Under the Baobab Tree

The La Conner Looney Tunes

Everyone wants to know how the La Conner wedding ended up. Mahvelous, simply mahvelous. First, the cast of characters:

• Allison, youngest woman CEO of something or other, now in NYC, waspy, Dartmouth, highly controlled individual. A hard nut to crack.


• Carlos, the Colombian Personal Trainer, Allison's most recent boy. Met in a gym. Was supposed to get married this month to someone else. Relayed whole story in the library of the hotel one morning, softly weeping into his muscled Colombian hands, desolate. Question -- does one tell Allison?


• Tracy, the sister of the groom. Rambunctious Armenian woman. Visibly pregnant. Host of the rehearsal dinner. A groomsperson. From Sacramento.


• Doug, Tracy's diminutive husband. Purports to be a screenwriter with bad luck, nothing ever gets picked up. The reason? He's not actually a screenwriter, he runs a soft porn website. Yes. Everyone knows this except his mother.


• Trevor, one of bride's oldest friends (other than me). Went to our high school. Was so ahead of his time in school that he was an outcast. Walked the bride down the aisle and then promptly tripped on her train and stumbled into the audience.


• Douglas (another one), Trevor's partner. Incredibly shy individual who is a graphic artist for Mad Magazine. Tall, shocking red hair, bright blue eyes. Turned out to be absolutely hilarious and my constant companion throughout the weekend. Dubbed by me as Doug Lass.


• Judith, the bride's 73-year old step mother, a real pistol. Motors around the country on her own, member of virtually every volunteer organization in Wilmington, DE, highly dismissive of lazy young people, sharp as a tack. Joined the Kim-Doug Lass cabal.


• Kristen, sister of the bride, Alexandria VA resident. Accompanied everywhere by her twin boys, Ben and Dillon. Challenge to all was figuring out which was which (Ben always wears blue, Dillon is a little fleshier of face -- complicated when both wore blue for the wedding).


• Chad, Kristen's new boyfriend, head of programming at PBS in Albuerquerque, NM, covered in tattoos, shaved head, sartorially challenged, very quiet. Initially dismissed by group as a bizarre Kristen whim. Turns out to be salt of the earth, devoted to Kristen's boys, a dedicated normal guy. Rounded out my weekend foursome with Doug Lass and Judith. Became affectionately known as Chad Roe.

Next, the rehearsal dinner. The bride and groom were committed to a laid back wedding. The rehearsal dinner was held in a biker pub in the cow town of Conway, Washington, a one dirt-road town hard up against the BNSF main line, on the other side of the slough from La Conner. Only other buildings in Conway are a corn silo and a general store. The freight trains do not stop there but they rattle every bone in every body as they blast through every 20 minutes or so. Sign on the front door of the Conway Pub said "No burnouts, peel outs, or speeding!" Droves of bikers ignored the sign all night. Meal was outside at tables under the Bud Light banners. I ate a fried oyster burger with bacon and cheese and a half carafe of pink zinfandel. A first for me.

Then, it was the day of the wedding. Wedding was on a farm half way between Conway and La Conner, smack in the middle of the slough. Again, the bride and groom were committed to informality. The service was 15 minutes long, outside, against a hedge of dahlias. The bride burst out in a belly laugh half way down the aisle. The ring bearers were actually two giant dogs -- a retired greyhound named Henny and a Burmese Mountain Dog named Desmond. They were brought in by the twins -- Desmond dragging Dillon way on ahead of Ben and Henny, Henny looking down his long nose at the audience as he passed as if to say, "hmmm….?"

After Trevor tripped over the bride's train and stumbled into the audience, the groom dropped the ring and Desmond lunged for it on the grass. Dillon flew through the air after him like a Raggedy Andy doll. Desmond circled the bride and groom and wrapped them up tight in his leash. The proceedings stopped while we unwound the couple, picked up the ring, and put Desmond back in his place. Meanwhile, Henny the Greyhound was stretching his back legs like a gymnast warming up for the floor exercise, or a track star getting settled in the blocks, gazing intently and calmly at the audience the whole time. Nobody could keep a straight face. A laughing chuckling wedding party, a laughing laughing audience, a laughing officiant, and the twins grinning from ear to ear, struggling with the dogs from start to finish.

After the wedding, Doug Lass and I explored the farm. He showed me a field of rhubarb which had some sort of sentimental value for him from his youth. I tried to go out into a ploughed field to show him a giant thistle but my heels got sucked into the earth and I crashed around like a drunk person in my yellow gingham dress, grasping at corn stalks and trying not to fall over, yelling "whoa! Whoa! Doug Lass laughed at me. Then we found a mysterious juniper hedge, dense and foreboding. A small child disappeared through it in silence and did not return. It was a Narnia hedge. Naturally, we pushed our way in. On the other side was an immaculate bocce court, surrounded by juniper trees. No sign of the small child. I dance around the bocce court, thrilled to find such a thing on the slough. Then I turn and see Doug Lass. He is irate. His push through the juniper hedge had left little botanical remainders all over his suit and he was brushing himself off with force shouting "Ah! Ah!" I come over to help. He looks at me and says, "You tricked me! You said this would be fine! It's not fair because you're in a yellow gingham dress and no-one can see that you are actually covered in juniper residue!" We laughed and laughed. Last part of this story is that I pushed on through the other side of the bocce court (Doug Lass did not follow) and found of all things a mirror in a small forested area. I stared at it. And then out of nowhere the wedding photographer arrived and got a picture of me in the mirror in the woods. Like the Secret Garden.

Final chapter -- bride is on her honeymoon and sends me a text message to say she has passed an excellent sign. "The Tillamook [Oregon] Air Museum." We chuckle and play the literalist game. What could be in there? A giant empty room? Displays of "Air Through the Ages?" "A Social History of Air?" It's almost as good as the Decoy Museum in Havre de Grace, Maryland. Every time I pass that sign I say out loud, to no-one in particular, "Ha! You can't fool me -- I'm going to wait for the real museum!"

posted by Anonymous @ 1:49 PM 0 comments

Floating Across the Skagit County Slough



I'm in Skagit County, Washington, for a wedding. Skagit County, Washington, is about 2 hours north of Seattle. Across the body of water from my hotel is Canada. It is aggressively agricultural.

The signs on the way up from Seattle were a good indicator of what was to come:

• I knew I was getting close on my drive up when I passed a sign that said: "Apple Maggot Quarantine Area -- Do Not Transport Homegrown Tree Fruit." Okay, I won't. Closer still when I saw the sign that said "Stay 100 Yards Away From Any Whale." Should be easy enough to do.


• Even closer when I started driving over a bog like thing and a sign announced "EXCELLENT LAND FOR GROWING BLUEBERRIES!" Indeed.


• And I was finally in the town of La Conner when I saw the best sign -- "Berries grown while you watch." Does that mean I have to be planted for the summer before I can buy a box of blueberries?
  

The land here is flat as a pancake with mountains floating above it like icebergs. Mount Rainier is just on the other side of I-5 from Skagit County. Some of the mountains look unmoored. I think geologically some of them may be monadnocks but that doesn't make sense to me because this is the Cascade Range. I need to find a local to tell me.

The flat land that surrounds the iceberg mountains is very boggy. Here they call them sloughs. The roads in Skagit County are perfectly straight and raised on berms above the boggy slough fields. I felt like a hovercraft in my rented Mazda -- corn and wheat and berries and soybeans and dairy cows flew past below me as I drove straight west from the interstate towards some floating mountains that turned out to be the San Juan Islands once I actually got there. I was weightless in my Mazda. Away to the sides I saw massive agricultural sprinklers sweeping across the fields. The farms down in the slough have windbreaks of aspen trees and larch groves and eucalyptus. I sat perfectly still in my Mazda and didn't need to turn my steering wheel for about 10 miles -- straight across the Skagit slough..... Then BANG -- I was in La Conner.

La Conner is a one street town with a brewery, an antique store, several inns and a marina. My room at the inn is bizarre -- it's a stand-alone two story little building essentially in the middle of the parking lot. I'm not attached to any other part of the inn and people arriving at the inn have to walk under my little building to get to reception. I am the gatehouse.

Here in La Conner I found my tribe. We are an excessively verbal bunch and some of our friends had brought their new men to be introduced to us. Apparently the men had all been warned what to expect. "Pay attention! Stay alert! Keep up! Try, just please try, to be funny?" Some of the men did okay, some didn't.

Someone should have warned La Conner too. The restaurants here all close at 9:30 and the inn we are all in actually made us each sign what I have been calling the "Anti-Joviality Agreement." Because we are here for a wedding we had to agree not to carouse past 9 p.m. Literally. No alcohol on the balconies, no parties in any rooms, no boisterousness, no gaiety, no fun. I said to the woman who made me sign it that it "sounds like you have a lot of weddings here in La Conner." "Oh yes, yes, we do -- it's hard to get any sleep around here."

We nevertheless managed to carouse. We had a rowdy dinner at the local brewery and ordered numerous bottles of wine before 9:30. We ordered 2 at a time and we'd just put the second one in someone's bag for later. When were kicked out at 9:30, we left serenely, walking past the maitre d' with our luggage bulging with our contraband. This kept us going until 10:30 -- the dead of night as far as La Conner is concerned. Unlike the receptionist, we really had no problem getting a good night's sleep.

Then this morning we caroused on the outside terrace at breakfast. Every time someone in our group came out we would send up a round of applause. "Good morning!" We learned from someone that Russia had invaded Georgia which stunned us so immediately after the round of applause we would pepper the new arrival about Russia and Georgia. "Did you know Russia invaded Georgia this morning? All day, apparently, according to the news. Did you know that? Do you have any idea why?" No-one did. We ate cheese and yogurt and apples and eggs outside in the fog for hours. The men tried to keep up. None of them really could.

Now I'm off to the Skagit County Fair, which happens to be going on this weekend. Excellent. Excellent. The hover-mazda and I will float across the slough in the fog to where the cows and pony rides and cotton candy are... Life is good.

posted by Anonymous @ 1:43 PM 0 comments