The new site is up!

Hey everybody! 

Thanks for coming by - this blog has been inactive for a while now but we're firing on all cylinders over at the brand-new "Largely the Truth", www.largelythetruth.com

A Strange Little Place: True Paranormal Stories from Revelstoke, Canada

Revelstoke, B.C., Canada, photo courtesy of Sami Lingren

Since April 2012 I've been researching paranormal stories from my hometown of Revelstoke, B.C. with an eye toward publishing them as a book.  These stories range from simple ghost stories to eyewitness accounts of unusual lights in the sky to strange combinations of the two which defy conventional explanations of both.

Just as they did last year, the Revelstoke Current will be running one of my stories a week, beginning today, in the lead-up to Halloween.

My first draft of the manuscript was completed in October 2013 and submitted to a number of publishers.  Llewellyn Worldwide, a Minnesota-based publisher of all all things paranormal, has expressed interest but requires the manuscript to be longer and so I am now back knocking on doors.  In fact, I will be in the Revelstoke area in the second week of October and if you have any experiences you would like to share, please feel free to contact me at the below email address.

The index below is not a complete listing of the stories which will appear in the final version, but represent a sampling of what to expect.

Thanks for reading and should you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me at bren(at)largelythetruth(dot)com

1. Bocci's
1. A Creeping Unease
2. A Blue Flash
3. A New Start
2. The Court House Square
1. The Girl in the Window
2. Voices in the Dark
3. The House on the Bank
3. Ghosts of the Revelstoke Hospital
4. Her Number One Fan
5. The Jealous Spirit of Main Street Cafe
6. As Far Back as I Can Remember...It Was Haunted
7. The Legends of Mount Begbie
1. The Mount Begbie Iceman
2. Watch the Skies
8. The Orange Triangle
1. "We Figured It Was Just a Trick With the Trees"
2. "Two Days Later We Heard Jets"
3. The Military Angle
9. The Pass
1. The Rogers Pass Fireball
2. Missing Time
1. Henry
10. Strange Tales of the Arrow Lakes
1. Fear on the South Road
2. Just Around the Bend
3. 'Strange Object Seen in South Heavens'
4. The Light on the Lake
11. Shadow People and "Gremlins"
12. The Girl on Highway 23
1. "There Was a Young Girl Crying For Help"
2. The Blizzard
13. The Ghost of Henry Colbeck
1. The Man in the Window
2. "There Was This Horrendous Crash"
14. The Man in the Field
15. Eyes in the Fog
16. The Graveyard Next Door
1. "There Were Voices...but There Was Nothing There"
2. "He's Looking at Me...He Looks Really Mad"
3. "Something Was Not Right"
4. "There Was a Rage in There"
17. The Haunting of Holten House
1. A Storied Past
2. Lyda 
3. Charles
4. "I Always Felt As Though Someone Was Going to Push me Down the Stairs"
5. A Territorial Presence
6. Visible Spirits
7. In Dreams

Photo Gallery: Lonesome Creepy - Victoria at Night

My contentious relationship with the sun was established on a summer day in Kelowna, BC when I was four years old and overheated to the point of having a seizure.  My memory prior to the seizure is vague; we were at the now-shuttered Kelowna Grand Prix "family fun centre" and so all I recall is seeing a row of refrigerator-sized arcade games before the brown patterned carpet rushed up at me.  However, my post-seizure memory - waking up in hospital a tub of ice - is still vivid and I have spent my life since then avoiding the possibility of a repeat performance, and thus the sun, whenever possible.  You could say I'm a bit of a night owl.

While this means I'm useless at the beach and in the early morning, it does allow me to see a different side of the world around me, a perspective my Lonesome Creepy galleries are aimed at capturing.  In this particular batch of photos, I've decided to focus on one particular location - my home of Victoria, BC.  Seeing the city at night has given me a deeper appreciation for a place many people - myself included - dismiss as picturesque but bland.

Many, if not all, of the below photos have appeared on my Instagram feed, albeit in cropped form under the tag #yyjatnight. If you're on IG, please feel free to use that tag and show off your own view of night time in BC's capital.

Click here to find and follow me on Instagram.  

All photos taken with an iPhone 5s

Legs, Eggs, and TheBesty.com

Once upon a time this blog was devoted entirely to restaurant reviews and so, every now and again, I would opine at great length on the subject of eateries in the Victoria and Vancouver areas.  One such establishment was Paul’s Place Omelettery, a Vancouver breakfast spot I wrote about on June 21, 2010 seven short months after Largely the Truth went online.  In the four years since then, thoughts of the review had drifted completely away from the waking part of my mind into the unreachable ultraviolet range of consciousness where hides such apocrypha as “where I left my keys” and “every book I have ever read.”

Then, in May, nearing the end of a road trip spanning some 2800 miles and fifteen states, I awoke in my Hyannis, Massachusetts hotel to find I’d received an e-mail from TheBesty.com.  The Besty is a new site which encourages bloggers to create and share lists of the best restaurants in their cities and elsewhere.  In February I had contributed a list of Waikiki hotspots culled from a recent visit and something about my hodgepodge of pizza joints and ice cream parlors must have caught their eye, because the email I received on that Cape Cod morning advised me a video using material drawn from my review of Paul’s Place had gone online.

That video is embedded below.  Though it may not contain every Julianne Moore metaphor I have used, it certainly has my favorite.

Thanks to everyone at TheBesty.com for reading and supporting Largely the Truth! 

P.S – Though things have slowed down for me on the blogging front you can still find me on Twitter and, my newest obsession, Instagram:

"Charlie Wenjack", by Willie Dunn

Most Canadians are at least passingly familiar with the long horror story that was our Indian Residential Schools.  For those of you not familiar with the subject, I recommend reading the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "A history of residential schools in Canada", which does a better job of summarizing the situation than I ever could.

Recently, while discussing the issue with a friend I wanted to show them the text to singer/songwriter Willie Dunn's song "Charlie Wenjack", which tells the tragically short story of the boy of the same name.  The lyrics could not easily be found online and so I thought I would reprint it here so more people would have a chance to appreciate it.

If there's a copyright holder out there who stumbles onto this and has an issue with it, please keep in mind this is entirely to help keep a small part of Dunn's work accessible; no one's making any money here.

Wawatay News has an audio file of Dunn (who died in October 2013) singing the song, so if you'd like to listen to it while you read, click here to open that link in a new window.

The following is reprinted verbatim from my copy of Ward Churchill's "Kill the Indian, Save the Man", which, if you have any interest in learning more about the residential schools, is an excellent resource:

Charlie Wenjack

(Who died in 1966, aged twelve, running away from an Indian residential school near Kenora, Ontario, trying to get back to his father and his people)

Walk on, little Charlie

Walk on through the snow.

Heading down the railway line,

Trying to make it home.

Well, he's made it forty miles,

Six hundred left to go.

It's a long old lonesome journey,

Shufflin' through the snow.

He's lonesome and he's hungry,

It's been a time since last he ate,

And as the night grows bolder,

He wonders at his fate.

For his legs are wracked with pain

As he staggers through the night.

And he sees through his troubled eyes,

That his hands are turning white.

Lonely as a single star,

In the skies above,

His father in a mining camp,

His mother in the ground,

And he's looking for his dad,

And he's looking out for love,

Just a lost little boy by the railroad track

Heading homeward bound.

Is that the great Wendigo

Come to look upon my face?

And are the skies exploding

Down the misty aisles of space?

Who's that coming down the track,

Walking up to me?
Her arms outstretched and waiting,
Waiting just for me.

Walk on, little Charlie,

Walk on through the snow.

Moving down the railway line,

Try to make it home.

And he's made it forty miles,

Six hundred left to go.

It's a long old lonesome journey,

Shufflin' through the snow.

 -  Willie Dunn

The Thing About the Desert...Part 3

On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  

Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own.  This is the conclusion of that story.

Click here to read part 1 first

Click here for part 2

The first time it happened I only caught it from the corner of my eye.  

The Subaru’s dashboard readout had still been misbehaving, no longer even pretending it was properly calculating the miles remaining in our tank – from 600 it had counted down to 500 or so, then back up past 600 – but just around midnight the whole thing went completely blank, then flashed briefly, before going back to normal.

“Did that just go blank?” I asked.

“It did, then it flashed 1:00.” Mike replied.

“So now the clock is boned too?”

“That’s the thing," he said.  "It displayed 1:00 on the ‘miles remaining’ part.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

The Thing About the Desert...Part 2

On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  

Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own.  This is part 2 of that story.

Click here to read part 1 first
Click here for part 3

A look at Google Earth shows the area to be dotted here and there with houses but on the ground, in the dark, the turnoff to Angel Canyon Road from Highway 89, some six miles into the desert north of Kanab, felt so remote it may as well have been the far side of the moon.  After leaving the highway we followed the road down a small rise, past low shrubs and patches of scrub grass, to the start of the 350-acre Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.

Best Friends is noted as being America’s largest sanctuary for companion animals, recognized for their commitment to their “no-kill mission”; they believe that 90% of shelter animals are adoptable, or could be with the proper care and treatment.  It seemed a bit grim, then, that the sole reason we were in the neighborhood was on the off chance of seeing someone wearing a fur pelt and firing pellets of ground-up human body at their enemies, but that didn’t stop us. 

Aw, that's cute.  Now make with the evil witches

The Thing About the Desert...Part 1

On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  

Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own.  This is part 1 of that story.

If you've already read part 1, click here to be taken to part 2

Those of you who read this site regularly will recall that I don’t find the desert to be a particularly exciting place.  Apart from the odd dramatic vista and infrequent lightning storms, the many hours I've spent driving across the desert have mainly consisted of scanning radio frequencies looking for something – anything – to distract myself from the agonizing pace at which the miles on my GPS screen tick down.  Yet, like so many things I claim to dislike – CostCo, social gatherings, Las Vegas – I find myself drawn back to the desert again and again.

The reading I’ve done in “paranormal” literature since beginning to write my book of ghost stories, and - oddly enough - the blog for dating site OK Cupid would like me to believe I’m wrong, that there is a great deal more happening in the desert than I thought but it took my road trip to the Grand Canyon last September to convince me.

A Little Wrestlemania is Good for the Soul

If you grew up in North America in the 80s you know damn well who this is

That I grew up spending my Saturday mornings watching WWF wrestling is not something I advertise.   It’s not that I’m ashamed of it – I suspect that a lot of guys (and gals) my age spent their Saturday mornings the same way – but the experience, or the knowledge gained from it, is not easily introducible to an adult conversation:

 “We’re expecting our first baby!  We are SO excited!”

“Oh my God that’s great!  This is like when Hulk Hogan bodyslammed Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania 3!”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, ‘Lovely!  When are you due?’”

“We really must be going.”

High praise indeed

Consequently, I am more likely to tell someone about the times in my life I have been accosted by shadowy paranormal entities than I am to describe my heartbreak at Hulk Hogan’s momentous Wrestlemania 6 loss to the Ultimate Warrior.

Welcome to my childhood

At this point it should come as no great surprise that I am not invited to many dinner parties.

Photo Gallery: Lonesome Creepy - Here, There and Everywhere

Surf Motel, Victoria

With Halloween fast approaching (and because I finally had ten pictures to put together) it's time for another Lonesome Creepy photo gallery, wherein you see the world from my point of view.   The locations presented here yo-yo from Victoria to Austin, Texas and back again, with one or two points in between.  As always, all photos have been taken with an iPhone 4S unless otherwise noted.

Once you're done, check out my post "A Strange Little Place" to catch up with the true ghost stories, authored by yours truly, currently running in the Revelstoke Current.

Midnight at the Waffle House, Part 2

Click here to catch up on part 1

The first Waffle House was opened by Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner in the Atlanta suburb of Avondale Estates.  The two men had met in 1949 when Rogers, at the time working for the national restaurant chain Toddle House, had bought a home from real-estate agent Forkner and the pair became friends.  Rogers, who had grown tired of miserably toiling away in other people's restaurants and decided it was his turn to make someone miserable, sold Forkner on the idea of starting their own diner and, in 1955, Waffle House was born.

Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner. I don't dare make jokes about either.

Another soon opened in 1957, by 1960 there were a total of four and though it has never grown to Denny's-level ubiquity, Waffle House has become a fixture along the highways of America’s southeast.

On that night in Austin, heavy construction along Ben White Boulevard meant the access road leading to this particular Waffle House was reduced to a miserable dirt path in a dark gap between streetlights and consequently it took Mike and me two passes before we could find the thing.

Just up the road sat a Denny's, it's gleaming, modern interior a beacon of hospitable sterility, with a driveway plainly visible from the road; in comparison, Waffle House looked like an old screen door banging in the wind at the end of a donkey track.   However, by this point we had invested so much time in trying to get to Waffle House that giving up wasn’t an option and had abandoning the vehicle across three lanes of freeway and walking been the only avenue left to us, we would have seriously considered it.

Midnight at the Waffle House

On September 24 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  Over the next couple weeks I'll be posting a handful of stories and photos from the trip.

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones

From finding out that my beer at Denver International was going to cost more than the sandwich it accompanied to taking off in a thunderstorm and seeing the clouds outside my window light up from within, God's name got a lot of play during my journey from Seattle to Austin. It's not that I'm religious - far from it - but if you're going to lodge a complaint you may as well take it to the very top. 

Dr. Broseph, DDS doesn't go in for $9 beers.  Too many carbs, brah.
And yes, he did have his name and "D.D.S" sewed into the front of his shirt.

Consequently, when Southwest Airlines flight 409 safely touched down in Austin just before midnight and I stepped out of the terminal into 86 degree heat I decided to give God a break and cursed Texas Governor Rick Perry instead; the back of my shirt was darkening with sweat regardless of whether or not that reptilian bastard believes in global warming.

You're a bad man, Rick Perry

My last visit to Austin had been in the summer of 2008; I'd arrived around the same time, but on a Greyhound bus from New Orleans rather than a plane from Denver. That time, instead of a lightning storm we had a group of teens harassing other passengers to the point where our driver called Houston PD. The teens, who were black, called the driver a racist before fleeing the bus and hiding in a nearby gas station. Demonstrating a level of restraint one step removed from sainthood, the Hispanic man they had most recently been hassling for, well, being Hispanic, remained silent through their pulling of the race card. 

Thinking back to that, a plane ride through a thunderstorm didn't seem all that bad if for no other reason than it didn't last 12 hours. Also improving on last time was my choice of attire - my first visit to the South, all I had packed was jeans and black T-shirts, and I spent a month on the brink of heat stroke - this time I had exclusively brought shorts. Also black t-shirts, but that's because anything brighter makes me look like Gumby gone to seed. 

Still, even with shorts I was grateful that Mike, the friend who was picking me up, had the air conditioning in his new car set to "Fortress of Solitude." Mike and I have been friends for around six years now, having first met through the Couchsurfing network in 2007.

"Can you turn it down another degree or so?"

Earlier that year he had left his New York City home and begun hitchhiking across the USA, stopping to catch the odd NBA game and, memorably, a sermon by none other than the Reverend Al Green. After a spell in Olympic National Park he journeyed north to Victoria where I met up with him on the steps of the library; I wanted to vet him before letting him into my house. He looked much the same way then as he does now: bearded, six-foot-four, about the same across the shoulders and possessing of an enviably booming voice which, under the right conditions, can change the course of rivers and tropical storms. 

"I'll have a Coke, please"

I liked him then and still do, which was invaluable considering we were about to spend the night 12 days in each others constant company. 

After saying our hellos and stowing my bags we were faced with the question of what to do next: the plan had been to drive to the Grand Canyon, which Mike had never seen, but his work schedule meant we had to leave within a couple days of arriving in Austin. Prior to my arrival I had half-joked that we could leave right from the airport as long as I got some pancakes and coffee along the way and as we pulled away from the curb he said, "

"Were you serious about leaving now? Because my stuff is in the back."

Questions like that are the stuff of which friendships are made.

"Do you know a place I can get pancakes?"

"I do."

"Then yes."

That partially explains how, 30 minutes later, we ended up at the Waffle House on Ben White Boulevard eating grits we hadn't ordered, pining after the hashbrowns we had and looking at a grainy cellphone video of what the waitress claimed were the ghosts haunting her apartment. 

To be continued in Part 2: Meth, Grits and Life After Death

North on 19: Traffic and the Savage Sky

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

This weekend my wife and I drove up island to Campbell River to visit my mother.  We used to visit once every few months but since my stepfather’s passing in March we've made the trip - some 260km - more frequently.

We had planned to leave Friday afternoon at 2, which we thought would allow us to beat the inevitable after-work traffic jam that clogs up the westbound road out of Victoria and in no way indicates a need for commuter rail.  As it turned out, we were almost right – we had made it as far as the beginning of the Malahat highway, where traffic bottlenecks on a good day, to discover a construction crew busily increasing to three the number of lanes which have to frantically merge into one thirty feet later.  Traffic slowed to a standstill and we had plenty of time to reflect on how peaceful our up-island trips used to be when Via Rail was still running.

In my more optimistic moments I imagine a day when some kind of light rail service gives commuters in the GVRD a way to work that doesn’t involve sweltering on asphalt while a chopped Harley Davidson four feet away plays you the song of its people but such a utopia is unlikely.

Victoria would like to be thought of as a forward-thinking city and with all the tattooed yogis wandering around you’d almost fall for it – until, that is, someone makes a suggestion towards improving infrastructure in any meaningful way.  

The Road to Olympia, Part 6: Love Me, I'm a Liberal

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

During my drive to Las Vegas, the Veteran’s Memorial Highway brought me through a handful of Indian Reservations.  I’m not particularly educated on the state of Indian-Government relations but I’ve read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and I’m a fan of Ward Churchill so I have at least a baseline understanding of the savage, locker-room rogering that was Manifest Destiny.  All the same, actually seeing the Godless stretches of sun-withered rock that the government assigned to its defeated enemy really drives the point home in a way that books can’t.

Though I know full well that the Indian people had no voice in the decision I imagine that the U.S. Government, having thoroughly won the American Indian Wars, called forth a representative from the surviving tribes when it was time to assign living space:

U.S. Government:  That is some lovely property you all were living on, wasn’t it?

Indian Representative:  Yes, that is why we liked living there.

U.S. Government:  Well, we need it

Indian Representative:  For what?!

U.S. Government:  Stuff.

Indian Representative:  What stuff?

U.S. Government:  Jamba Juices, hockey rinks, hot dog stands.  White people stuff.

Indian Representative:  But what about us?

U.S. Government:  That’s what I wanted to talk to you about!  Using the most scientific methods currently available we have located the absolute worst parcels of sandblasted hell in America

Indian Representative: Why?

U.S.G: Because we want to give them to you!

Indian Representative: I’m sorry?

U.S.G.:  So you can live there, silly!  All of you.  Bring sunscreen.

Indian Representative: I have a few reservations about this.

U.S.G.:  Great!  That’s what we’ll call them.  Now get out of here you crazy kid.  Remember what I said about sunscreen.

Indian Representative: But I don’t…is that a shotgun?
U.S.G.:  I said get

Since NPR liked to disappear on me whenever I got interested in a subject, thoughts like this were all I had to keep me company.  I’d given up on country radio after hearing Tim McGraw’s “Indian Outlaw” three days running.  It’s a catchy song and I’m not particularly sensitive but every time I heard “You can find me in my wigwam /I’ll be beatin’ on my tom-tom / Pull out the pipe and smoke you some / Hey and pass it around” I wanted to throw up.

A mild diversion came when I saw a sign advertising a Wildlife Viewing Area.  The last several hours of driving had brought me endless vistas of windswept hardpan and I was a little sceptical as whether any wildlife not existing solely at the microscopic level could possibly thrive here.  A tour guide would have to be a Zoloft-popping mixture of cock-eyed optimist and Spalding Grey to sell that particular Wildlife Viewing Experience:

“Here in front of us we have some rocks, heavy ones by the look of them.  To our left if you look closely you can see more rocks, one of which looks like an anvil.  Oh!  Look!  Just over there I thought I saw…no, no…that was a rock too.  Isn’t this fun?  Who else could go for a Jamba Juice?”

Night had fallen by the time I got close to Vegas and traffic had fallen off to almost nothing.  As Highway 95 slipped by beneath the moonlight I had a look at the map and realized I was driving parallel to Department of Defense land.  Then it hit me – this wasn’t just any DoD land – this was the Nevada Test Site, formerly Nevada Proving Ground, one of two nuclear testing sites used by America during the Cold War.  Hey, I read books.

From 1951-1992 over 1,000 nuclear devices were tested on-site, often resulting in fallout that insisted on ruining the day (and genetic material) of anyone who happened to be downwind.  These blessed souls are cheerfully called “Downwinders” by those who take an interest in the subject – I imagine this is because “Boy Howdy, You Are Boned-ers” is too much of a buzzkill.  Over the years there were a number of settlements paid out by the government although the official figures are apparently well-hidden.

Scenes from The Hills Have Eyes came flooding into my head and in desperation I reached for the radio.  Even “Indian Outlaw” was better than that.

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal

The Road to Olympia, Part 5: Like a Bat Out of Hell

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones.

The last thing I did before leaving for Nevada the next day was wash my car.It’s not that I thought it was going to stay clean on the drive to Winnemucca but I wanted to make sure I washed off every trace of John Day before advancing further. I was going to burn my laundry too but my car has suffered enough without the added indignity of coming into contact with my bare ass.

See you in Hell

Fittingly, the car wash was the second worst I’ve come across. The soap smelled like the chemical development team had started off aiming for “lilac” but given up somewhere around “How long has this sandwich been behind the radiator?” It did the job but only after the investment of six dollars and about a dozen passes with what may be the western world’s feeblest foaming brush. 

I hit the highway at speeds that would have made the protagonist from Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” look like he was driving a float in the Tournament of Roses Parade.  Trees, mailboxes and hitchhikers whizzed past as I desperately tried to out run whatever white trash Wendigo haunts that town.

This haste was to blame for the lives I took – for my becoming a murderer.  A mass murderer, really. In my defense it’s hardly my fault – these hapless victims should have known better than to wander directly into the path of a man recklessly fleeing a Mayberry so awful that Andy Griffith would have eaten Opie at birth as an act of mercy.

The victims in question were hundreds of small white butterflies that swarmed the road at several points in the Malheur National Forest. At first I thought there were tiny balls of fluff bouncing off my windshield, then I looked closely and noticed they had wings. 

I do not know how many of them I killed but should there ever come a day when butterflies rule the earth I will be the first against the wall.

Crossing into Nevada was a relief – not only was I able to put Oregon’s weak-kneed speed limits behind me but I was pretty sure that the Wendigo’s house-arrest anklet would stop him from crossing state lines. 

I have no more affection for the desert than I do any other climate that will kill you without taking the slightest notice but I concede that it has a grandeur all it’s own with jagged outcroppings of rock silhouetted against the sky and the way shadows of clouds lay across the mountains like drop cloths.

It’s not all grand, of course.  Much of it is, as my Saskatchewan-born grandfather once said of his own home, “as flat as piss on a plate”, and driving through it can become wearing over several hours.  At one point the boredom became so acute I found myself listening to finance shill Dave Ramsey‘s radio show and being deeply concerned about the fate of those calling in.  I actually teared up after one caller confessed that her husband was adamant about keeping their new truck, even though the prohibitive monthly payment meant they would lose the house they currently shared with their children.

The shedding of a tear not related to immediate physical injury or the loss of a sporting contest shocked me out of my stupor and I snapped off the radio. To reclaim my masculinity I turned up the CD player and sang along to “Sylvia’s Mother” until I arrived in Winnemucca.  Before you talk smack about Dr. Hook all I have to say is this – there is nothing more distinctly male than trying to talk your way past a woman’s mother.  

My hotel room at Winner’s Casino would have been unremarkable under normal circumstances but after the Little Pine Inn it felt like the Taj Mahal - ”I can walk around in my bare feet?  I don’t need to sleep in my clothes?  I have arrived in life.”

And in rarefied company no less

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal

The Road to Olympia, Part 4: Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Reading is for suckers.  Click "play" on the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

It was late afternoon by the time I arrived in John Day, Oregon via highway 395. The light had taken on a beautiful golden tint you sometimes see at the end of the day – the kind that can make a garbage dump look like Venice in the spring.

395 turns into John Day’s main street, with most of downtown lining either side. Signs welcoming home 3 local boys from their tours of duty in Afghanistan were up in every window and there were yellow ribbons around the trees. Unlike Fox and Dale, two down-at-heel hamlets I’d passed through earlier in the day, John Day, seemed like a pleasant, welcoming example of Small Town America.

The first crack in that facade came when I pulled into my motel, the Little Pine

Looks nice, right?

Inn at the far end of downtown. On the outside it looked no worse than anywhere else I’ve ever stayed. Sure, the rough-looking woman who checked me in had a voice like Captain Beefheart and the only other guest was a bearded man who claimed to live in the mountains but I wrote it all off as part of being in a blue collar town well off the beaten track. Then I saw my room.

Where is your God now?

“Lived in” is one way to describe it, “I expected to find Bob Crane’s tenderized corpse in the bathroom” is another. The brown shag carpet was long enough to hide a marijuana grow-op from passing helicopters, several of the lights didn’t work and everything was covered in what is best described as a thin film made up of equal parts dirt and neglect. When I looked in the bathroom what I saw made me wish I’d found Hogan’s moldering corpse instead. Radiating out from the toilet’s base was a thick ring of accumulated dirt (I refuse to believe it was anything more) and nothing, from the sink to the shower stall, was quite what I’d call clean.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!"

After dropping my luggage and vigorously washing my hands I set off down Main Street to find dinner. The sun was now almost fully set save for a pink band where the mountains met the sky. The downtown that had, not two hours before, felt like a living advertisement for war bonds now felt like a small seaside town an in H.P. Lovecraft story right before something tentacled rose from the sea and caused everyone to require fresh underpants.

The Mayberry facade cracked and fell apart when I noticed that in many of the windows – right next to the signs welcoming home John Day’s troops – was another sign forbidding entry to anyone displaying neo-Nazi apparel or tattoos. They warned that in the eyes of the community everyone was created equal and hate would not be tolerated. Suddenly I regretted shaving my head before leaving home.

Just then, as if to drive the point home, a scrawny twenty-something with a shaved head and swastika tattoo on his bicep rode past on a bicycle. I guessed John Day, like a lot of towns that have seen better days, was having a hard time keeping its young men occupied when work ran thin.

Dinner was beer and pizza in the Dirty Shame Saloon, not far from the motel.

And I'm pretty sure the pizza
gave me food poisoning.

It was your typical small-town watering hole where the menu incorporates the entire nutritional pyramid (pizza, hamburgers, chicken, deep-fried) and the locals eye you up as you walk in.

Ever paranoid I sat with my back to the wall and ate while a fat woman in a tie-dyed T-shirt sang along with the jukebox.  To distract myself I set my mind to figuring out whether the mullet-sporting person who kind of looked like Meat Loaf in the video for “I’d Do Anything For Love” and was stood at the far end of the bar was a woman or a man.  After 20 minutes I failed to come away with an answer.  

When Aretha was done at the jukebox I could suddenly hear a group of middle-aged tourists at a nearby table discussing “The Celestine Prophecy”, a 1993 novel full of New-Age hooey.  The conversation was more literate than I was expecting, given that the book has less intellectual value than “Go Dog Go”.  Then one of the participants said, “I’d rather read a list of quotes than an entire book” & I realized I wasn’t listening to people, I was listening to organic tape recorders.

Then I heard “Where love rules there is no will to power” and decided it was a good time to head back to the motel.

Where I was murdered. The way my stomach feels right now I only wish I was joking.

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal

The Road to Olympia, Part 3: By the Side of the Road

Reading is for suckers.  Click "play" on the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

Leaving Bellingham with a stomach-full of breakfast quiche that wouldn’t have made the cut in a retirement home cafeteria wasn’t the best way to start my September 11 but it was all I had. The restaurant recommended to me by the

motel desk clerk turned out to have a 40 minute wait, unless I wanted to sit in the lounge next to the loud, pudgy blonde who had already started drinking. I didn’t. Instead I ended up eating the unfortunate quiche at a nearby Tully’s Coffee, just around the corner from Deseret Books (now selling the Mormon-approved Harry Potter alternative “Janitors”, in case you’re interested).

My target for the day was John Day, Oregon and traffic was heavy as I drove I-90 east. All the things I love about interstates – sudden lane changes, yuppies in SUVs whose engine power far exceeds their driving capabilities, and the idiots going too slow infuriating the idiots who want to go too fast – were in abundance until traffic thinned out just short of Ellensburg, which was, fittingly, when I had to break south.

Green forest gave way to sunbaked yellow grass as the landscape changed and the mercury rose.  Just south of Yakima there was a family clustered next to a car that had broken down by the side of the road. The eldest son, a tall, slim, bespectacled kid in a yellow T-shirt was holding up a small handwritten sign and even though I couldn’t read it at speed I more or less knew the content: “It’s broke, we’re hot, this sucks. Please.” I kept driving and I don’t know why – I can still see that poor kid standing in the sun with a disappointed look on his face as hundreds of people drove their air-conditioned cocoons past him and his family.

In 2001, America was rocked by a sucker punch that shook the country and its people out of their insular, capitalist stupor.  It reminded them that the people around them were neighbors and friends rather than competitors, stepping stones or dangerous lunatics. Ten years later, to the day, and no one, myself included, could remember that message long enough to stop for a family of five in obvious need of help.But hey – they remembered to put up flags along the highway.

The interstate eventually gave way to state highways, long, empty roads through farmland that stretched off to the horizon.  The sky was a dark grey, threatening rain, and the air was rich with the smell of soil and raw onions. Dump trucks filled with these, thousands of fresh, fragrant bulbs would pass by at intervals and the smell would become almost overpowering.

As I passed into Oregon the smell of farmland faded and the temperature rose to to the low 90s, which was cool in comparison to the previous weeks according to Mike, a gas station attendant in Pendleton.  Oregon is one of only two US states, New Jersey is the other, that doesn’t allow you to pump your own gas, and so Mike’s job is to run around outside in 100 degree heat for 9 hours while enjoying the heady smell of gasoline.

“This is fine,” he said, sweating and lying through his teeth.  ”The breeze helps.”

Just outside of the Battle Mountain Forest on Highway 395 I saw another drama played out by the side of the road.  A bright white motorcycle lay on its side at the edge of the gravel and EMTs were clustered in the high grass just beyond.  Next to the ambulance was a cop car, it’s flashing blue and red lights unnatural among the yellows and greys of the landscape.  Three other motorcycles were parked further down the highway, their riders standing together just behind the EMT crews.  It looked like a group of white-collar guys on a motorcycle trip and their faces had the hollow, disbelieving looks of people who have never seen something go so bad so fast.

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal