I remember the first time i saw the pacific north west from the window of my Alaskan airlines flight from LA. I was 21 and had just flown over from Australia. I had a fantastic view out the window, and was watching the magnificent volcanic mountains glide past when Mt St Helens came into view, like a big exploded zit! It was so visceral. All my high school geology about subduction zones came back to me and I guess it struck me how real it all was. Landing in Seattle and seeing Mt Rainer above the city it almost felt unsafe to be so close to something that might blow up any minute.
I’m struggling a bit to write at the moment. My health issues seem to have impacted my clarity of thought. Well i’ll try.
Braden met me at the Airport.. it was nearly a year since we’d got to know each other in Edinburgh, working at the Argyle Backpackers, which is still there it seems on Argyle Rd just near the Meadows. When i finished with tramping through Europe and being a hermit i decided to reconnect with the world a bit and chose Edinburgh, where my grandfather was born. Beautiful, crazy city. Fell in love there, well that’s another story Ill have to tell one day.
Braden and I had been writing letters – Braden has this fabulous extravagant kind of handwriting – getting those was such a blessing during those long months in Australia in ’99 trying to scratch together some coin to travel again. Although i really was going back to London i decided to get one of those half round the world tickets and stop in America on the way. I had been brought up a total anglophile so I was suspicious of American things until i met Braden. My trip to the Pacific NW changed all that.
First thing was that magnificent coffee with half n half that we had as soon as I arrived. Even from the airport cafe it was just fantastic, so rich and warm. Braden’s dad’s house in Ballard where we stayed was built from this beautiful timber, it had a delicious softness. Such a kind family to have me stay for a few weeks. Braden’s dad was a carpenter and made boats and we took one out on the water one day but just a little way as it was very low in the water with all of us in it. Lots of nice family dinners. I was so broke the best i could do to thank everyone for their hospitality was bring a bottle of zinfandel to the table for dinner once or twice. I did come to love that tasty zinfandel. It never tastes as good outside the states. There was something about the tastiness of the food there. Even a plain old subway seemed so good.
It was familiar to anyone from an anglo country but then different. I remember Braden’s dad had an air pistol sitting on the kitchen table to scare of squirrels from the bird feeder. Just sitting there.. that was different to home.. We went tenpin bowling one day.. it felt more natural to do that, not like it was a kind of exotic American thing to do. I’d say the cars were bigger but actually Braden drove at the time this kind of funny old bmw i think it was that was tiny and kept breaking. We drove up to Bellingham.. there was an old museum full of vintage TVs with tiny screens that fascinated me.
I wrote a love letter to a girl in a cafe in Ballard .. Piper.. we went out she took me to see a really interesting screening of animations short films done by local students. It was such a vibrant creative place. Piper was so sweet. It would have been good to stay or go back, if i could have found a way to get a visa. I did apply for green cards in the lottery for a couple of years. But i guess it wasn’t very easy whereas i already had a work visa for the UK so that’s where i was headed.
Braden and I went camping one night on the Pacific somewhere out past the Cascades.. maybe it was Sand Point or Wedding Rocks.. i’ve been trying to work it out on google. I should just ask Braden. We thought we heard a bear at night, i remember being too drunk on red wine to care. We did see two bears on the way in, crossing the road. Smaller bears not grizzlys. That’s something different about America. Bears. Braden talked about walking up to the lookout that Kerouac was in and coming across a grizzly on the path so turning right back around. We didn’t carry guns or anything like that. I guess the bears could have eaten us if they wanted to. We had a little super 8 camera that Braden had bought in a flea market. that film would be funny to look at now. i think i’ve written about this trip before somewhere.. i wrote a poem about it too, it’s in my library: Braided Ham.
Something i often say i like about USA is the rawness. The feeling of things being a bit more loose and dangerous. Guns, bears, big cars. Everything kind of hangs out. Even in the polite Pacific NW. Been reading Elmer Keith’s book ‘Sixguns’ about revolvers and although i don’t like all the killing, i am a bit thrilled by the gutsiness of life out there at the tail end of the wild west that Keith inhabited. Taming wild brumbies and fast shootin’ cans thrown in the air. Australia doesn’t seem to have that – even though there’s a similar cattle farming scene – but our penal colony origins seem to mean our governments like to keep us a bit more in line. Freedoms are granted, not innate. My first job was in a fireworks shop and I feek sad and annoyed that they made all fireworks illegal (in my state) a few years after. The latest gun laws seem a bit on the nose to me too, new limits are coming in just as i’m getting interested in collecting old firearms. That’s not a very leftish interest of mine, maybe, but then George Orwell liked having a pistol under his pillow.. i don’t think the right have exclusive rights to boom sticks.
Anyway getting a bit off track.. after a few weeks with Braden I went off to London and i talked about that in another blog.
In 2001 i came back to the states and I went back to visit the pacific north west. This time Braden was living in a little flat above a cool Ethiopian restaurant somewhere near Cherry Hill I think. One of the meals in that restaurant we had a lovely foamy bread that reminded me of the foam under the car seat in mum’s old corolla. We had a picnic by the water somewhere nearby i think Denny Blaine park. I was reading Kurt Cobain’s life story the other day and realized he lived and died just around there. Braden also took me down to Portland where he was directing a little play i think it was telling the story of Orpheus and Persephone. It was a nifty little production, one of Braden’s guitarist friends who i wish i got to know better did a great soundtrack. I did box office duties which felt right as i’d been working in the theater back in London for about a year by then. We went to that fantastic big bookshop – Powell’s – i think it’s still open. But wasn’t that a great time for big bookshops, before Amazon and the internet. Although Amazon did exist then, i remember Braden ordering a book (one of the early Leonard Cohen novels) one night and it arrived the next morning cause the warehouse is in Seattle somewhere.
Speaking of Leonard, my next trip to the states i visited Mt Baldy monastery above LA, i’ll write about that sometime.
But after visiting Braden in 2001 I went up over the border into Canada and spent about a week around there eventually meeting up with mum and nana and grandpa who were about to go on an Alaska cruise. I took the ferry over to Vancouver island and was just overwhelmed with how nice it would be to live there on a little island with a little house perched on the waters edge in the mist. I went out to Victoria and visited a ship that a friend from the theater worked on, it was laying undersea cables. He wasn’t on it unfortunately. I remember having a chat with a lady running a nice shop with bags n things, i bought one, and she was talking to me about her daughter and showed me a picture and i spontaneously said “I’d marry her!” and she was kind of stunned but, i felt, also sort of amused and I almost felt like i should just stay there and marry her daughter since i’d said it. This was just before i met Rose.
Back in Vancouver i bought a little seagull guitar, lovely little thing and i carried it all the way back in the plane. It was the perfect guitar for playing in tight spaces like the stage door of the New Ambassadors back in London. Lovely timbers too. I sold it when we left London for Australia, about five years later. I flew back to London and made it back just in time before the 9/11 attacks which shut down the airways. I had been in NYC too, just a few weeks before in August. And Philadelphia. That was my last big USA trip. Just a couple of short visits to LA and San Francisco after that.
Funny I have no photos of any of my visits to the pacific NW. I did have my Ilford camera on my second trip but i think i ran out of film on the east coast. Oh well those were the days before phones made memories for us. In a funny way i like that it’s all hidden inside my head though. I guess i have to do my best to get it out. And maybe i’ll watch that super 8 reel one day too.
Update: i found that poem,