A Northwest Passage

Greetings from Seattle, everybody!
That naked baby on Nirvana's debut album "Nevermind" is 21 damn years old now! Eddie Vedder's middle aged and has already drifted in esteemable older rock icon deaconism: the making of film soundtracks. My, the time flies...remember the stripped down EP by Alice n Chains: Jar of Flies? I do. The gunge scene was of course over when it started, it seemed, and drug overdoses and suicides and the documenteries about the overdoses and suicides have all occured. The candles in effigy have melted long ago...but the city still smells like coffee, and there is just the smallest smell of teen spirit in the air...and always will be.

I like Seattle a lot, and I've already bumped my facebook friends up by 3! People are really friendly here. They like living here, it seems. However, the weather has turned over the last three days, and my three new best friends have all told me they are bracing for the long gray hopefully 6 but more than likely closer to 8 months ahead.

Mother Nature rules all, still, no matter what we've done. That grand and mighty interstate, that concrete river route I easily rolled into town on (the traffic by natives in little canoes made by Ford, Chevy, but more so by Toyota and Honda, were the only hindrances, and we thank God we were not shot by their arrows and spears) gets closed down in Snoqualmie Pass, a beautiful mountain route outside of Seattle, at least 6-9 days a year. That's total shut down on an interstate, folks, and it has been closed for as much as 21 days in a single winter. That's a long time in a long winter to cut access down a long road in America. I'm surprized there's not more cannibilism due to lack of supplies in the winter by the the colonists, but I guess the natives have teached them how to fish by now. Mother nature still rules, I say again, and people of the northwest know, and revere her, they just hope she's not too moody.

The trip from Grand Forks, N.D. to Seattle was filled with dynamic landscapes and dynamic people. Its a long way, around 1,500 miles, and I saw arid zones, forests, big rivers and big rigs along the highway. Sunsets that a mortal is foolish to explain and colors I've never seen before on the great plains of the nation. I also saw Texans. Yep, a fracking oil boom is alive and well in North Dakota, and towns like Minot and Dickenson, N.D. aren't building hotels enough to house their boots and spurs. A native North Dakotan was telling me its the wierdest thing, "I grew up here all my life, and now all the sudden everbody's got a Texas accent." The oil rigs still can't take away from the grand skyline one can see up here...at least, not yet.

Huckleberries grow wild in Montana and Idaho, and I went into a cafe in St. Regis, MT, where I was when I got the news that my father died last year, and if there's anything you like, they have a Huckleberry based recipe of it. "Huckleberry" in front of anything just makes it sound better, lighter, happier, and St Regis looks a lot better to me now than it did last December.

Well, there's coffee to drink and when in Rome...

Take care,
Todd