Go As You Were

Last weekend the sun came out in Oly and everyone went stark staring mad, even Caitlin, who for once agreed to leave the house. The only condition was that she had control of the radio in the car - le sigh - and that we be back by 5. Since she only wakes up at noon, that didn’t leave many places to go – no Portland, no Seattle – so we went to Aberdeen, in the hopes of seeing  the ocean.

Aberdeen, of course, is known by most people in America as the childhood home of Kurt Cobain, who in some ways was my childhood friend – though by childhood, I mean, my twenties, by which time he’d left there, and  “friend’ is an enormous exaggeration; he was the friend of one of my best friend's boy friend, and as I’ve said elsewhere, the extent of our so-called friendship was that at the height of his fame, I was a person who’s name he still knew, and that was about it. However, that was not nothing. If you think having the most popular kid in High School say ‘Hi’ to you in the halls makes for a good day, try having Kurt Cobain greet you by name in public somewhere. You won’t just bask in reflected glory. People will actually throw money at you.

I can tell you the last thing he said to me. “Hi Gina, what are you doing here?” I know that’s what he said, because it's like the last three things he said to me. I was always popping up in unexpected places -- like Denmark - and the answer was always the same: “Writing about you.”

 “Oh.”

End of conversation.

Anyway, the whole time I knew him – “knew” him – he characterized his home town of Aberdeen as a total shit hole that he didn’t want to go back to. But I never went there until this week, and what surprised me about it was that it was beautiful there. I don’t mean the town itself, but its surroundings. Indeed, you never saw a place that looked less like grunge sounds. To me grunge sounds urban, gritty, melancholic. Before the word was coined, the one we used to describe that sound was dirge. Bauhaus was dirge. Killing Joke was dirge. The Swans were dirge. Nirvana wasn’t dirge, exactly, it was faster, but it had points in common, and it sounded more like icky parts of London – crossed with icky bits of Seattle – than with this, the pastoral idyll that Grey’s Harbor County limns.

Here in Washington, Nirvana is still endlessly on high rotation on the radio. Maybe that's true elsewhere too, but it couldn't be nearly as true as here: you can't go twenty minutes without hearing them. Once, when I first moved here, I drove up to Snoqualmie Falls to see the water and the lodge, and KNND ("The End") was having some kind of grunge weekend marathon, and it was all Nirvana, the whole way there. Snoqualmie Falls is where Twin Peaks was filmed and the drive there - through Auburn - is very woodsy. It felt right to hear Nirvana on my way up o the mountains, because Twin Peaks and high grunge go together historically; plus, I am always happy to hear what I am lucky to call Friend Rock.

But Snoqualmie isn't anything like Aberdeen, it turns out. To get to Aberdeen from Olympia, you head out on Mud Bay road, across the flats and round the edge of the Puget sound, and up along the side of a forest, with watery boulders lining the sides of the road. Soon you head into open farm country, the kind with cattle grazing and old fashioned red barns, edged with tree-covered forests and bright, bright green grass, a color you’ll never see in California. The farms hint at fresh eggs and warm milk and new pototoes – they get them from here at Five Guys, I know – and you know that come summer there will be fruit trees galore as well.

Half way to Aberdeen, the cooling towers of a  nuclear reactor pops out along one of the forested ridges. It’s called Satsop and it’s not only abandoned, according to Wikipedia it was never even completed. It’s just a pointless ghost on the highway, a funny little pointer towards “The Simpsons.” Otherwise the landscape is lush and pristine. If it sounded like it looked, it would be a simple Mozart etude, or perhaps a folk song with a banjo. 

One of the things I can never get over here is how empty Washington State is. The freeway only has two lanes each way, and at the end part of it it just goes alongside houses. Caitlin and I wondered what it would be like to live there, right next to the highway. As we got closer to the port, there were a lot of churches. Or signs for them. The first one said, “Are you feeling flustered? Ask Jesus for Help.” Flustered? For reals? I am almost always feeling flustered, but it wouldn’t ever occur to me to ask anyone for help over it, least of all Jesus. Being flustered is the least of my problems.

We also saw a bunch of marijuana shops and tasting parlors (well, two); a paint ball range, a disk golf course, a ‘weekend getaway’ called ‘Tokeville,’ and inevitably a giant Walmart which sort of dominates the town. When you first cross into Aberdeen, there’s a tidy little stand-alone Starbucks on the right, and I am pretty sure all of these things were not in place when Kurt lived here. Neither, of course, was the welcome sign. "Welcome To Aberdeen. Come As You Are!" Do you think the city fathers have listened to the lyrics of that song lately? "Come as a friend, as an old enemy...come doused in mud, soaked in bleach, as an old memoria..." Talk about a spectre haunting Europe....not to mention America and everywhere else.

Driving on through town, we got a better flavor of Aberdeen-as-teenage-wasteland, especially when we continued on to Hoquiam, which is poorer and more downtrodden: it looked, Caitlin said, like some suburban part of San Diego got plopped into the deep south, and it’s true: as in the south, there are train trestles and empty store fronts and a port that looks like it's out of a Raymond Chandler novel, and in the residential part, lawns that look unkempt with burnt out cars on them. It looked like you might come across a body - or at least a dead drunk body - at any moment. You'd definitely see a mangy dog if you stayed for more than half an hour.

We continued on for a while up the highway, but it started to look eerie and strange and we had to drive through all these clear cuts. You know you're in the very corner of the United States out there, it ...plus the forest out there is somewhat unholy; the trees look like someone tortured them. Some of them are bent over like tall, skinny willows; others just lack branches except at the very tip top. It feels dystopian. Also, our five o clock deadline was looming and it seemed like we would never get to the actual ocean, so we eventually turned around and drove back to Oly.

It wasn’t a very extensive trip to Aberdeen, but it was interesting nonetheless. My colleague from here tells me that Aberdeen in the 1980s, when Kurt was growing up, was at the height of its degradation; that the death of the logging industry had made it into a wasteland of epic proportions, and for the sake of people here, I'm glad it's not like that now. In some ways it is a little unnerving to think how much has changed about the world since Nirvana walked the earth, but in other ways, maybe not so much. Kurt left this place because it was conservative and anti-gay and full of rednecks, and though we only talked to one person while we were there and he seemed nice enough, it wasn't hard to infer that Aberdeen still may be all those things. At one point on our way home, we were traveling behind a car that had two stupid Seahawks flags stuck in its windows, flapping like giant elephant ears, and a parody bumper sticker that depicted the owner’s stick-figure family as four differently sized and shaped automatic weapons. And I swear that I don't have a gun.

The words wafted unbidden through my head as I passed the guy. They won't be going away any time soon.