Lillie's Valley: In Search of the Good Life - Part 3 of 3

There are few experiences more delightful in life than departing Edmonds, Washington, on the ferry with the weather mild, the ferry engine rumbling down low, beneath your feet, the mountains before you, the promise of the ocean beyond them, and the water ablaze with sunlight.

The ferry docks in the tiny town of Kingston. From there you would drive a little over an hour to get to the area’s hub, Port Angeles, the largest city on the Olympic Peninsula and the headquarters of the Olympic National Park. It’s less than an hour drive south to the heights of Hurricane Ridge and its spectacular view of the surrounding Olympic mountains. On the drive to the visitors’ center, you may drive through a canyon of plowed snow that lingers into the spring. The path up from the center is paved most of the way. You can see Black bears and mountain goats on hillsides, and wildflowers in bloom above the tree line. At the top, in the twilight, you can see the far-off lights of Port Angeles and those of Canada on the other side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Or instead of heading south, you could take a two-hour ferry trip north to Victoria, Canada, and have high tea at the historic Empress Hotel and take in the floral wonder world of nearby Butchart Gardens, or head west from Port Angeles to the hot springs at Sol Duc or go to La Push and the ocean beaches, hike a wooded trail to the Pacific, rent a cabin and watch the sun set over the Pacific, hunt razor clams along the shore, or just stare up at the night sky, which shining above the darkness of the ocean expanse and the wilderness beside it, is so startlingly crammed filled with stars that it’s like you’re looking up into the heavens above an alien planet.

Our friends Mary Clare and Randy, who relocated to the Seattle area with us, got us interested in the outdoors there. Their world was a world of hiking boots, backpacks, canoes, and cross-country skis. In my mind’s eye, I can see Randy paging through a L. L. Bean catalog and Clare taking nature photos.

Through our university jobs as secretaries in the Chemistry Department, Marcia and I became acquainted with another secretary, Barb, and became friends with her and her husband Rich. A generation older than us, they became our surrogate parents. They were a portly pair who were nonetheless nimble on their feet. They loved skating. Barb, when young, had a job where she roller skated down office hallways. Rich used to brag that he was quite the ladies’ man when skating and romancing girls on the ice. I used to tell him that he was “the rake of rink,” and he would laugh heartily. It was Barb and Rich who showed us how to use so-called “clam guns” (actually, a metal cylinder you push into the sand) to hunt razor clams and how to shuck them and cook them into a stew. A professor in the department, Barney, was an amateur naturalist, who gave us a copy of a book that he had written on coastal sea life, a book that we used to walk along the shore and identify its creatures. In the university’s cafeteria, Marcia struck up a conversation with a Japanese woman whose husband was on sabbatical from a Tokyo university, and we became friends with the couple and their two young daughters. Together we rented a cabin for a weekend on the shore and later in the year celebrated Thanksgiving together. We got to see America afresh through their eyes.

The climate of Seattle area was not only good for outings; it was also good for my new resolution to jog every day. Increasing my distance every month, I eventually worked myself up to jogging eight miles a day. I dropped twenty pounds, could run up stairways without being winded, and – best of all—could eat anything I wanted without fear of weight gain.

As we adjusted to living in our new home turf, I began writing back to Cleveland with an unexpected result. Through my sister, ten years my younger and living at home, I learned that my father was reading my letters and was commenting positively on them. When my father was drinking and I was an arrogant teen, we had had a combative relationship. But even when he quit drinking, it wasn’t easy speaking to my father. First, he had his strange obsessions. For example, when Marcia and I would drive to his house, he would immediately ask who drove. Second, he was nosey. He had a technique that I think could be profitably borrowed by the CIA. Ask a rapid series of mind-numbingly banal questions that will put the other person into automatic response mode and then, when the person’s guard is down, ask something intrusive with the hope that the person will blurt out what you want to know. Finally, there was a nervous, aggressive edge to his conversation. It was like he was a Revolutionary War soldier frantically working the ramrod on his musket so he could reload and get off a shot before you could finish your last sentence. The effect of all this was that you avoided talking to him and, when you did, you felt that you really weren’t being heard. My letter writing opened a new channel of communication, one immune to his interruptions.

Then my father’s father, my grandfather, died. I was close to my maternal grandfather, who wept when I left for Seattle, but I didn’t have the same bond with my other grandfather. Although he could tell amusing stories, he had a thick accent that made him hard to understand, and he had a dried out alkie’s jitters that made him not want to be around the raucous grandchildren. My father, though, wanted to pay to have me fly back for the funeral. I was surprised that he wanted his idiot son in attendance. Maybe it was for appearances. Maybe it meant something more to him for me to be there.

I was also surprised when my parents agreed to come out and vacation in the area. They flew out, bringing along my sister, and seemed to enjoy themselves, and I enjoyed being the tour guide and sharing experiences that had been so memorable for me.

So the Seattle area was as great a place to live as we had hoped, if not greater. And yet…. The first Christmas there in 1975, for the first time ever, we attended a movie on the holiday: One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest. It was a good movie, and it won the Academy Award for best movie film the next year. But going to a movie on Christmas wasn’t the same as being with family.

As we entered our second year living in the Seattle area, both Marcia and I began to think seriously about the direction of our lives. I would be turning 27; Marcia 29. Before leaving for Seattle, Marcia had gone to get her haircut at a salon near where she had attended high school. The stylist turned out to be an old classmate of hers. Marcia’s last job had been being a typist in Detroit. The stylist asked her what she had been doing and when Marcia told her, the stylist laughed and said, “The valedictorian of our class and you ended up a secretary!” Now Marcia had decided. She wanted to be a lawyer in public service law. Even back when living in Detroit in 1974-1975, I was thinking about going to graduate school in English and, in preparation for the graduate record exam, was reading the Norton survey anthologies that I had avoided reading when I was an undergraduate. We decided that Marcia should go back to school first, and she took the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). She did well and applied to both the University of Washington Law School and The Ohio State Law School in Columbus, Ohio. When she was accepted by both schools, it was time for us to decide.

Living in the Columbus area would put us in easy driving distance of her family in Springfield, Ohio, and my folks in Cleveland. Judging by my experience finding work in both Detroit and Seattle, I knew that I wouldn’t be making a lot of money while Marcia attended law school. It would be hard for us to fly back home. The time in Seattle felt to me like a long vacation, and I was ready for it to end. Marcia was torn. She, Mary Clare and Randy had been friends since being undergraduates. They had worked together in rural Virginia registering black voters. They had been arrested together and jailed in an antiwar protest in Washington, DC. For us to be going back to Ohio now would seem to be breaking an unspoken pact that we would all start a new life together in the Pacific Northwest. I guess my homesickness tipped the scales.

We had always imagined that one day we would buy a house. Back in Detroit, I had bought a book called Finding and Buying Your Place in the Country and had studiously read and highlighted it. It turned out to be wasted effort. My grandfather, happy to have us move back, offered to help us get a place. Marcia flew back for a law school interview, and then house hunted with her father. She found a place, asked for the go-ahead, and, just like that, we were homeowners, with a mortgage on a 900 square foot little box of a house built on a concrete slab with war surplus steel girders in a development built after WWII to accommodate the housing needs of returning GIs. My father pronounced that buying a home was “the first smart thing” that I done in my life. This milestone reached it was time to plan our trip back to Ohio.

By this time in our lives, we had accumulated enough household goods that we decided to have a moving company load them up and ship them to our new home in Hilliard, Ohio. My sister decided to fly out and join us on the trip back. With the moving van on its way, all that remained was for us to pick my sister up at the airport, say our final goodbyes, and depart.

That’s when Horace, our rust bucket of a car, quit for good. Fortunately, our friend Rich stepped in. Rich was a great guy, but terrible with money. His money difficulties were both a cause and consequent of him always looking for “good deals,” and he had recently acquired a mammoth old station wagon as a second car. He generously offered to sell it to us below his cost for a few hundred bucks. When you’re travelling with two dogs, it makes a big difference whether you’re in a compact Ford Maverick or a huge station wagon. I loved the car with its roominess and its powerful big engine. It was the first time that we had a car with power windows.

We loaded the wagon up and set out. I was eager to get back. We were supposed to stop at Spokane, on the other side of the state, but, finding my groove behind the wheel of that car, I kept driving past Spokane and through the night, on and on, until, finally heeding the pleas of my passengers for lodging and a rest, we stopped at a motel in Bismarck, North Dakota, after over 1200 miles on the road. It was midday and hellishly hot. We dragged ourselves into the motel room with the dogs on leashes. The males smelled the floor and the odor of a female in heat must have lingered. They growled at each other. Both were mutts. One was part collie, named Norman after Norman Mailer who was then my favorite author. The other had been sold to us out of someone’s apartment and was supposed to be a Labrador retriever. It turned out to a swat, shaggy, ugly brown ill-tempered dog. We had named him Rogue, and, as he got fatter, we took to calling him Rogie Pierogi. Rogie Pierogi got Norman’s snout in his jaw and wouldn’t let go. Attempting to separate them, Marcia and I each grabbed a dog and held them in the air as Rogie Pierogi tenaciously kept his grip, until, swatting his head with one hand while holding him aloft with the other, I got him to unclench and promptly pushed him into the bathroom and closed the door. Norman had two bloody indentations in his nose but was otherwise ok. Then in the dark, cool refuge of the motel room, we slept the August afternoon away.

The final leg of our journey took us along I-70 and under the arch of the welcome-to-Ohio sign. As dusk fell, I pulled the knob for headlights, and nothing happened.

“We need to get off,” I told Marcia. “We have no lights.”

I got off the next exit and checked the car. No headlights and no taillights, except when braking. The exit was just the junction of a county road, with nothing but uninhabited farmland for as far as you could see. We found a road on a map, a road that seem to run parallel to the freeway and leading to the next exit on it.

“Maybe there’s something at that exit,” Marcia said.

So as night darkened, we crept along the country road with it becoming harder and harder to see in front of us. But then lighted signage twinkled ahead of us. A motel! Once there, though, the night clerk had bad news. There were no vacancies.

I don’t know who suggested it, but we came to an agreement that allowed us to camp on the motel lawn, but not use its facilities. After we pitched our tent, Marcia and my sister, Linda, walked over the freeway overpass to use the restroom at a gas station and buy snacks while I walked Norman and Rogue. Beneath the neon lights of the motel, snug in our sleeping bags, we slept to the sound of semis roaring by.

At dawn, we were on the road again. We had arranged for our friends Bruce and Martha to meet the movers, so they were there when we arrived, and they had the big wall air conditioner humming. We were ready to begin our bourgeois life of careers, consumer debt, mortgages, car payments and home maintenance. In a few days, though, we would be in attendance when Marcia’s sister, Kathy, was married in Springfield, in attendance there and at all the many family occasions that filled the decades that followed.

THE END