Trans/plant/portation

I watch Hoarders, even as I wonder what I’m watching or why I find someone else’s obsession viewable. One episode and I was interested; two and I was rather well past curious; three and the fascination had taken hold. One of the things that I ponder with regard to hoarding are the kinds of reasons and justifications the hoarders supply for their accumulation of things and/or animals. To a layperson like myself, these look like the following:

• I’m going to do/make something with that
• I’m going to give this to someone someday
• If I just fix it it’ll be great/priceless/beautiful
• I couldn’t let it go to waste/be unloved
• I don’t want to forget the memory this reminds me of

It’s this last one that I personally understand the best. It’s resonant with me because I push myself through life so hard at times that I fear I’ll lose part of what made a previous moment important. More upsetting is thinking that I can lose memories of people who aren’t around anymore, so things they owned or pictures of them take on meaning they probably shouldn’t have. I’m fine, overall, not accumulating objects d’art or otherwise, and I go through regular periods of casting off, but there is a certain pain involved in packing up everything I own into cardboard boxes and seeing my material possessions disassembled and depersonalized.

My grandfather’s tin drinking cup is in there somewhere. My Joy of Cooking signed by my mother with the little happy face she always leaves at the ends of her notes. The oil painting my uncle gave my father, that hung in his office for 20 years. Wedding photos, taken a scant two years ago. I have an attachment to these things, and I can only scratch at the most immediate reasons why, suspecting my emotions go to places I can’t actually recall anymore.

This very minute Susanne is asking me what I plan to do with the 20 or so dead batteries that are in a marble container on a bookshelf in our living room. Fortunately for me I ran across our alkaline battery charger upstairs in my office. I jump suddenly to the hoarding justification #3. She nods her head, listening to me, her face expressing a wisdom I won’t have for another decade or so. I swear I got rid of a lot of stuff in DC, before we moved out here. I use my Walla Walla public library card faithfully and on a regular basis, so I have accumulated a minimum of new books.

To make myself feel better about storing dead batteries in my living room, I proudly announce that I will go through my mass market books and toss out the ones I don’t need to pack. In terms of volume, one mass market is the equivalent of those 20 batteries. In terms of weight, however, I’d need 50 or 60 of them. And in terms of guilt I’m betting I need to toss roughly 125. I am a large fount of guilt.

I hate moving. Spaces are meant to have things in them, not sit vacuous, echoing sounds as small as my breathing. Though I don’t want to sit in a space filled with clutter, I enjoy having objects around me that reflect my interests, my people, my past.

The old VHS tapes I made of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Secret of My Succes$, and Ruthless People, well, I’m not sure what those say about me.

This second year here in Walla Walla has seen the visits of several friends and family, including Susanne’s parents, my Mom, my sister and her two daughters, my friend Michael, and now our friend Jody. They have tasted from the chalice of the town of many waters, and they have enjoyed it thoroughly. Especially Jody. Nobody we’ve brought here has been as excited about the wine sellers and vineyards as Jody.

Jody is also a fan of the German tradition of the glass beer boot. There really is nothing like repeating a favorite event from one’s college days to bring back the nostalgia for that time, so when Susanne and I stumbled across a boot for sale in Victoria, British Columbia, we of course purchased it, telling ourselves it would make a perfect graduation gift for our friend. The catch was that she would need to trek across the country to get it from us. We figured we would see her last summer, but then she was too embroiled in finishing her dissertation. And as I hear it, that needs to happen before this graduation thingamabob.

Jody walked with her fellow Ph.D. recipients in DC last week, and the ink scarcely had a chance to dry before she was on the prerequisite three flights to get here. We had the boot set up in the dining room, waiting patiently and lovingly for its new owner. She hugged it like a toddler loves a teddy bear. And we told her we’d venture out to the Laht Neppur brewery in Waitsburg, about 20 minutes away to the east. We hoped the Irish beer would be okay in the German boot, not that it bothered us personally, as we are not purists.

The next day we, with another professor from Susanne’s college, made the journey, and unlike other trips to this town, we did not see any anti-abortion protesters. Slackers. The weather gets a little nice and they all drop their political mischief. Well fine, I don’t need them anyhow.

I’d called ahead to see if the brewery would be okay filling up a two liter boot for us, and they actually sounded thrilled. As we walked in the door, boot in hand, a couple of people from behind the bar clapped excitedly, as if I’d just told a kindergarten class we were about to have birthday cake. At least that’s how I recall responding to such news when I was 5. We needed to taste a few of the dozen or so kinds of beer they make to see what should fill the boot. I mean, drinking this thing is a commitment, one wants to really like the beer inside. We opted for a fruity hefeweisen. So now we’re really out there: a German style, Irish made beer in a German boot. I asked them to play a little U2 to keep things balanced. Because a little Bono goes a long way.

Jody told us the rules: once the boot is picked up, it cannot be put back down until it is empty. You can drink as long as you want, but can not stop and start. You must thwack the boot with your finger before and after you drink, and you must pay if you’re the second to last drinker of the boot. So we ordered some pub food and started passing the boot.

The owners were enthralled with our level of interest in drinking their beer, so much so that the brewmaster came out from the back to take pictures of us. The customers were happy for us too; I don’t think there’s been that degree of excitement in a while, but then again, I don’t spend every night in the place, so perhaps I’ve missed the children’s birthday parties.

We drank and drank and scarfed down a pizza that at that moment, seemed like the best pizza in the world. It could have been rancid and freezer-frosted, but in actuality, I think it was rather tasty. Finally, we were getting near to the end of the boot. I looked at what was left in it, something close to a full pint, and took a breath. Jody, the veteran boot drinker of our bunch, was next after me, and I didn’t want her to show me up. I looked around the room and noticed that everyone was noticing me. All of the people at the table but me had doctorates, but I was the big man, and suddenly I felt like I was being measured in terms of masculinity. I didn’t want to weigh in on the Pee Wee Herman end of the scale, I wanted Lou Ferigno. And I hated that I didn’t want to be teased for not finishing this thing, so I tilted the boot back and finished it. Woo hoo! We cheered. Jody snapped a picture. And from the other table, an older man and his wife clapped, but then he totally deflated my ego by saying, almost under his breath but just loud enough for me to discern:

“A real man would have drunk a boot of porter.”

Bam. And then I wondered if this is why men walk around being macho and masculine—because they don’t want someone to say that they’re not. I didn’t see that guy drinking a boot. And why should I care what he thinks about my manliness? And who is a real man, anyway? I stuck in the back of my mind that I should set a different priority in those moments, not that this would have changed my behavior. For I would have killed the boot in any case, but I didn’t need to kill it because strangers might tease me if I didn’t.

We went ahead and ordered another boot, figuring that four of us could handle a liter of beer each. It was clearly the end of the semester for the two college professors, who could potentially have put their own students to shame with their capacity. And though I hadn’t drunk that much in a long time, I had a blast, and we enjoyed our indoor picnic table. For though this is wine country, there are definitely a few places for beer drinkers, and we deeply appreciate them.

Wagon Man!

Walla Walla has been quite the setting for our little 2-person play on adaptation, struggle, ego, relationships, and personality. Living between a house of students who practiced the Save Ferris version of Come On Eileen for a whole academic year with nary any improvement in tempo or pitch was not something we’ll soon forget. Meeting the “wagon man” as he carefully jettisoned his recycling across the alley from our kitchen window will stick with us for a long time. And who doesn’t remember the bathtub water raining in our kitchen for a 3-month period, star of the film I directed, Holy Shit, It’s Raining in My Kitchen? Good times, all.

But our time in The Liar House is drawing to a close now. The nicked-up doors and baseboards, mushy plaster walls, cobweb-infested basement with illegal bedroom, we’re saying goodbye to them all. We’re only sorry we never found the electrical panel so we could meet properly.

But goodbye, hidden, invisible electrical panel! Goodbye, leaky main water valve! Goodbye, broken dryer the maintenance guy said wasn’t his responsibility! Goodbye, strange plots of bare dirt that the lawnmower guy insisted on spraying for weeds! Goodbye, ducks fornicating on our lawn! Goodbye, many, many students who walked across the same lawn, every day, multiple times a day, to and from class! Goodbye, strange cat who walked into our living room last spring! Goodbye, never shoveled street, even after 30 inches of snow came down from the sky and buried us inside! Goodbye, weirdly reappearing hornet’s nests that keep freaking me out! Goodbye to all of you!

Hello, road trip! And someday, HELLO dishwasher!

In 2003, I volunteered at DC’s gay film festival, which meant working with some very nice people and a few overly controlling people, but I was willing to take the long view and deal with challenging personalities in order to get passes to other movies for free. One of the films I went to see was Drag Nuns in Tinseltown (rereleased in 2006 as The LA Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence), a documentary about the antics and charity work of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Some of the Sisters attended the screening, laughing along with us and hosting a Q&A afterward.

Unlike other drag performers I’d seen before, the Sisters don’t eschew things like facial hair (a Ru Paul no-no) or insist on lip synching to women-sung songs, but instead will occasionally take on tenor or other “male range” compositions, singing in their own voices.

They also have a tendency to rework lyrics to songs we’d otherwise be able to belt out with them, in order to make a point. I’d forgotten that little bit of Sis-trivia until last night.

Susanne and I trekked to the Tri-Cities yesterday with a few colleagues from the college to see the Seattle chapter of the Sisters host a fundraiser for Walla Walla’s Blue Mountain Heart to Heart organization, a non-profit direct service charity for people with HIV, AIDS, and Hepatitis C. Heart to Heart is, in fact, the only direct service charity of its kind in southeast Washington state, and Franklin County, which it also serves, has the highest HIV infection rate outside of Seattle, so their work is rather desperately needed here. I would have gone to see the Sisters in any case, but knowing it was a fundraiser for Heart to Heart only solidified my commitment to making the 60-mile trip.

We found our way to the only gay bar in these parts which, on the inside, was a series of differently shaped rooms and a hell of a lot of seating: booths, high tables and stools, plain diner tables that looked like they’d been purchased from a going out of business sale from the empinada counter around the corner. A room in the front boasted a stage and short catwalk where the Sisters and local performers belted out everything from Xanadu’s I’m Alive (unfortunately not performed on 70s-style roller skates) to Bjork to School House Rock, Electrify, and some strange German song about genitalia that left me covering my face because I was there with a student from the college. Talk about awkward! Thank goodness there’s no sexual harassment policy at Susanne’s school. (Ironic, I’m being ironic.)

As the performances rolled on, audience members left their seats to slip money into the contribution basket at the end of the catwalk. Here’s where I was reminded of the unofficial rules about gay bars:

1. No matter how gay the bar is, there will always be a creepy straight guy trying to strut his stuff or hook up with some random lesbian. Persistence of said creepy guy is in an inverse proportion to his level of attractiveness. And creepy guys tend toward creepy props/dress, like a pipe or opened up dress shirt.
2. As soon as a couple first hooks up, they must stand in a corner or against a wall, making out. It helps if they’re anywhere near a heavily trafficked area, so that more people will notice their coupled upness.
3. Older couples should feel free to bicker in the bar or stand apart from each other, at turns looking cold or hurt.
4. There will be an overworked, overtired lesbian bussing tables and shooting daggers out of her eyes at the careless customers who spill their drinks for her to clean up.
5. Even if the gay bar is occupied by 95 percent gay men and < 5 percent lesbians (the other 1 percent straight allies, transgender people, and lost people who haven’t realized they’re not in a straight bar yet), there will still be a long line for the women’s rest room.
6. A small group of depressed looking older men will be quietly sitting around a video monitor of gay porn.
7. A few young or questioning people will be in the bar on any given weekend night, looking astonished at the naughty humor and antics of the other people there.

All of these I saw with my own eyes last night, and nearly 20 years after walking into my first gay bar, I smiled a little to myself, because no matter what else changes, these dynamics are the same. Not that I don’t want all of those to stay the same, certainly not. But it’s kind of like I haven’t aged.

Who’s up for Gay Bar Time Machine? Or the Curious Case of Benjamin Buttman? We can make it happen, people. Actually, maybe I should do an Internet search and see if they’ve been filmed already.

Back in DC, the local NBC affiliate’s weatherman would take bets as to the first snowfall of the year; whoever came closest without going over (thank you, Price Is Right, for that little construct) would get a visit from the local celeb, who would shovel their walkway with a special golden shovel. To call it absurd would be a bit of an understatement.

Out here in Walla Walla, the betting is on when we’ll get our first 90-degree day. I don’t really see this as comparable to snow in DC, because 90 + days are a plenty in the um, desert, but snow days, last year’s winter notwithstanding, are actually fairly uncommon in DC. Looking for the 100 + point seems like the closer approximation to me. But fine, the Union-Bulletin is looking for 90-degrees as its benchmark. I’m not sure what the award is—maybe a free 10-minute lawn watering? A golden chalice with some ice cubes and lemonade? We don’t have a local television station, so there’s really no weather-forecasting person to bring anything to the winner. Like other things in WW, the glory is in just being right. That way there’s no real expenditure associated with the contest.

The heat and cold have been struggling over the last couple of weeks, and we even had a thunderstorm here a couple of nights ago, during the college’s “Naked Beer Mile” event. I don’t suppose it stopped anyone from trotting around the quad naked, but certainly, I was not going to head over there to witness their fortitude-slash-stupidity. We learned last year to keep our shades drawn that evening.

The tradition is this: the cross-country team, obviously a group of exhibitionists and nudists, sponsors a run around the quad on campus at midnight on the day after classes end in the spring. We hadn’t been forewarned about this last year until a few hours beforehand, and as we live on the edge of campus, heard shouts of “naked” from some students who, through the loudness and slurredness of their communication, seemed fairly intoxicated. Ah, college. I had friends who pushed a refrigerator out of a second story window, so I suppose this is par for the course, and less environmentally troublesome.

What is particularly amusing, once one gets past the communal birthday-suits-are-the-most-aerodynamic thing, is the email that went out in advance of the Mile this year, with some advice for participants:

In preparation for the big event, we would just like to take a second to play the grandma role and remind you of a few ground rules. First, if you are traveling from off campus, you should be wearing clothes when you arrive and when you leave. Your neighbors and especially the authorities do not appreciate public nudity. Second, do not enter any academic buildings, residence halls, or the library, no matter how tempted you are to do so. Finally, please do not set off any fireworks. Seriously. This quickly catches the attention of the police, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep their presence to a minimum.

This email amuses me to no end, because:

1. I can’t see any grandma offering any of this advice to young adults who were preparing to run around in their skivvies.
2. I can’t believe people need to be reminded to wear clothing in public.
3. I might have reversed the sentiment of the phrase “your neighbors and especially the authorities.” In our house, it’s “the authorities and especially your neighbors” who don’t appreciate your naked bodies skirting across the lawn on the way to campus.
4. (Really 3a) I can’t believe the email author had to give a reason why public nakedness is wrong.
5. Students really are tempted to go to the library au naturelle? Seriously? Mightn’t you be seeing these librarians again? You want them to be able to recall that image of you as they’re checking out your books or arguing over fines you owe? Seriously?
6. I just can’t imagine that fireworks and alcohol are a good combination, especially when there’s not even the barrier of cotton shorts or t-shirts, much less serving as an SOS flare for your activity.

Yes, I was once in college. And I poured orange paint on Penn State’s Nittany Lions as a prank. But darn it, I did it with my clothes on.

I went to the 2009 Walla Walla Balloon Stampede, having never made first contact with the hot air behemoths, and I wasn’t disappointed. The evolved quickly, from reams of lifeless fabric spread on the ground to fat and bright living beings, puffing with hot air and then quietly lifting off into the air. One by one they drifted up, their engines roaring in short bursts until the humans with two feet on the ground can barely discern what color they are. And everyone watching seemed a little in awe of the balloon beings, but perhaps we were just still fuzzy from getting up so early.

This year I woke up pre-dawn to get ready for more balloon stampede viewingship, but was disheartened when my fellow watcher texted me to say it was sprinkling outside. Sprinking, I thought, so what? I pulled up the Web site for the event and saw that indeed, the launch would occur “weather permitting.”

What does weather permitting mean, I asked my friend. Baseball weather or football weather? As a sports enthusiast who has dabbled in both, I know that there is a big difference. Only Charlie Brown plays in a downpour, but I can recall football games in Alexandria in which we had to crunch through a crusted-over ice field in January, with the coach bellowing at us, “We came to play!” I’ll just note here that this coach had been a linebacker for the Detroit Lions in the mid-80s, so clearly, he knew all about hard work and winning.

We decided to forge ahead, crossing our fingers that some random precipitation wouldn’t mean disaster for our less dense friends of the parachute-fiber variety. At 6AM sharp, we drove to the fairgrounds.

Parking was too easy. If the launch were set for 6:30, more people should be here by now, I figured. We came across one older couple walking toward us, back to their car. They looked deflated [sic].

“They canceled because of the rain,” she told us, looking fairly dry. Perhaps she’d dodged every drizzle drop on her way across the field.

We turned around and saw four more senior citizens, who informed me that they’d followed us here, figuring we would lead them to the balloons. This is funny ha ha and funny strange for a few reasons, including:

1. There’s nothing about us to signal to other drivers that we’re interested in this event, like a neon sign over the car reading “Balloon Freaks,” a bumper sticker saying, “I brake for balloons,” or a personalized license plate.
2. The balloon launch was at the Walla Walla Fairgrounds, which are pretty large in a town that’s pretty small. There’s really no need to tail another car on the off chance that they’ll lead you to a very well marked place in the city.
3. Someone was more clueless than we were.

Faced with having woken up especially early and wanting to make the best out of the morning, we headed over to the Elk’s Lodge. While this may at first seem completely arbitrary, let me just note that hey, I’ve mentioned it before in this blog, and I have a curiosity about it, but more importantly, the Elk’s Lodge has been hosting Ed’s Diner since Ed’s had a fire last winter. It’s nice of the Elks to give the staff the capacity to stay employed while the structure is being renovated, and Ed’s makes a helluva good greasy spoon breakfast. It’s just a shame that the life-size statue of Elvis didn’t survive the fire, because I’m sure the Elks wouldn’t mind having his presence in the middle of their ballroom.

And what a ballroom it was. We walked in needing a second wind and hoping to find it on the other side of made-to-order eggs. I looked around and wondered to myself just how many people had had their wedding receptions here. All of the tables were empty save one in the far corner that had something like a dozen older men I presumed were Lodge members. I have to imagine that all of these groups—the Elks, the Masons, the Rotaryians, or whatever they’re called—are having trouble finding new members because all of these people were eligible for AARP.

We may have been the second table of the morning, but apparently I underestimated how many other disgruntled balloon watchers were following us, because within five minutes, 50 other people arrived at the makeshift diner-in-an-old-man-lodge. Seriously, there was one waiter and 18 tables with hungry patrons. Some people looked like they were considering bum rushing the fake elk next to the front door, hoping to find French toast inside like one stores candy in a pinata. Fortuitous for us, we’d already placed our order with the cook in the back before the mob took over the space. I enjoyed my mushroom omelet but my friend walked across the room to get some ketchup, and I waved down a fellow customer who was helping himself to the fresh pot of coffee at the waiter’s station. Hey, we Walla Wallans have some initiative, especially when it comes to our caffeine consumption.

All in all, it was an adventure. We took turns with our individual elk photo ops, and I went back to bed. Maybe next year.

Nearing the end of our initial stint in Wallyworld, I feel it only appropriate to take stock of what lessons I’ve learned thus far, as part of what I’ve tried to do while living here—otherwise known as how to carry on when lots of things in one’s life have gone awry. Through a torn ACL and meniscus, the free-fall of the world’s strongest economy, 30-some-odd inches of snow, for which our passengers tires were completely insufficient, and the sudden adjustment that accompanied moving from a town in which 70 percent of the residents were registered Democrats to a town that went 57 percent for McCain in the last election, I’ve tried to keep up, somehow, with my new reality. And along the way I’ve picked up a few things that I promise to take with me as we start our road trip and half-year sabbatical. These are, in no particular order:

1. There is nothing that being in a hurry makes better, except possibly catching a ferry. I spent a lot of time in DC rushing around, and now I wonder why.
2. Listservs just aren’t as good for meting out advice as real people. Sure, I appreciate the community list, but asking my local pharmacist who they recommend for something, even when it’s unrelated to pharmacy, helps get me information they feel attached to, and thus, it becomes better information. This is how I found the second dry cleaners in Walla Walla. For the record, there are two dry cleaners in Walla Walla. The first was cheap but a bit brusque, if anyone cares to know such things.
3. It’s not what you do, it’s who you are. This was a hard one for me. Career was very important to me before we moved; it was something I worked hard for, found accomplishment in, and that I could appeal to when I asked the question “why.” I also quite enjoyed the salary I eventually made, but again, I worked damn hard for that salary, including working at 3AM on a Saturday for a company vice president who was just about completely incompetent, and having a report thrown at me because the president didn’t like how much it had cost to produce. Fast forward to today and I’ve now been out of a job for 19 months. As long as I was focused on what I didn’t have, I tasted my own bile with the level of frustration I felt. But in the meantime, I’ve mentored people who really needed someone to listen to them and encourage them, I’ve helped out a mom with her newborn when she needed a sitter, I’ve tried to help people just this side of lonely make new connections to others, and I’m currently working on shining a spotlight on the emerging Walla Walla food culture/community, and I think those are all good things. None of them has made me a penny, and in a way, that’s very liberating. My sense of self has shifted from me inside an office to me beyond an office.
4. Sometimes you just need a nice glass of wine at the end of the day. Or if wine isn’t your thing, iced tea. Or some other refreshment, so long as there’s a moment to decompress from the day’s activities. And if chocolate could accompany this moment, all the better. But remember, we have to breathe before we take the next step.
5. When faced with an opportunity to do something unknown vs. already experienced, go for the unknown. I suppose this is another way to say nothing ventured, nothing gained, but damn, that phrase is old and worn out. We could have stayed in DC and not come to Walla Walla, sure. And Susanne would still be teaching as a part-time instructor and I would still be working for the government. And I would not have found the time yet to get to my writing. This would all have amounted to limbo as humans live it. So even if this writing thing is a pipe dream, I’m glad to be doing it, and not a week goes by that I don’t hear at least once that what I’ve written has meant something important for someone. All because I arranged pixels on a screen. That is really touching to me.
6. The more you make your life about learning Important Things, the less you’ll really know. Another hard one for me, since I’ve been all about the learning and growing my whole life. But I see now that I’m not less of a person for not knowing rocket science. The beauty of this position is that I can learn constantly, just by being aware and being principled. This drives me to keep picking up other people’s stories, because I can’t live everyone else’s lives. So the next best thing is hearing them, asking questions and paying attention. I aim to walk a whole lot of miles in other people’s shoes and spend less time fretting about what I don’t know.
7. Having a sit-down supper most nights is a great excuse for talking. I know, this means I need to close my laptop. I’m okay with that, because on any given night, it could be cheese grits with asparagus and seared pork chops, or curried chicken over rice, or smashed red potatoes with roast chicken and wilted garlic spinach. And I wouldn’t want any of those things to get in between the keys. I also like recapping the day and enjoying another person’s company while having tasty treats.

These weren’t the lessons I sought out when we moved here, but these are the ones I’ve run into. And I recognize that the edge of interesting and trite is razor-thin, so if anyone has puked on themselves reading this, my sincerest apologies. But at the end of the analysis, these have turned out to be important to me. It’s not that they weren’t important before August 20, 2008, but they were just hard to hear through the din. I would genuinely love hearing other folks’ life lessons, so feel free to add them in the comments to this post.

Reflecting on all of the intersections within Walla Walla, I can’t recall a single NO LEFT TURN sign. Not by the Bi Mart, south side of town. Not at any point on Isaacs Road, which is a straight shot east into the Blue Mountains and which is littered with fast food shacks, auto parts stores, car washes, and oodles of plain gray parking lots. Not in the small downtown, even though every other city I’ve tromped through has boasted at least one stubbornly red sign.

It’s a small thing, I know, but it takes on a bit more meaning once one ventures into a large city with any kind of traffic issue. One finds oneself in a strange place and on the wrong street, and once the first battle with orientation is settled, realizes that the quickest way back to the tiny quadrant one does know is forbade by the local powers in charge. And then one is faced with a decision: break the law and feign innocence, or try to find another way over to the relief zone.

In DC, drivers could find themselves hitting a series of NO LEFT TURN signs, their frustration building quickly as they creep along, stuck behind other tourists, bicycle messengers, and a lot of men in suits with big briefcases.  And here the visitors thought government was trying to go paper-free. Little do they know that those are more likely the private sector guys. There are 50,000 practicing attorneys in Washington, DC.

In DC, defensive driving means watching out for all the Lexus owners texting while driving, the cars with fake paper license plates in the rear windows that add the important note, “STOLEN,” and the truly clueless in RVs. Who the hell RVs to a major city? Sometimes I would stand on a corner and laugh while they circled the block, trying to find parking. I wasn’t trying to be mean, it was just such a great pastime. Twice in DC my car was hit while I was idling at a red light: once from a guy who slid into me on black ice, and once when a driver in front of me backed up, trying to make room for a turning tour bus. These things just don’t happen in Wallyworld.

In Walla Walla, defensive driving means looking out for small children who’ve broken free of a parent’s grasp, slowing down for momma and baby ducks, and watching the red light runners, which I’ll get to later. These things tend not to happen in DC, although there is a street over by the army hospital with a goose crossing sign, and the two days I was on that road, I did in fact have to stop for crossing geese. It was almost as if they waited for my car just so they could cross, which I’ll note is the logic most pedestrians in the city, use too.

I’ve been made aware of the split between this corner of the United States and the world inside the Beltway that ensnares everything in the District. It has come in the form of massive snowfall. And it has come in the total lack of snowplowing afterward. It’s shown its face in the 5-minutes-to-anywhere nature of the city confines, a distinct difference from DC, in which most things are at least 35 minutes away, no matter how one travels. 2,800 miles away from the Capitol’s epicenter, how government really functions is invisible to people, who have en masse decided to decide that everyone in government has their worst interests at heart. And I try to explain as gently as possible that the government is just like every other office they’ve worked in, with all of those personalities working against and with each other for 8 hours a day.

These discrepancies remind me that we fear what we do not know. I’m not a subscriber to the “if we educate, we’ll have world peace,” because I’m far too cynical to believe that bigotry, oppression, and anger are only the result of ignorance. People have stakes. People earnestly believe their group (read: race, nation, state) has stakes that are threatened by some of other group. I could no sooner “educate” Rush Limbaugh and inspire him to be a bleeding heart liberal than I could teach a worm to fly, and I say this feeling pretty certain that even Rush doesn’t believe half the crap he spews out into his microphone. But Rush has a stake in his persona, and like everything else, if he’s not being increasingly conservative, he risks becoming irrelevant. And so he spews.

In the same way, people dig their heels in about what they think government represents, who they think it represents. It’s been a long time since I heard anyone say they feel personally supported by the Federal government, even as they drive on interstate highways, take their kids to the public library, call 911 when their kitchen’s on fire, or go to their child’s high school graduation. Instead when they make the pilgrimage to DC they get caught with one-way streets and NO LEFT TURN signs and it signals to them that they’re unwanted, when all it really means is there are way too many cars on the roads in the city and someone is trying something to make the system keep working.

Walla Walla is a place where people run red lights all the time. I was astonished when I saw the first runner, because I’d been conditioned out of it from all the ticketing cameras that have grown into the East Coast traffic system like kudzu, and because I’m such a law-abider, my exception that of speeding. I never saw a speed limit that 7 more miles an hour didn’t make better. But going through a red light, to me, was just jaw-dropping, in the same way that any minimally suicidal tendency is, like intentionally gaining 500 pounds, or BASE jumping.

But maybe it says something about the garden variety Walla Wallan. As if the rules don’t apply out here. Or that my neighbors and fellow car drivers won’t mind. It’s just one light. It’s just today. It’s just that it’s 3AM. It’s just that I see other people do it all the time.

In this kind of context, what else can the government represent but an angry nanny, an everything-is-rules custodian who seeks to end pleasure and red light running, out of spite? I shouldn’t be surprised at the level of distrust, I suppose.

I wonder what 20 months in Walla Walla has done to change my perspective, what new kinds of things I’ll see as we drive back across the country, and what I’ll miss that I wouldn’t have before. I am the guy who wants to discover the hidden world in the sidewalk crack, a focus on fascination that I’ve carried with me since I was 3. I want to start seeing where we come together because I am damn tired of seeing how far apart we are. I want people in DC and Walla Walla to know that they are closer than they think: in both towns I was a regular customer of several businesses, laughing with them about inanity. Both towns boast big, tree-covered parks. Both towns struggle with caring for their elderly, face cutbacks to their education budget, struggle with aging and fading infrastructure. We could learn a lot from each other.

I am not looking forward to being told I can’t make a left turn. But I won’t blame anybody about it, either. I’ll try to take the laissez faire attitude of the Northwest to the Type A personality of DC. I’m a peace ambassador.

So we’ve sketched out and thought about and worked our way through to some summer plans, and wireless connectivity what it is, will be relaying our journey on this very blog, in what will wind up being a reverse travelogue of our trip in August 2008. Once June rolls around I will also be guest blogging for Bitch magazine, so I will have to get a bit creative in the early part of the month on ways to get my posts published. But as far as trans/plant/portation goes, here is a preview of our trip back east:

Hot springs in Idaho—non-sulfur pools like the one we’ve been to in Radium, British Columbia

Grand Teton National Park—Susanne revealed to me that “tetons” is from the breast-like mountain silhouette. Yeah, she had to go make it dirty.

Yellowstone National Park—we’re aiming to reach this park on my actual 40th birthday, because I can think of nothing as wonderful as standing next to “Old Faithful” when I enter my 41st year.

The Badlands of South Dakota—I have no expectations, but I am told it will be breathtaking, so I’ll bring some extra air with me.

Mt. Rushmore and the Corn Palace—I feel an itch to write this blog post very badly, juxtaposing the majestic grandeur of the presidents with . . . corn.

Minneapolis/St. Paul—no trip cross-continent would be complete without at least a short visit to the land of the Fargo Accent.

I think it may be fun to make some kind of flip book like I’ve seen for little kids. It could combine the destination, the beautiful feature of the destination, and how I could wound or maim myself. Roughing out the idea a little, here are some examples:

Everett got splinters | taking pictures of trees | in the Grand Tetons

Everett got sunburned | looking at the sculpture garden | in Minneapolis

Everett was bitten by a bear | hiking the stunning cliffs | of the Badlands

Mixing and matching only makes it more fun! I see a children’s book here, really.

After all of this traveling, we will land in DC, just in time for the DC Pride weekend, which will, it nearly goes without saying, be completely unlike Walla Walla in tone and demographic. And just watch, I’ll probably get overwhelmed from so many people. The desert’s always greener, or something.

I am a stickler for cleanliness in food preparation. I actively think about cross-contamination, heating temperatures and holding temperatures, the timing of separate dishes, and the kinds of food that go well in one’s stomach and not just with one’s taste buds. I dedicate myself to these tiny causes as if I were wielding a neon green small plastic fork, usually only suitable for battles with tasteless green olives before they are drowned in a sea of gin and tonic. My persistence comes not because I was scared into it by countless local news broadcasts, but because I have intersected salmonella before, and have vowed to avoid it from here on out if at all possible. And I certainly, most definitely, to the nth degree do not want to unleash that kind of hell onto anyone else.

Especially my wife.

To say I was upset that she was ill would be an understatement, but whatever it was, her emotions regarding her sudden lack of stomach control were probably more intense.

We presumed something had gone off the rails with regard to the chicken I’d made Friday night. I was just fine and she was the keeling over canary in the mine. Perhaps the bacteria party had only made a scene on one chicken breast and not the other.

Saturday and Sunday she struggled through, mostly sleeping, and me mostly writing downstairs, venturing out to the supermarket a couple of times for electrolyte-rich liquids. By Sunday evening she was mostly repaired.

I was excited to start my Census training the next day, on Monday. Well, excited might be a bit of an overstatement. I was happy to get back to work, and interested in knowing where they’d send me and what my door-knocking experience would be like. I had a little stack of items the recruiter had said I’d need, a little bundle of my personal identifying information or PII as the government calls it. The government has never met an acronym it didn’t like. TGHNMAAIDL. Well, maybe that one.

Monday morning, I felt oddly sluggish, and not entirely myself. Having no direct recall of being anyone else, I couldn’t name who else I felt like, so I just took the 70 percent that was me and sat up. This turned out to be a bad idea. I bolted to the bathroom and threw up the little that was in my stomach after 8 hours of sleep. While this might seem fortunate—generally, people don’t like the experience of vomiting, after all—what it really meant was that the material that had moved on past my stomach was just looking for the next nearest exit, which as anyone who’s ever flown a plane knows, may be behind you.

I was supposed to report to my swearing in at 9:00. It was 7:50. This was not good.

I showered briefly, cursing my alimentary canal for the Judas it was, and I crept back into bed for I don’t know what reason. Susanne pet my head.

And then she acknowledged that perhaps I hadn’t made her sick. I groaned in response.

I figured if I didn’t eat anything and didn’t drink anything, I could make it through the so-called “administration day.” I’d have to swear to protect the Constitution, which I’ve done before and having seen a good number of inaugurations, am pretty sure how it goes. I’d get fingerprinted, and fill out lots of paperwork.

Question: How long could that take?

Answer: Long enough to have to run to the men’s room and heave a few times.

The Census staff were nice enough, but the problem was that these trainings—even for the rote paperwork chicken scratching—are designed for inattentive or otherwise unfocused people. Every direction is read three times, using slightly different words. One would think this would be a helpful device, but it’s not, because those inattentive and otherwise unfocused people, or IOUPs, as they’re known in this blog, get all caught up on those differences.

“Wait a minute,” said one young fellow looking at the tax withholding form, “how do I know if I’m exempt from taxes?”

“Well, let me read you the definition,” said the crew chief. Because most people are exempt due to the fact that they’re retired and on Social Security, the chief knew this guy didn’t fit the criteria already, but he read it anyway.

And still, my young friend did not understand. Now he was getting confused between excluded from taxpaying and withholding allowances, like for head of household or the Duggans’ 20 dependents.

Five minutes later the crew chief was back on track and I had forged ahead with my paperwork, my hands neatly folded in front of me.

I held myself back from taking hold of any of the bottles of water in the room. Oh, water, I thought. I love you so much. You are a part of me. I am sorry for our recent misfortune. I don’t want to be like those leaky-from-the-mouth water people on that recent episode of Doctor Who. I just want to drink you. I am Alice in wonderland, okay?

I made it through the fingerprinting and had finished all but one of my forms and saw, to my horror, that I had been there for two and a half hours. I asked the assistant crew chief how much longer we’d be today.

“Oh, we’ll go to 4 or 4:30,” she said cheerily.

I stabbed my eyes out with my pencil. At least, I thought hard about doing that but realized it wouldn’t actual help me with anything. I really just wanted to drink some water. In my mind I saw water fountains, bursting faucets, twirling bottles of Evian. My stomach lurched and I felt unsteady and shaky. I hadn’t eaten or drunk in 16 hours.

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” I told the crew chief, who seemed to recognize that I was a cesspool of virus strands. I was Patient Zero.

He looked to see what else I had to complete and told me if I could bring it back in later today, I could come back for the start of training tomorrow. I nodded and thanked him.

The rest of my day was a feverish blur. I froze under a thick woolen blanket on the couch and slept, and Susanne sweetly delivered my signed papers to him. But Tuesday morning I was no better, the thermometer reading 100.6. I was now holding down liquid, but I’d lost 8 pounds, I guessed all in water.

I blew my opportunity to work for Census, although they’d said I could do another training in May. Given that we’re heading out of town at the end of May, it doesn’t seem worth it to me or my friend the government. Susanne summed it up for me in a way that made me laugh out loud in one duck honk:

“I feel like your blog is all about the stuff you’re about to do but that doesn’t somehow work out for you.”

Touche, darling. Touche.