Chapter 9: Windows on Washington
© 1986 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs
Centralia, Washington (295 miles)
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 lock picking 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, bottle caps, 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 wood smoke 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 villains
at all... they only look the
part.
They’re only villains 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 Poulsbo 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.