A Lap Around America

by Shawn Inmon

  Dawn looked at me. “How far from Enumclaw are we?”

  “Mmm … maybe an hour?”

  “How often do we come up here?”

  “Almost never.”

  “What is wrong with us?”

  “That’s probably a question for clinical psychologists to answer, really.”

  She gave me her patented Dawn look, the first of many thousands I would no doubt receive on this trip.

  “Seriously. I can’t believe we have lived this close to this much beauty and never come here.”

  I think we are probably too typical when it comes to this. Life gets busy. You work all week, then when the weekend finally arrives, you’re worn out, and a quiet day at home seems pretty good. Or, the chores that you put off all week are piled up waiting for you. Or, there’s that new Jerry Lewis movie waiting for you down at the multiplex. (Really? Jerry isn’t making movies anymore? I knew there was a void in my life.)

  Whatever it is, you get to Sunday evening in an eye blink, and you’ve got to start thinking about what you’re going to wear to work tomorrow. All of that doesn’t leave a lot of time for gorgeous drives through national forests, even if there’s one only an hour away.

  That’s a big part of what made us do the irresponsible thing and say, “Chuck it all,” to our reliable jobs. My vision is already failing, and I have a difficult time driving at night. I had this terrible feeling that, if we worked another ten years to get everything “just right,” we might never make this trip at all.

  In fact, after I’d announced the trip on my author’s page on Facebook, I was overwhelmed with messages from people saying, “My husband and I always dreamed of a trip like this, but …” There were a lot of causes that came after that “but,” and we knew the best way to avoid them was to just go.

  We stopped at a small picnic area alongside Highway 410 surrounded by tree-covered hills, a gorgeous meadow, and a pristine little lake. We had decided to eat at least one “picnic” per day, for two reasons. One, two meals per day at a restaurant would balloon our calorie count, and two, we wanted to try to keep costs down.

  I thought it was boring just packing our food into a normal bag, so I immediately dubbed it The Magical Mystery Bag. Eating out of The Magical Mystery Bag seemed infinitely more exciting than just grabbing some trail mix and a PB&J sandwich.

  We dined on french bread, cheddar cheese, and, yes, some trail mix. That seemed like part of our adventure, at least on Day One. Who knew what it would feel like on Day Forty-something?

  Our first picnic spot

  After lunch we hiked out to the little lake, reasoning that this adventure was absolutely about the journey, not caring a whit about the destination. We watched little polliwogs swim, soaked up the sun, and eventually made our way back to the Silver Bullet.

  We drove eastward alongside the river, as it gurgled, sang, and beckoned to us. We gave in at last, pulled over, and walked down to listen to its song. We each found a flat rock, took off our sandals, and put our feet in the icy cold water. I was sure every day wouldn’t be as relaxed as this first, but it was a good way to start.

  For the most part, the goal was to keep schedules and appointments to a minimum. But I wanted to make sure that we would have a nice place to stay the first night, so I had made a reservation at the Weinhard Hotel in Dayton, Washington. The Weinhard looked old and funky.

  Since those same adjectives can be applied to me, it looked perfect.

  We had many miles to go before we slept at the Weinhard, though. When we dropped down into the beige eternity that is the state’s eastern side, we skirted around Yakima, the Paris of Eastern Washington. (Not really. Spokane is probably the Paris of Eastern Washington. Do you ever wonder if Paris gets ticked off about being compared to all these backwater towns?)

  Brown fields blended into brown hills that faded into a sky that, I noted gratefully, was still blue. Do you remember that movie Pleasantville, where much of the story takes place in a black-and-white world? Eastern Washington isn’t quite that bad, but it does pull most of its color from the sepia part of the color wheel.

  After we had driven through so many miles of brown haze and I had lost sense of any other color, a river appeared on our left.

  “There’s the mighty Columbia,” I said to Dawn.

  From our vantage point at that moment, looking down from on high, it didn’t look so mighty.

  “That stream?”

  “Just remember you called it that.” I knew we would see the true power of that little stream before too long.

  As I would do for the rest of the trip, I searched every available resource to see what lay ahead that we might want to see. Under my feet, I had tomes on all the national parks, a Reader’s Digest book called Off The Beaten Track, and, most important, Mama Google on my trusty Android Galaxy phone.

  I came across something called the Gingko Petrified Forest.

  “Okay,” I said to Dawn, “There’s a petrified forest up ahead, but it will take us about fifty miles out of our way. Whaddya think?”

  “What’s a petrified forest, really?”

  I wanted to say it was like something you’d see in a Disney movie, with hundreds of once-lush trees and bushes all turned to stone. Instead, I said: “No idea, really.”

  “Good! Let’s go, then.”

  I need to point out that this was still Day One of our trip. If it had been Day Fifty, I think we might have stuck to our route. Instead, we took a detour along the Columbia and finally found the Gingko Petrified Forest State Park. We had to take I-90 for about two miles to reach the park—enough to remind us why we were sticking to back roads. Semis and cars whizzed past, their drivers intent on doing at least 90 mph, and we had a hard time adjusting from an average speed of 45 to double that.

  Soon enough, we were off onto another dirty little gravel road. As we pulled up to the building marking the park entrance, we saw some logs lying on their sides, as though someone had begun building a campfire, then thought better of it.

  “That’s not the petrified forest, is it?” Dawn asked.

  It was.

  On the trip ahead, we would see a thousand wonder-inducing sights and be constantly dazzled by the state and national parks we would see. This, however, was not a great beginning. For one, we hadn’t gotten out of the car since we’d dropped down into Eastern Washington, so we hadn’t really noticed the temperature rise. It had gone from the very comfortable upper 70s, where we had started, to the low 90s.

  Maybe we just weren’t in the right frame of mind, but I felt a little sorry—petrified, even—that I had suggested driving an hour out of our way to see chunks of wood that had been turned to stone.

  We didn’t even bother to go inside the information center. Instead, we backtracked over I-90 and the Vantage Bridge, then immediately got off and dropped down to our comfortable cruising speed of 45 mph.

  It was well into afternoon by now and we knew we wanted to make it to Dayton before dark, but it was still summer and dusk was nowhere in sight. So we turned off the main highway toward Palouse Falls State Park. By the time we got there, the sun was getting lower and shadows were lengthening. The road was one of the twistiest we would drive on the whole trip. But we were glad we were going slowly when we came around a turn to find a flock of half a dozen wild turkeys congregating on the road. Big and black, with reddish wattles, they didn’t look much like the fat birds advertised at Thanksgiving. They looked like a gang, prepared to rumble with us if we had a mind to. Though unimpressed by us or the Silver Bullet, they were kind enough to let us pass as we nudged forward.

  As we approached the park, it was hard to picture where, in this flat terrain, the advertised 200-foot waterfall might be found. How can there be a twenty-story-tall waterfall where there is no mountain? Apparently, by dropping into a hole that rushing water has been carving for millions of years.

  Palouse Falls at sunset

  Because it was the end of summer, the waterfall wasn’t as impressiv
ely wide as it is during the rainy season, but the drop was spectacular—a long, thin ribbon of froth constantly plunging to the rocks below.

  We walked back through an impromptu campground, where groups of people had set up tents and were gathered around fires and picnic tables, talking and laughing. I saw an acoustic guitar leaning against a table and imagined an eventual rendition of “Kumbaya.” This inviting scene made me want to join in, but our reservation at the Weinhard awaited.

  We made one last side trip before we called it a day, in Starbuck, Washington. Never heard of Starbuck, or think I was just misspelling the coffee chain? Don’t worry. Anyone who has never lived within 100 miles of Starbuck is unlikely to have heard of it. With a population of 129, as of the 2010 Census, there’s not much to recommend it to outsiders. In fact, in the town’s Wikipedia entry, the photograph of the town is a grain elevator. Not a huge, historic grain elevator; just a normal, smallish grain elevator. That should tell you most everything you need to know about Starbuck.

  So, why did we want to drive through Starbuck? I was hoping to exorcise a personal demon. I had lived in Starbuck over the summer of 1968. My mom had just remarried, after my dad had died in 1965, and my new stepdad was a construction worker. I have no idea what he could have been helping to build in the area in 1968, but we lived first in Starbuck, then Dayton.

  This second marriage for Mom was not great, and all the not-greatness, at least in my memory, traced back to Starbuck. We had rented a tiny little single-wide trailer, almost a travel trailer. The trailer was cramped, the summer air was hot, and tempers were hotter still. One night, I had been lying across the bed, reading a comic book, when I heard a crash. Like any curious eight-year-old, I ran to see what caused it.

  What had caused it was my step-dad hitting my mom hard enough to knock her into the little refrigerator, which had flown open and disgorged its contents of ketchup bottles, milk, and pickles, with a crash. I didn’t have a chance to say a word, before my step-dad picked me up and threw me back into what passed for a bedroom.

  My mom shouted, “Shawn, he’s killing me! Run and get help.”

  I bolted for the back door, feeling like I had evaded further violence by the merest of whiskers, though I don’t know if he even noticed I had left. I jumped off the back porch and looked desperately left and right. There were no houses near us, but there was a large field of tall grass behind the house. I ran and hid in the grass, feeling as helpless as I ever would in life, and berating myself for being a coward.

  Eventually, I worked up enough courage to stand up and saw the two of them sitting on the back steps. I approached cautiously. I saw Mom had a cut on her forehead, and my step-dad had the beginnings of a bruise on his cheek. They were both holding Rainier Beer cans against their abrasions.

  “Sorry,” my step-dad said. “Things just got a little out of control. This will never happen again.”

  Mom sat beside him, nodding.

  It did, of course. It happened regularly, although rarely involving me. Usually, they just beat up on each other. And though it happened in every house we lived in, I always associated the ongoing violence of my childhood with the town of Starbuck. We moved to Dayton shortly after that, and I hadn’t returned to either in the forty-eight intervening years. But it had loomed large in my nightmares.

  Now, probably twenty years older than my step-dad had been at the time, I returned to the scene of the crime. Dawn turned down the side streets and we drove around in long, slow loops. We had lived in what was, even then, an old trailer. I knew it was almost certainly gone. I hoped to recognize something, though—some landmark, that big empty field perhaps—so I would know where “home” had once been. I wanted to let it go.

  That kind of easy closure was not to be, though. I recognized nothing. We saw closed-down businesses, old houses, people quietly going about their lives, but nothing that looked even the slightest bit familiar. We made one last loop through town, driving at 20 mph. I had always demonized this place, associated it with hell. It wasn’t, of course. It was just a tiny dot in a map where my parents launched the first skirmish in a war that went on for decades.

  I turned to Dawn and shrugged. “It’s not so much. I can let it go, now.”

  And I did.

  In my memory, there was some distance between Starbuck and Dayton, but the grown-up reality was different. Before we knew it, we were on the outskirts of Dayton.

  The first thing I saw was a shiny new Best Western hotel. That didn’t bode well for being able to remember much in Dayton, either, as there had been nothing like that years ago. As soon as we hit downtown, though, everything fell into place. The Liberty Theater was exactly where I remembered it, looking completely unchanged. As I peered up Main Street, it was the same, too. Most of the businesses I remembered, like the Bulldog Den, where the young hoodlums hung out, or the five-and-dime store, were gone. But the vibe was exactly the same.

  Unlike Starbuck, I had loved living in Dayton. The whole town gave off good energy then, and it hadn’t changed.

  We found the Weinhard, a century-old building that looked nothing like a hotel, really. I asked the young girl at the front desk if she had ever heard of the Bulldog Den. She looked at me as if I were an ancient prospector wandering in from the desert.

  “Just a minute. I’ll ask my dad.”

  Dawn said, “Really, Shawn?” Our bags were puddled around our feet and she obviously wanted to get to our room and relax. Too late. A man and woman who appeared a few years older than me came out of a back room.

  “Bulldog Den, eh? Was that the place with the pinball machines?”

  I nodded. Pinball machines, and all kinds of other little machines that would eat all your nickels and dimes, if you let them.

  The gentleman and his wife had a long discussion about where it might have been, deciding finally that it might have been located right in the building we were standing in, before it was converted to a hotel. Or, maybe down about half a block. No one was certain.

  Thanking them profusely, and avoiding the look I knew was on Dawn’s face, I hustled our bags up the long flight of stairs to our room. Stairs, no elevator. We had each packed a duffel bag with our clothes, plus a small backpack with bathroom necessities and a suitcase for dirty clothes, plus one more packed with other items I thought we might need on the trip. When it was all stacked in one place, I looked like a Sherpa, preparing to mount an expedition to the top of Everest.

  Our room was beautiful, decorated impeccably in the style of a hundred years earlier. But everything felt new. We threw our bags down and trekked back down the stairs, which felt a lot shorter when I wasn’t schlepping the luggage, and inquired as to local restaurants.

  The man and woman both glanced at the clock, then sucked on their teeth and looked slightly stricken at the paucity of options.

  “If you hurry,” the woman said, “you might find one place open down the street.”

  We hustled down the charming, old-timey feeling Main Street and did indeed find one place open. It was a bar, but they had food, according to the sign. It was immediately obvious that this was the local watering hole. Everyone there seemed to know each other.

  The bartender assured us it wasn’t too late to order food and the place would be open for some time. While we waited, we had a chance to look around at the crowd having a nightcap. They were all about my age. Since I went to third grade here, I knew it was vaguely possible I had gone to school with some of them. But I couldn’t think of a way to ask without looking like a fool, so I didn’t.

  Soon, one table group after another stood up, paid their bill, and left. The bartender looked at the suddenly emptying bar and asked if we wouldn’t mind taking our order to go. We were pretty dead after our first day, so we were glad to take our sandwiches back to our room.

  We immediately discovered something about life on the road: Every hotel has a different shower system and cable television setup. We spent twenty minutes trying to get the DirecTV setup to
work, then gave up. Which was fine. We had a lot of miles ahead of us.

  Day Two

  Have I mentioned how little concrete planning I did for this trip? I had some general concepts, such as wanting to hit all four corner states—Washington, California, Florida, and Maine—and seeing as many national parks as possible. I was intent on sticking to smaller roads, but I didn’t have a “point A to point B” agenda. That offers a lot of freedom, though I realize it might drive some people crazy to not know where they’re going.

  I went to sleep that first night figuring that we were going to wake up and drive to Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon.

  As we were packing, Dawn asked, “Are we going to drive down the Oregon coast?” Having left to me what little planning was to be done, she was flying blind.

  “Umm, hadn’t really planned on it,” I said, envisioning the map of Oregon with an arrow pointing down the middle, toward Crater Lake.

  “Oh. Okay. I was hoping to put my feet in both the Pacific and the Atlantic on this trip, but no big deal.”

  I flipped the map open and saw that we could indeed make it to Crater Lake with a hard day’s driving, without a lot of side trips. But that’s not what this trip was really about, was it?

  “I like the sound of that. Let’s do it. But we’re clear over in Eastern Washington. That means we’ll have to drop down and backtrack all the miles we did yesterday.”

  “Is that okay?”

  “Of course it’s okay!”

  One simple conversation changed the next two days of driving. That’s the kind of trip we were on, and I’ll admit I liked it.

  When I was young, I had hitchhiked up and down the West Coast, and I had always wanted to ride my thumb all around the United States. Other obligations had arisen, so I had never gotten the chance. Now, with serial killers apparently roaming every inch of highway, not to mention that I was a lot older and liked a comfy bed, I knew I would never thumb across the country. I still had that anarchic spirit, though.