Under the Baobab Tree

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