about Banksy and Shepard Fairey as a boxer growls at our bike lights suspiciously.

Her owner puts her in the truck, saying: “I just got her about two weeks ago and I’m not about to coddle her and let her think it’s ok to act like this.”

I mention the “at large dogs” sign and one of the others says, “dogs can actually be shot on sight if they get on your land here. There are so many sheep on the island that it isn’t tolerated at all.”

Conversation continues about Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary (or mockumentary, depending on who you ask) about the British artivist Banksy in which a knock-off artist named Mr. Brainwash gains a degree of notoriety in Los Angeles by selling works that clearly rip off styles generally associated with Banksy and Andy Warhol.

“There are plenty of conspiracies that suggest Banksy was actually working with Mr. Brainwash and the whole thing was a ploy,” one dude says.

“It would be awesome reality hacking,” I suggest.

“It points out the death of the American Dream,” he continues. “The American Dream says that if you have an original and relevant idea, you can go and work hard and make that idea into a business that will support you and your family to a reasonable degree. But that’s not how it works. Now, if you have an idea and you do anything about it – anything at all – pretty soon one of three things will happen.

“One – someone will say they thought of it first and sue you for everything you’ve got, or at least run you broke with lawyer fees.

“Two – a lawyer will exploit a loophole in the way you run your business and run you into the ground with a class action lawsuit or an ADA violation or some damn thing.

“Three – a corporation with a competing product and more resources will buy you out. Best case scenario. Sell out your dream.”

The notion is especially poignant in the microcosm of Lopez Island, where the grocery stores brim with local goods – pickled garlic, goat cheeses, chipotle-goji-cacao hot sauce, greens – that, while more expensive, take precedence over outside competition.

The Dream, at least within the Puget boundaries of “the rock,” may just have a chance, for now.

Once the Galley closes, Z and I head to karaoke at the Islander - an overpriced resort joint full of wasted vacationers.

The $8 cocktails don’t matter, however, because a drunk man from Burlington continuously buys us shots of Bulleit bourbon as he expounds on the enduring depths of the love he has for his wife, who is talking with her girlfriends at a nearby table while a gaggle of girls twirl and toss around a roll of toilet paper on the dance floor.

It’s sad and classic and beautiful all at once.

I sing a terrible rendition of “Suffragette City” and the jockey cuts me off right before I get to “wham bam thank you ma'am!”

A light rain falls on our tent as we dream.

written by  chaddeal on May 30, 2012 from Friday Harbor, United States
from the travel blog: Two-Wheel Heart Attack Fuck the World West Coast Bicycle Ride-A-Thon of the Millenium
Send a Compliment

---

1 comment...

At least, as long as I’ve known it.

Six or seven years ago, when I romped with some locals on days off from a summer job at Sol Duc Hot Springs, the exhausted lumber town stank of cedar dust, whiskey breath, and the rogue meth wisp.

Nothing ever happened, and the solitary natural invigoration came from rumors of hauntings on the A Road, a retired lumber trail that only served as a refuge for drunks and high school students looking to evade the sheriff, who was said to strap a giant fan to his back and soar over the town with a parachute, eagle-eyeing keggers and speed-trapping stray tourists who never would agree upon why they came here in the first place.

Sometime after 2008, when the Twilight vampire film and book series became the new teen-and-then-some sensation, the clear-cut coven found new blood in tourism, which I once described in the San Diego Reader around June of 2010 thusly:
________

Not long ago, Forks, Washington, was among the dreariest and most unremarkable expired lumber towns in the country.

Teenagers would kill time getting twisted on the “A” road, a desolate lumber route rumored to be haunted on the outskirts of town.

Others would drive a couple hours east to Port Angeles in search of nightlife or west to La Push or Second Beach on the Quileute Reservation.

Discarded lumberjacks would submit job applications with resignation at Clallam Bay Correctional Center and take long drives alone to contemplate the clear-cuts, wondering where it all went wrong.

As if to accentuate the abject tedium surrounding the small town just west of Olympic National Park, the rain never stopped and the clouds never parted.

Which is exactly why author Stephanie Meyers chose Forks as the setting for her bestselling vampire love novel Twilight, the premise of which came to her in a dream. Having Goggled the rainiest place in the U.S. (121 inches a year), Phoenix native Meyers wrote the book without ever visiting the town of just over 3,000 residents.

Forks saw a 600% increase in tourism almost overnight after the book’s publication in 2005. Corner store profits doubled, shop windows posted signs reading “We love Edward and Bella,” and cafés renamed their menu items to include characters’ names as fanatics swarmed to Forks from all over the world.

The mania was bolstered by the 2008 release of Twilight the movie, which was never actually filmed in Forks. Regardless, buildings were designated as sites from the story for the Twilight tour.

The Miller Tree Inn became the Cullen House. Owning one of the few two-story residences in town, locals Kim and David McIrvin volunteered their home to be Bella’s house. Shop workers dressed up like characters from the movie. Forks fully embraced Meyers’ imagination of itself, and the money it brought with it. In a surreal way, Forks became the Forks of Twilight – a town modeled after a book inspired by a dream.

Now you can spot Bella’s red ’56 Chevy truck parked in front of the Visitors Center on the south side of town. You can contend with droves of predominantly female fans for memorabilia at the Dazzled by Twilight store. You can track down the police chief who happily plays the role of Bella’s father and stay at the Miller Tree Inn Bed and Breakfast. You’ll probably need to make reservations.

But once the madness blows over, when the adolescent masses tire of chasing the vampire daydream, when Jacob’s blackberry cobbler is once again just a slice of blackberry cobbler in the middle of nowhere, and all that remains are the damp sidewalks and a few straggling tourists on their way to Sol Duc Hot Springs and the San Juans, what will become of eerie Forks, Washington?

Just how long does it take to clear-cut a dream?
________

As it turns out, not a lot has changed.

Every aspect of Forks is still sucking off the dream:

Some 40 miles on bike from Sol Duc, Z and I poke into the Mill Creek Bar and Grill. We drink cheap beer and whisky in a recently remodeled bar whose menu reads in Twilight font.

A bald and bearded local makes conversation.

“I used to work in the cedar mills as a boy. Then that all went under. Now, this Twilight thing? Yeah, it’s working this year. The people are still here. They come for Twilight. Then they come back for the area. For Forks, the area. They see what’s here. The falls, the trails, the beaches, the forests…”

Certainly, the Olympic Peninsula is one of the last remaining wonders of the wild, lesser-bastardized tracts of Good America. Much of it protected National Park, the place is set, for now.

Later, many drinks later, our bartender, a woman in her mid-thirties maybe, reiterates a similar idea.

“Everyone comes for Twilight. But they come back for this place. I’ve seen people from Sweden, Iceland, Portugal, everywhere. They all come back just to see what else is out here.”

The new metaphor is obvious.

When once Forks thrived on the gratuitous clear-cut of timber, the town now celebrates a return of vibrancy via the voyeuristic suckling of the area’s remaining natural virtues.

What remains.

Vampires glimmer in sunlight.

These woods glow in Arizona eyes.

Ebb and flow.

Ebb

and

flow…

(By the way - Don't you dare judge Forks for theme-parking this notion. You would do the same, and your dream would still have its own sanctity. Your daughter is an embryonic Dolly Parton. America dreams for you, etcetera.)

We catch a ride with two Wisco kids down to Kalaloch Resort on the coast – their summertime Aramark gig - and nearly drive up the asshole of a deer as it bounds off the highway at the last minute while our driver changes the Ziggy Marley CD to something more Dead.

Next morning – the waitress says the 101 highway ahead is more “clear-cuts and trees” – a contradiction we’ve encountered plenty already. So we hop a bus to Quinault, then Humptulips.

We quickly discover Humptulips to be a profoundly creepy nexus of humanity – the stuff of Dean Koontz coffee beans breakfast and R.L. Stine’s to-be-continued ellipses.

“I moved here twelve years ago,” says the storekeeper in a clinical tone, like he’s diagnosing an exotic cancer. “It’s quiet here. Unfortunately, since the lumber work went, probably because of the Spotted Owl, the industry has died. It’s mostly Hispanics now. Many people turned to the crank. I try not to judge. I see these people every day. Out of simple compassion, I can only see that some have chosen to take this path. It isn’t my path. But I see it every day. And it’s sad. These are capable men. Good men. You know, out here, I don’t worry about things. Not like in Seattle. I moved my family out here for a more simple life. I don’t worry about your regular city crime. That isn’t it. But we have our things like anybody else. Just last year, there was a murder across the street. One block from here. A man was shot in the back with a crossbow. Then they killed his wife with a hatchet. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘they.’ It was one man. He killed her with a hatchet.”

A slow silence as we check out our landjeagers and fire paste and sundries.

“Drugs?” I offer.

“He just lost it,” the man says, still both entirely involved and removed like a dentist.

"He just lost it."

These words follow us to the campsite down the street, as marked by our bike guide book from 2005.

The site, evidently, is entirely abandoned – the bathrooms overgrown and the cabins full of garbage and the only sound a horror movie sine-wave moan from the overhead metal-halide lamp buzzing into the surreal Humpulips clouded sunset night.

We bike away, west.

A sandwich board advertising broccoli draws us to Voss Acres Produce Market (www.vossacres.com), a homespun operation run out of a garage.

Sharon Voss comes out to greet us and, though the store is closed, offers us a “sidedoor shop” as she slides open the glass door and pulls the till out of the safe.

Z and I browse the fresh produce, much of which came from the Voss’ 6,000 square-foot garden just out the window, as Sharon relates the history of the place.

The house that she shares with her husband, Steve, was originally built in Tumwater, Washington – 60 some miles to the east – as a bunk unit for rail workers building lines to accommodate timber harvest in the late 1800s.

As the rail was built, the house traveled along behind it, eventually settling right here in nothing-doin Copalis Crossing. It served as a train depot and then a post office before falling into disrepair many years later.

Steve has since done an amazing job of refurbishing the place.

Sharon takes joy in sharing regional artifacts with us – ceramic model T spark plugs dug up in the yard, an antique olive pitter, old photos of the nearby Aloha Lumber Company mill owned by the Dole (of pineapple fame) brothers, who were raised in Hawaii and crafted primitive finless surfboards from pungent Washington cedar wood starting around 1902.

We enjoy Sharon’s stories and simple cheer, and roll into Copalis Beach at sunset feeling careless and enchanted and ready for drink.

There’s only one place to drink in Copalis Beach. The river winds through a short slough to the ocean and, just south, as just south as it could be, sits Green Lantern Tavern.

(View from the tavern next morning at breakfast.)

The nondescript bar is empty but for two patrons.

“San Diego!” exclaims Bob, a rounded country man perched with his apologetic but not surprised blonde wife or girlfriend at the end of the bar. “Well, all I got to say is that it’s nice to meet some folks from San Diego who ain’t queer.”

It becomes Bob’s mantra for the evening: “You San Diego folks are welcome here as long as you ain’t queer,” cheerily, even long after the bartender suggests that perhaps it's San Francisco he's thinking of, the queers and all.

Bob orders us two shots of a rather Yuletidely liqueur and, drunk now, says, “yall throw your bikes in the back of my truck now and you can camp out on my property.”

He offers it several times throughout the night, and when we eventually decline, he erupts, saying, “you turn down old Billy Bob’s hospitality? Weeeeelll! That’s on YOU now! That’s YOUR karma now. And that’s BAD karma!”

“Are you doing hoojoo on us?” Z asks with her adorably amused grin.

“Yes I am!” he declares, beaming with self-satisfaction. “That’s YOUR bad karma now!”

We entertain the validity of ole Billy Bob’s voodoo, briefly, but soon take up Pebbles’ offer to stay in her trailer just a block away at a campground.

Pebbles is a beautiful, nervous, open-hearted woman who dearly wants to take us out of the rain for the night. So we sip wine in her RV listening to a Luke Redfield album as she tells us about the abusive alcoholic man she is on the run from. He’s hit her for the last time. If she sees him, she’ll kill him. If he comes tonight, we’ll help.

Next morning we ride a few miles south to Ocean Shores and spend a few days waiting out rain and concocting some articles for work. The beaches are surreal and everything feels like a simulation.

The feeling is amplified as we bus into Westport, a fisherman’s foggy painted-by-memory town on a peninsula across the water from Aberdeen.

We park our bikes at the Knotty Pine Tavern, the surliest dive on the West Coast, and meet a vacationing young couple from Puyallup who teach us how to gamble on the state-issue punch boards.

“It’s like this,” Anna says as she jabs away heedlessly at the bacon board like a blind dowser probing for groundwater.

She wins two pounds of bacon in about ten minutes, and we hope it isn’t just drunken camaraderie when she and Jordan invite us over to their hotel tomorrow for oysters and crab and beer all day as they lurch out of the bar in a lusty embrace.

Z and I spend the night in the bow of this crab boat, owned by a fisherman named Mike who we met at the Pine earlier.

We spend the next day sipping Rainiers and barbecuing ribs and seafood.

Here are a couple shots of Z modeling with some oysters in Bay Center, WA.

A few days later we roll into Ilwaco, a former fishing mecca on the mouth of the Columbia River that died off with the salmon and now retains the haunting infrastructure of what-once-was – vacant seafood restaurants, under-priced houses, barnacled boats moaning in the harbor, nautical waste, and the dive bar at the end of the universe, the Sea Hag, spewing drafts to the echoes of near-extinct commerce collapsing all around.

Everyone is confused as to why we are even here in the first place, but it feels right and we end up crashing with some local kids who work as occasional dockhands and, far more lucratively, clerks at the waterfront indoor gardening shop.

Next day, we bike over the Astoria-Megler Bridge, which is supposed to be terrifying, except it’s been undergoing a four-year painting process since March, so we breeze over with no cars in sight for much of the 4 mile stretch, feeling immense gratitude for the fates and a warm ambivalence to the natural laws of physics, the rules of reality, and even ole Billy Bob’s well-meaning, cross-eyed, dumbass back-country hoodoo.