I got on board with the whole Harry Potter thing a little late in the game. Even though I live my life surrounded by kids for most of the year, the Potter books had escaped my radar in their earlier days. I first knew of it as a phenomenon on a dark and stormy July night, watching some national news magazine reporting on all of the kids waiting in line to buy "Goblet of Fire" at midnight. I figured it was something I should know more about, and had myself caught up with the first four books in a matter of weeks. It was a convenient excuse to say I was following it all so closely because I was an elementary teacher, and felt like I should stay on top of whatever my students were interested in at the time. Admittedly this was a pretty thin excuse -- after all, I've never seen an episode of Hannah Montana, I didn't buy any *NSYNC albums, and to this day I still have no idea how to play Pokémon. So my need to stay in touch with what my students like has its limits.
Once I was caught up in the whole Hogwarts-world mythology, I wound up reading and re-reading each book several times. It became an escape for me while my sister was sick. Reading Harry Potter on the love seat up in my loft with my dog beside me, the house darkened except for a reading lamp, with the John Williams scores from the movie series shuffling through an iTunes playlist providing the background music for my reading was a valuable coping tool during that time. I became very caught up in the mythology, even buying a couple of fan-exploiting speculation books where people had analyzed the books for clues that might provide hints about what still could be coming up in the overall story. Which was perfect reading for someone who overthinks 250 different things on any given day.
My first hardcover copy of "Prisoner of Azkaban" was stolen from my classroom. It was kind of a bummer since it was hardcover, but part of being a teacher is just accepting that at some point books are going to disappear from your personal library. And since Azkaban is my least favorite of the series, it wasn't really the end of the world. It was curious when, months later, a kid gave me a brand new copy of it, just out of the goodness of his heart, since he was so marked by the injustice of my book being stolen. I'm still slightly suspicious about this...
The year "Order of the Phoenix" was scheduled to come out saw the excitement build to a fever pitch at school. I read "Goblet of Fire" to my class that spring -- and it took the whole spring to finish, with several days when read aloud time stretched well beyond the allotted twenty minutes. We even had a poster from the first movie hanging in the classroom that year, and I let the students, led by one particularly psychopathic Harry Potter nerd, keep a countdown to the release date for "Order of the Phoenix" on the whiteboard. Using "Goblet" as a read aloud was kind of a precarious thing to do since this was back in the time when there was a little bubble of controversy around the whole witchcraft element of the stories, but I only heard anything about it from one parent. I got an e-mail from a mom later that summer, saying that my reading Harry Potter to the class had been what had broken through her son's lifelong resistance to reading independently, and that he'd read all of the other books as soon as school had gotten out, and then moved on to other books as well. A pretty gratifying moment.
I was so pumped to get "Phoenix" that I used taking Nephew #1 to the midnight release at Borders as an excuse to wait in line. And wait we did... we probably weren't out of there until at least 1:00, which was much later than Nephew #1 wanted to be there. Although he did read himself to sleep as soon as we were home. We planned ahead better for the midnight release of "Half-Blood Prince," and staked out a place in line as soon as we were allowed in for the Borders festivities. Luckily we hooked up with a group of people all loosely associated with school (including the little girl who would go on to nominate me for my teaching award a couple of years afterward) so the waiting was a lot less boring. Nephew #1 and Award Girl had quite the time laughing over the books in the section where we waited, which were all foreign language translations of current bestsellers. And since this was toward the front of the store, we were out of there in a beautiful eight minutes.
Years later Nephew #1 and I finished off our midnight appointments waiting for "Deathly Hallows." We walked around a bit and snarked to each other about all of the people there in costumes and face paint, then got in line before it became unreasonably long. That year I knew I'd wind up seeing people from school, so I defiantly wore my Pearls Before Swine "People Are Idiots, and I Hate Them" t-shirt, just to see how many raised eyebrows I'd get. There were certainly a few. There would have been even more if those parents had realized how many times I'd worn that same t-shirt underneath a respectable-looking sweater during parent-teacher conferences....
By the time "Deathly Hallows" came out, some of the thrill had burned away for me -- I just didn't need the escape like I had before. By then it was more about having everything resolved and finding out how it ended than about getting all kinds of questions answered. Once I had finished the books and knew how it all worked out, the movies lost a lot of magic since there wasn't anything to speculate over anymore. I've always loved the movies, even the ones that some people don't think worked as well. I was really taken with the first two because the casting and the settings had, for the most part, closely matched how I had envisioned so much of the story... although, I personally don't feel that Michael Gambon's Dumbledore ever came close to Richard Harris's, and I think there was a huge lost opportunity when Tim Roth turned down the part of Snape in favor of that stupid "Planet of the Apes" remake that came out about the same time. Seriously -- go look up a picture of Tim Roth, and try telling me he wouldn't have been an awesome Snape. I'm just saying.
Tomorrow it all comes to a definitive end with the release of the last movie, "Deathly Hallows Part 2." Everything I've read about that movie makes it sound like it should be a great conclusion to the whole thing, and I'm very excited to see it, both to enjoy the movie itself and to just put the last bit of closure on what has been a great story to follow. But is it Midnight Showing Worthy?
I think I'd rather wait for a quieter early afternoon matinee tomorrow, when the theater won't be overtaken by fandom enthusiasm, and I can enjoy it all in the same personal way I have throughout the series. I've waited for the end for this long. Pretty sure I can make it a few more hours.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Truth Behind the Bunny Suit
Class party days obviously aren't as educational as other days at school. Even if the parties only last an hour or so, the kids spend much more of the day thinking about the upcoming party than focusing on any learning that should take place.
Believe it or not, class parties have become fairly political in the past few years, with Halloween being the biggest potential firestorm on the list. For some people Halloween is just a chance for kids to wear costumes and make-up and wigs and funny hats and so on, dressing in whatever ways will get the biggest laughs or draw the most attention. But for other people it’s a precarious day when the kids are in danger of being exposed to any and all varieties of terror and violence through frightening masks and fake blood and phosphorescent goo, all of which will undoubtably instigate weeks of nightmares. The kids themselves, for the most part, just want to have a fun time and enjoy a day at school with their friends when they’re allowed to do something out of the ordinary, like play games or dress up have treats. In many cases this has led to some schools or grade levels or individual classes tweaking their party themes and renaming them “Harvest Festivals.” Which is decent work-around I guess, and the kids don’t care much as long as they get to have their special day. And celebrating the harvest is appropriate enough, because it is October after all, and apparently we live in the 1700s.
At my school, the Halloween / Harvest breakdown happens by grade level. My grade has always come down on the Halloween side of things and probably will until we’re told not to. I honestly don’t care one way or the other, outside of one small detail: If we were to hold a harvest festival instead of a Halloween party, I would look terribly out of place dressed like a big white bunny.
Several years ago my younger sister Erin was dying, stricken with the astonishingly rare variety of lung cancer that occurs in non-smokers. After fighting through some aggressive treatments, she was given a terminal diagnosis in the late summer. She was the activities director at an assisted living complex and worked as long as she could but reached a point when she had to stop, which hadn’t been an easy concession for her to make. It also meant that she wasn’t going to be wearing her bunny suit to work on Halloween that year. Our older sister had made the suit for her years before. It was white, fuzzy, and inescapable, the kind of attention-getting costume that was self-deprecating and in your face all at the same time.
Erin had begun downsizing her belongings that fall, and as Halloween approached I thought back to the bunny suit. I had never willingly worn costumes to school before and became theatrically grouchy about such ideas whenever they were brought up. Wearing the bunny suit to school would catch people so completely off guard it was worth considering. I e-mailed Erin to ask her what had happened to it. She thought it had wound up in our parents’ garage, and pieced together what I was thinking. “That would rock,” she replied. “Your kids would love it.”
I wasn’t sold on the idea and knew I’d be setting myself up for some pretty serious embarrassment, but decided to go for it when I thought of Erin, stuck at home that year with no energy to do anything, no costume to wear and nowhere to wear it. And if the thought of my wearing the bunny suit would bring a couple smiles to her face while she spent her day fighting back her fear and depression, it was worth doing. “I love it,” she wrote when I finally made up my mind. “Please have someone take a photo.” Knowing what the reaction would be, I assured her that wouldn’t be a problem.
I was at school early on the morning of the party day to make sure I could smuggle the suit in unseen. I called one of my friends to come to my room and help with the make-up since I didn’t have a mirror. Her reaction was a good preview of the abuse that would be piled on me throughout the day, but we couldn’t get the make up kit to work at all. We eventually dismissed it the cheap piece of grocery store junk that it was and dug some washable markers out of a student desk instead. They did the job nicely.
Most people on the staff laughed like I had never seen them laugh before. A few managed to keep straight faces and play along, but the effect worked exactly like I thought it would. Eventually the make up issue was resolved by an expert. One of my students was dressed as a zombie cheerleader, and even though she wasn’t wearing her make-up during our class party, she has practiced extensively with the kit that came with her costume. "You have to get your face wet first, and then it works," she said. And it did. So she redid my face for me, and I finally looked like a bunny for the last two hours of the day. Several pictures were taken, and I was able to e-mail them to Erin that evening. Knowing how much she enjoyed them made it worth the embarrassment.
The following Halloween came around only weeks after she had died. I was destroyed, angry and depressed in the aftermath, and was doing little more than sleepwalking through my life with no sense of bearing or purpose. But I still decided to wear the bunny suit again as a tribute, even if it was something that only a few people would know the reason behind why I was wearing it. Because frankly, the thing is a pain in the butt to wear. It’s unimaginably hot. The ears flop down in front of my face and block my vision, the head is constantly twisting sideways on its own to try and cover my left eye, and the little bunny mittens make it next to impossible to pick up anything and write while staying in costume, to say nothing of the discomfort that comes from walking around without shoes all day because bunnies don’t wear shoes and it looks even more stupid to do so. And since they only way in and out of this thing is a velcro strip down the back, simple things like using the bathroom or putting keys in a pocket become pretty impractical.
I still wear it, all the years later, and still as a tribute even though most people only think its just a costume. It’s become something of a tradition at school: Little kids jump and wave when they pass me in the hall that day, and for the rest of the year will point at me and shout “YOU’RE THE BUNNY!” like I’d forgotten about it. If there ever was a year I decided not to wear it, the grief I’d collect from much of the staff, and especially the students, would be worse than just enduring the thing for another year. But as much as I gripe I have to admit the suit has become a distinctive hallmark, and if / when the day comes when our Halloween celebration becomes more harvest-oriented, I’ll miss not having to drag it out.
And even though I’ve probably now worn it more times than Erin ever did, I still think of it as hers. In fact just a couple of years ago I’d gotten an e-mail from someone at a different school asking about it. They were having some kind of reading night or whatever and had heard through a connection to my school that I had a bunny suit which would fit perfectly with their event, and wondered if they’d be able to borrow it.
My reply: “No, I’m sorry. It’s not my suit. I only borrow it.”
Believe it or not, class parties have become fairly political in the past few years, with Halloween being the biggest potential firestorm on the list. For some people Halloween is just a chance for kids to wear costumes and make-up and wigs and funny hats and so on, dressing in whatever ways will get the biggest laughs or draw the most attention. But for other people it’s a precarious day when the kids are in danger of being exposed to any and all varieties of terror and violence through frightening masks and fake blood and phosphorescent goo, all of which will undoubtably instigate weeks of nightmares. The kids themselves, for the most part, just want to have a fun time and enjoy a day at school with their friends when they’re allowed to do something out of the ordinary, like play games or dress up have treats. In many cases this has led to some schools or grade levels or individual classes tweaking their party themes and renaming them “Harvest Festivals.” Which is decent work-around I guess, and the kids don’t care much as long as they get to have their special day. And celebrating the harvest is appropriate enough, because it is October after all, and apparently we live in the 1700s.
At my school, the Halloween / Harvest breakdown happens by grade level. My grade has always come down on the Halloween side of things and probably will until we’re told not to. I honestly don’t care one way or the other, outside of one small detail: If we were to hold a harvest festival instead of a Halloween party, I would look terribly out of place dressed like a big white bunny.
Several years ago my younger sister Erin was dying, stricken with the astonishingly rare variety of lung cancer that occurs in non-smokers. After fighting through some aggressive treatments, she was given a terminal diagnosis in the late summer. She was the activities director at an assisted living complex and worked as long as she could but reached a point when she had to stop, which hadn’t been an easy concession for her to make. It also meant that she wasn’t going to be wearing her bunny suit to work on Halloween that year. Our older sister had made the suit for her years before. It was white, fuzzy, and inescapable, the kind of attention-getting costume that was self-deprecating and in your face all at the same time.
Erin had begun downsizing her belongings that fall, and as Halloween approached I thought back to the bunny suit. I had never willingly worn costumes to school before and became theatrically grouchy about such ideas whenever they were brought up. Wearing the bunny suit to school would catch people so completely off guard it was worth considering. I e-mailed Erin to ask her what had happened to it. She thought it had wound up in our parents’ garage, and pieced together what I was thinking. “That would rock,” she replied. “Your kids would love it.”
I wasn’t sold on the idea and knew I’d be setting myself up for some pretty serious embarrassment, but decided to go for it when I thought of Erin, stuck at home that year with no energy to do anything, no costume to wear and nowhere to wear it. And if the thought of my wearing the bunny suit would bring a couple smiles to her face while she spent her day fighting back her fear and depression, it was worth doing. “I love it,” she wrote when I finally made up my mind. “Please have someone take a photo.” Knowing what the reaction would be, I assured her that wouldn’t be a problem.
I was at school early on the morning of the party day to make sure I could smuggle the suit in unseen. I called one of my friends to come to my room and help with the make-up since I didn’t have a mirror. Her reaction was a good preview of the abuse that would be piled on me throughout the day, but we couldn’t get the make up kit to work at all. We eventually dismissed it the cheap piece of grocery store junk that it was and dug some washable markers out of a student desk instead. They did the job nicely.
Most people on the staff laughed like I had never seen them laugh before. A few managed to keep straight faces and play along, but the effect worked exactly like I thought it would. Eventually the make up issue was resolved by an expert. One of my students was dressed as a zombie cheerleader, and even though she wasn’t wearing her make-up during our class party, she has practiced extensively with the kit that came with her costume. "You have to get your face wet first, and then it works," she said. And it did. So she redid my face for me, and I finally looked like a bunny for the last two hours of the day. Several pictures were taken, and I was able to e-mail them to Erin that evening. Knowing how much she enjoyed them made it worth the embarrassment.
The following Halloween came around only weeks after she had died. I was destroyed, angry and depressed in the aftermath, and was doing little more than sleepwalking through my life with no sense of bearing or purpose. But I still decided to wear the bunny suit again as a tribute, even if it was something that only a few people would know the reason behind why I was wearing it. Because frankly, the thing is a pain in the butt to wear. It’s unimaginably hot. The ears flop down in front of my face and block my vision, the head is constantly twisting sideways on its own to try and cover my left eye, and the little bunny mittens make it next to impossible to pick up anything and write while staying in costume, to say nothing of the discomfort that comes from walking around without shoes all day because bunnies don’t wear shoes and it looks even more stupid to do so. And since they only way in and out of this thing is a velcro strip down the back, simple things like using the bathroom or putting keys in a pocket become pretty impractical.
I still wear it, all the years later, and still as a tribute even though most people only think its just a costume. It’s become something of a tradition at school: Little kids jump and wave when they pass me in the hall that day, and for the rest of the year will point at me and shout “YOU’RE THE BUNNY!” like I’d forgotten about it. If there ever was a year I decided not to wear it, the grief I’d collect from much of the staff, and especially the students, would be worse than just enduring the thing for another year. But as much as I gripe I have to admit the suit has become a distinctive hallmark, and if / when the day comes when our Halloween celebration becomes more harvest-oriented, I’ll miss not having to drag it out.
And even though I’ve probably now worn it more times than Erin ever did, I still think of it as hers. In fact just a couple of years ago I’d gotten an e-mail from someone at a different school asking about it. They were having some kind of reading night or whatever and had heard through a connection to my school that I had a bunny suit which would fit perfectly with their event, and wondered if they’d be able to borrow it.
My reply: “No, I’m sorry. It’s not my suit. I only borrow it.”
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
George, Boom City, and the Drunken Boat Race
I hate listening to people talk about their vacations. I understand how they were adventurous and restorative experiences, but too often listening to the trip or looking at the pictures is the kind of thing I find myself only being able to politely endure, because the enthusiasm with which the vacation is retold never translates well to someone who wasn’t there to experience it themselves. Having said that, I’ll cut right to the interesting parts of my recent trip to Washington state. And I’ll skip the photos entirely.
*I get stressed pretty easily about flying -- not so much the flying part, but the whole getting through security on time and not being stranded in Chicago kind of thing. It just seems like too much can go wrong, and on my way out it sort of did. My connecting flight was delayed an hour, and when we finally got on I was trapped in a window seat between the side of the plane and a 317-pound poster boy for sleep apnea, who snorted himself awake every eight minutes all the way to Denver. I was very happy to deplane and grab a quick lunch while waiting in a quiet corner at the gate for my flight to Seattle. Which I enjoyed, right up until the moment Larry the Cable Guy’s in-laws came along and sat down behind me for half an hour. The flight to Seattle was delayed about an hour due to the weather in Denver, though not until we were already on the runway. This was mostly okay though, because I fell in love with our flight attendant Jamie about six minutes after I sat down. She looked good in her librarian glasses and airline shorts, and spoke with just enough of a southern lilt to make everything she said sound vaguely and dangerously flirtatious.
*I stayed with my friends Dax and Melissa, who live just outside of Seattle. Dax works out of their home and has some flexibility in his schedule so we were able to check out sights while Melissa was at work. The first big visit was Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, a shopping experience not entirely unlike a day at the Minnesota State Fair. Pike Place is three stories worth of fish market / farmer’s market / craft fair / tourist trap / food court / shopping mall full of stores selling things that nobody could possibly need. It’s so crowded you need to walk through it sideways and look ten feet ahead to navigate your way through everyone else. We saw at least a dozen different street musicians playing while we were there; it occurred to me that if all of these people got together and collaborated, they’d make up the most eclectic orchestra imaginable. The vendors we encountered were unfailingly friendly, except for the fish guy who was trying to give me a complex when I wasn’t immediately willing to ship 15 pounds of fresh salmon to every person I know.
*With the fourth of July approaching Dax really wanted to get some fireworks, so we went on a run after Melissa came home. There were signs along the highway advertising “Boom City,” a temporary explosion mall located on a reservation where a wider variety of combustion promised to be available. And holy smokes, was it. Boom City was the size of a county fair, and looked scary enough to make me think it was the kind of place where the quasi-criminals populating the backgrounds of movies like “The Fast and the Furious” would go to buy their fireworks. A couple days later we found a newspaper article about Boom City, where one of the carnies -- I mean, vendors -- had been asked about what seemed like the legal gray area of what they were selling. He said they stayed within the law, because, and I quote: “It ain’t worth the felony.” Which is the kind of statement that implies there could possibly be a list of things in his worldview that would be worth the felony. But apparently selling $1,300 packages of fireworks was just fine. It didn’t take us more than a few minutes to decide we were out of our league, and we quickly retreated to a friendly little tent outside of a nearby grocery store.
*Last winter when I was first planning my trip, Dax told me that Rush was going to be playing Washington in early July, so we decided to go. Regular Summer Vacation readers know I saw Rush just last summer, and seeing them again seemed like it’d be a good time even if it would be the identical show from the same tour. (Although it turned out to be the very last show of the tour, so that was kind of cool.)
The real draw this time was to see a show at The Gorge. This is a world-famous amphitheater in central Washington that has the Columbia river and its resulting canyon -- or gorge, I suppose -- for a backdrop. The Gorge is really remote, the nearest bit of civilization being a truck stop of a town called George. Yes. George, Washington... I know! This place is so far removed from the rest of the world that people living here would have to travel to the middle of nowhere for a night on the town. We took the interstate through the Cascade mountains to get there, so we did take in quite a bit of scenery not generally found in Anoka County. The climate shifted so dramatically on the eastern side of the mountains it was like traveling to another region: instead of the lush, green cool of the Seattle area, we were surrounded by dry brush and rock formations, with a good twenty-degree summer-like jump in the temperature. The view at The Gorge is transcendent, and the sound was great. I can’t imagine a better place for a midsummer concert. The one drawback? Sitting on a hill with a forty-degree grade messes with your balance.
*The next day we took the ferry over to Poulsbo, where Dax’s parents live. They have a great house with a stunning backyard. Calling it a garden wouldn’t do it justice -- it’s more of a private arboretum. When Dax’s mom, Lynn, mentioned something about shopping at the farmer’s market in town (which I’m sure was amazing), I couldn’t see the point: There had to be twenty different fruits and vegetables growing there between the yard and the rooftop garden above the garage.
Poulsbo would be the most blatant tourist trap imaginable if it had been intentionally created, but instead it just exists as it is. It was all genuinely small-town Americana: a downtown of nice restaurants and specialty shops, a band shell in the park, art shops and bookstores, a boardwalk along the waterfront, all tied together by Norwegian heritage. After touring the town, we spent the evening at a neighborhood picnic, complete with music playing, more food than seventy-plus people there could possibly eat, and kids running around in a massive water fight all night long. It was great fun to be a casual observer of it all, and worth noting that I did in fact hold a brief lead in the men's 18-and-older division for the Cherry Pit Spitting Contest.
We stayed at the picnic until it was dark and cool enough to collect the sweatshirts and blankets we needed before walking down to a small park overlooking the water, where we could see hundreds -- seriously, I’m not exaggerating here, I mean hundreds -- of enormous boats waiting for the fireworks. They’d been parked down there all day. We joked about the challenges presented by anyone trying to navigate their way out of that when the show ended; it would have been difficult enough in the dark, much less sober. Which likely didn’t describe too many captains by that time of the night. But it was a perfect location. The last fireworks I intentionally sat down to watch were over a shallow mud hole of a lake formed in a river bend. This year they were over Puget Sound. Make your own comparison.
*Dax and I spent most of the actual 4th of July regressing to fourteen years old: sleeping late, watching TV, playing video games, driving around listening to music, going to Five Guys for lunch. When Melissa got home from work, dinner was ribs on the grill, homemade onion rings and potato salad, and my first corn on the cob of the summer. Not a bad meal for the 4th. While the events of the day went on, the Washington Statewide Fireworks began. Now, Minnesota people who complain about their neighbors shooting off fireworks? No. You don’t get sympathy from me anymore. Because Washington on the 4th is INSANE. There was so much popping and crackling and pounding and whistling and screaming throughout the day, it was enough to turn a mildly ADHD kid inside out. When it was dark enough for the real show to begin, it continued on for at least three hours. Constantly. There were more professional-grade fireworks being shot off within a two-mile radius than I could follow, including the display by all the neighbors in Melissa and Dax’s cul-de-sac. There are few things I’ve seen in recent memory as disconcerting as the sight of an eight year-old kid in flip flops using a propane torch to light the fuse on a $30 chemical mixture that could melt bone, then yelling “Fire in the hole!” and jogging away. Things finally started quieting after midnight... but notice I didn’t say “stopped.” It was still going on when I fell asleep, which wasn’t as hard to do as you might think, because it became so easy to tune out all of the noise by then. But the dogs were not pleased.
*My return trip was blessedly uneventful, and the morning sky was uncharacteristically clear and we could see Mount Rainier dominating the southern horizon on the way to the airport. The whole experience was a great trip, and just the break I needed. And even though we ate really well the whole time, there was so much to do and so much walking around that I actually dropped a few pounds while I was there.
Can’t ask for much more than that.
*I get stressed pretty easily about flying -- not so much the flying part, but the whole getting through security on time and not being stranded in Chicago kind of thing. It just seems like too much can go wrong, and on my way out it sort of did. My connecting flight was delayed an hour, and when we finally got on I was trapped in a window seat between the side of the plane and a 317-pound poster boy for sleep apnea, who snorted himself awake every eight minutes all the way to Denver. I was very happy to deplane and grab a quick lunch while waiting in a quiet corner at the gate for my flight to Seattle. Which I enjoyed, right up until the moment Larry the Cable Guy’s in-laws came along and sat down behind me for half an hour. The flight to Seattle was delayed about an hour due to the weather in Denver, though not until we were already on the runway. This was mostly okay though, because I fell in love with our flight attendant Jamie about six minutes after I sat down. She looked good in her librarian glasses and airline shorts, and spoke with just enough of a southern lilt to make everything she said sound vaguely and dangerously flirtatious.
*I stayed with my friends Dax and Melissa, who live just outside of Seattle. Dax works out of their home and has some flexibility in his schedule so we were able to check out sights while Melissa was at work. The first big visit was Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, a shopping experience not entirely unlike a day at the Minnesota State Fair. Pike Place is three stories worth of fish market / farmer’s market / craft fair / tourist trap / food court / shopping mall full of stores selling things that nobody could possibly need. It’s so crowded you need to walk through it sideways and look ten feet ahead to navigate your way through everyone else. We saw at least a dozen different street musicians playing while we were there; it occurred to me that if all of these people got together and collaborated, they’d make up the most eclectic orchestra imaginable. The vendors we encountered were unfailingly friendly, except for the fish guy who was trying to give me a complex when I wasn’t immediately willing to ship 15 pounds of fresh salmon to every person I know.
*With the fourth of July approaching Dax really wanted to get some fireworks, so we went on a run after Melissa came home. There were signs along the highway advertising “Boom City,” a temporary explosion mall located on a reservation where a wider variety of combustion promised to be available. And holy smokes, was it. Boom City was the size of a county fair, and looked scary enough to make me think it was the kind of place where the quasi-criminals populating the backgrounds of movies like “The Fast and the Furious” would go to buy their fireworks. A couple days later we found a newspaper article about Boom City, where one of the carnies -- I mean, vendors -- had been asked about what seemed like the legal gray area of what they were selling. He said they stayed within the law, because, and I quote: “It ain’t worth the felony.” Which is the kind of statement that implies there could possibly be a list of things in his worldview that would be worth the felony. But apparently selling $1,300 packages of fireworks was just fine. It didn’t take us more than a few minutes to decide we were out of our league, and we quickly retreated to a friendly little tent outside of a nearby grocery store.
*Last winter when I was first planning my trip, Dax told me that Rush was going to be playing Washington in early July, so we decided to go. Regular Summer Vacation readers know I saw Rush just last summer, and seeing them again seemed like it’d be a good time even if it would be the identical show from the same tour. (Although it turned out to be the very last show of the tour, so that was kind of cool.)
The real draw this time was to see a show at The Gorge. This is a world-famous amphitheater in central Washington that has the Columbia river and its resulting canyon -- or gorge, I suppose -- for a backdrop. The Gorge is really remote, the nearest bit of civilization being a truck stop of a town called George. Yes. George, Washington... I know! This place is so far removed from the rest of the world that people living here would have to travel to the middle of nowhere for a night on the town. We took the interstate through the Cascade mountains to get there, so we did take in quite a bit of scenery not generally found in Anoka County. The climate shifted so dramatically on the eastern side of the mountains it was like traveling to another region: instead of the lush, green cool of the Seattle area, we were surrounded by dry brush and rock formations, with a good twenty-degree summer-like jump in the temperature. The view at The Gorge is transcendent, and the sound was great. I can’t imagine a better place for a midsummer concert. The one drawback? Sitting on a hill with a forty-degree grade messes with your balance.
*The next day we took the ferry over to Poulsbo, where Dax’s parents live. They have a great house with a stunning backyard. Calling it a garden wouldn’t do it justice -- it’s more of a private arboretum. When Dax’s mom, Lynn, mentioned something about shopping at the farmer’s market in town (which I’m sure was amazing), I couldn’t see the point: There had to be twenty different fruits and vegetables growing there between the yard and the rooftop garden above the garage.
Poulsbo would be the most blatant tourist trap imaginable if it had been intentionally created, but instead it just exists as it is. It was all genuinely small-town Americana: a downtown of nice restaurants and specialty shops, a band shell in the park, art shops and bookstores, a boardwalk along the waterfront, all tied together by Norwegian heritage. After touring the town, we spent the evening at a neighborhood picnic, complete with music playing, more food than seventy-plus people there could possibly eat, and kids running around in a massive water fight all night long. It was great fun to be a casual observer of it all, and worth noting that I did in fact hold a brief lead in the men's 18-and-older division for the Cherry Pit Spitting Contest.
We stayed at the picnic until it was dark and cool enough to collect the sweatshirts and blankets we needed before walking down to a small park overlooking the water, where we could see hundreds -- seriously, I’m not exaggerating here, I mean hundreds -- of enormous boats waiting for the fireworks. They’d been parked down there all day. We joked about the challenges presented by anyone trying to navigate their way out of that when the show ended; it would have been difficult enough in the dark, much less sober. Which likely didn’t describe too many captains by that time of the night. But it was a perfect location. The last fireworks I intentionally sat down to watch were over a shallow mud hole of a lake formed in a river bend. This year they were over Puget Sound. Make your own comparison.
*Dax and I spent most of the actual 4th of July regressing to fourteen years old: sleeping late, watching TV, playing video games, driving around listening to music, going to Five Guys for lunch. When Melissa got home from work, dinner was ribs on the grill, homemade onion rings and potato salad, and my first corn on the cob of the summer. Not a bad meal for the 4th. While the events of the day went on, the Washington Statewide Fireworks began. Now, Minnesota people who complain about their neighbors shooting off fireworks? No. You don’t get sympathy from me anymore. Because Washington on the 4th is INSANE. There was so much popping and crackling and pounding and whistling and screaming throughout the day, it was enough to turn a mildly ADHD kid inside out. When it was dark enough for the real show to begin, it continued on for at least three hours. Constantly. There were more professional-grade fireworks being shot off within a two-mile radius than I could follow, including the display by all the neighbors in Melissa and Dax’s cul-de-sac. There are few things I’ve seen in recent memory as disconcerting as the sight of an eight year-old kid in flip flops using a propane torch to light the fuse on a $30 chemical mixture that could melt bone, then yelling “Fire in the hole!” and jogging away. Things finally started quieting after midnight... but notice I didn’t say “stopped.” It was still going on when I fell asleep, which wasn’t as hard to do as you might think, because it became so easy to tune out all of the noise by then. But the dogs were not pleased.
*My return trip was blessedly uneventful, and the morning sky was uncharacteristically clear and we could see Mount Rainier dominating the southern horizon on the way to the airport. The whole experience was a great trip, and just the break I needed. And even though we ate really well the whole time, there was so much to do and so much walking around that I actually dropped a few pounds while I was there.
Can’t ask for much more than that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)