Friday 26 June 2009

Juan de Fuca and other stories (day three and four)

"The UK? That's in Germany, right?"
Sophia, the helpful Alamo lady

Car dramas are not fun for anyone. Each day has seen a near accident. Today, we nearly go off the road. ('We' is meant in the sense it's Sophie's fault. I don't trust her). Yesterday Oscar tries to cut someone up. What a twat.

This ain't the America you see pixellated onto your LCD/cathode ray screen. This is the wilderness bit. Roads strung between outposts set up for nugatory/trivial/forgotten reasons. Do these places exist outside of a place for people to count down the miles to, before they get onto somewhere else? We pass lone workmen strimming. Minor gardening on the roadside, twenty miles away from the nearest settlement. A task for Sisyphus.

You arrive into Aberdeen, and realise why Kurt Cobain wanted out. Aberdeen is a jumble of buildings looking sorry for themselves. Apologies in squares of concrete. The bowling alley feels the need to annouce that they are, indeed open. Port Angeles is a strip of motels and fast food by the water. Divetowns- nowhere, but somewhere for some people, no one people, but someone people to other people.


In the morning the car winds through pine forest with mountainside dropping down to the left. Gasp gasp gasp we do. It wears you out. Lucky Charms with a view. A sugar nirvana crisp aired soggy cerealed blissoutswoon. Sigh.

Mosses hang feathered beards on the wizened cedars. Dinosaurs stomped here first, their bones lie down there, deepdown, furtherdown, fossilised & waiting endlessly. A coastal sweep and we walk on ruby sands (grey seasmoothed pebblestones). Skeletal Douglas firs pick up sticks wave scoured and salt bleached and chipped cling to the edge of the continent. Zombie beach. The Pacific spools out until Russia. A slip of a plate and we all crash to the floor. Shattered.

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