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Published: March 23rd 2008
Marjie
This is one of my favourite photos right now.In the Words of Prince Humperdink: Skip to the End
I apologise in advance for this journal is nothing of the sort. Consider it more along the lines of me trying to get some thoughts out of my head and onto paper (albeit the electronic kind). For those of you who are actually interested in what I did while in the USA I have included a short description towards the end along with some decent photos. Feel free to skip to the end and please do not feel required to read any of my ramblings. Also, I’ve had to write it twice thanks to a dodgy internet place so you’re actually going to get a vastly abridged version (I’m a bit angry about that, I much preferred the original).
A Fortune Told in Savanakhet
Travelling around the world, seeing amazing places, meeting people who show you that there is more to life than you previously thought, driving down breathtaking roads, eating foods which would be banned back home, partying it up in exotic locales, seeing sights, smelling smells, tasting tastes and hearing sounds that have never reached your senses before; this is what makes travelling such a
Frost on a Log
This is evidence of how cold it was when I arrived in Tacoma. mind blowing experience. These are the sensations which expand your mind and show you how infinitely diverse and magical this world is; they show you a small collection out of the billions of possibilities which you can choose for your life. To many people it is a dream to travel endlessly, to see as much as possible, and to experience it all. A dream which I have taken great liberties with in recent times.
Once upon a time, oh lets say about almost exactly one year ago, I met a woman who dishearteningly moaned to me about her life. She had been travelling for almost a year and she explained how, after eleven months to the day, she completely lost the urge to travel any further. Instantly she transformed from “never going home” to “can’t wait to sit in front of the TV all day with my friends”. She warned me that no matter how I felt at the time (I was at this stage still early on in my travels) I would hit the horrible eleven month point and end up just like her. I didn’t believe a word of what she said, although I did not say
as much because I was trying to impress her for one reason or another, and soon afterwards I headed off on my own on an adventure involving a small motorbike, a cave, a river and a thunderstorm, nevertheless, I always remembered her words.
Thanks to a brief interlude back in Australia for my Dad’s wedding I managed to get past the eleven month line without batting an eyelash. I was convinced that the woman had been wrong and that I could continue to travel almost indefinitely thanks to an immunity to homesickness (I can confidently say that I will never again live in Townsville), however, things simply couldn’t last. I found myself in a very unusual situation: I was travelling to incredibly interesting and exciting places, I was seeing things the likes of which I had never seen before, and I was living a lifestyle which most people only dream about (not the least of whom being my mate Paul who was travelling with me at the time), yet I was not actually enjoying it as much as I should have been. The buzz, the exciting chills running down my spine, the breath which you hold just long enough
The Lodwick Family
Nice bunch aren't they? for it to be noticed as “extended” while not actually resulting in suffocation; all of these things no longer seemed to occur to me no matter where I was. Perhaps I had seen so many great places that the new ones simply didn’t compare? Hardly, the sights in question were some of the most remarkable places in the world for both their majesty and their uniqueness. Perhaps I was just tired of running all over the world like a headless chook? Hardly, I am by far the laziest traveller I have ever met (with perhaps the exception of one wolverine impersonator). Perhaps I just needed a change?
They say that a change is as good as a holiday, but what happens if you need a change from your holiday? In such cases the usual remedy prescribed is a simple does of going home, getting a haircut, and getting a real job. However, for me this resulted in two major problems: where is home, and is it really going to be any better there?
Home is Where the Heart Is
I had decided that I needed to go and settle down somewhere; the question was, where to
Puget Sound
Looking out into the sound from Point Defiance. do it? Long ago I decided that I no longer wanted to live in my old hometown as it quite simply bored me to death. No offence guys, Townsville is a great place (particularly if you have a family) but it simply doesn’t suit me. I need a place that doesn’t rely on taxis and has areas other than suburbs. I can quite confidently say that I will never again live in that city, which essentially removes my only real home. I am still attached to Australia though, which is something that has changed since I left the country. Right now a 32 degree sunny day sounds absolutely perfect, especially if you have a beach handy.
The other main method for finding a home would be to head somewhere near all of my friends. Somehow though, my friends seem to have dispersed themselves so efficiently that the highest concentration of my mates in a single city is somewhere in Europe, and even then I couldn’t tell you which city. Not even Brisbane seems to have enough of my friends to warrant the status of home-away-from-home above any other Aussie city.
In the end I was left with the
ultimate variety of possible choices. I could simply live anywhere in the world and do anything I wanted to (a lesson learned from the road) as nowhere out there seemed to have any solid claim on me. In the end I decided to follow a girl to Tacoma.
A Trap For Young Players
After Paul left me alone in Delhi I rather quickly jumped onto a plane which flew me half-way around the world to a city that I had never been to simply because I missed a girl. In fact, I flew to a country which I have never before even had the smallest interest in visiting (I can’t really explain why, but the USA has never really felt like my kind of place. Obviously, now that I’ve been there I know that there are many wonderful things to see and do there). I didn’t know what to expect but I was sure that by being with Marjie I was guaranteed to be happy no matter how horribly boring, frustrating, or depressing the place might actually be. That was a lot more than I could say about any of the other cities which I could have
Seastar on the Beach
For some reason there were a lot of these washed up that day. chosen.
My first days were unfortunately ruined by India’s last ditch attack on my intestines and it took a few days before I was well enough to truly enjoy myself. Then, once I started to see things and explore Tacoma and the cities nearby I actually did have a good time. For a while there I was truly enjoying the luxury of living in a house. I didn’t have to pack my things into a bag each day, I could have a good shower whenever I felt like one, I could eat whenever the urge took me, I could cook my own food (ohh that was a pleasure). The simplest and most mundane homely chores seemed so easy and trifling compared to the task of getting a decent haircut from a man on the side of a street in Hanoi. It felt great to have a home, even if it was temporary, and I was happy to be off the road. Also, I was happy to be around a girl who really, truly cared about me.
However, the trap soon swung shut, and I must admit that I was the one doing the shutting. As I was really
Galloping Girdy
The Tacoma Narrows Bridges (there are two of them now). Apparently they've been built in a different way to the original but I was still hopeful for at least a little wobble. just feeling the waters I didn’t immediately get a job and all that, instead I spent a lot of time tying up loose ends while I waited for Marjie to get home from work. Pretty soon I was bored out of my skull and soon after that I had seen every tourist attraction in Tacoma. I also realised that Tacoma exhibited every characteristic of Townsville which had lead me to leaving Australia: I had unwittingly ended up in the exact type of place which I had spent a year travelling the world to get away from. All of a sudden I was edging to get away again.
It is strange to think back on those weeks now as my thoughts then and now do not align as well as one might think. At the time, I couldn’t bear to stay in one place, but as soon as I left all I wanted to do was to stay in one place. Even now, as I sit in a London internet café thinking about places to go in Europe, the thought of actually going somewhere seems like a massive waste of effort as all I really want to do is to
Old Rail
Inside Point Defiance Park near the old logging camp. stay stationary. Then, when I regret leaving Tacoma I only think of how much I disliked staying in one place and being bored. You see, despite the fact that I know that I really want to settle down somewhere, the thought of actually doing so scares the hell out of me. I could have taken a job near Seattle, I could have been happy living in Seattle (I suppose I could have figured out how to get real coffee there, the stuff they make is rubbish), I could have filled my time with thousands of things that would have made me happy, and I could have had Marjie as well. When put all together that sounds like the perfect life to me but I was too scared by the thought of it to actually put it into action. So, instead, I ran off to London as I said I would from the very beginning.
And yet now I find myself living my dream. I always said I would travel to London and work here, but now that I’m here I can’t bring myself to settle down here either. The trap is simple: I’m scared of changing my life so
I keep travelling, but I really don’t feel like travelling any more. How can I be so daft?
Solution: sit down one day, make a spontaneous decision, and do it before I have a chance to think about it.
A View of America
You may get the impression that I dislike the USA, and this is only partially true. I never really got a chance to see the country as I only saw the Pacific Northwest and Manhattan Island so my impression is incomplete to say the least. Even so, I saw enough natural wonders to realise that the USA must indeed be a beautiful place, however, I found that a lot of the culture there falls far short of what I would have hoped for.
Given the country’s age I can understand that the place doesn’t exude the age old charms and wonders of Europe or China, and given the limited demographic which founded the country I can forgive the lack of individuality, but still, the place really seems to be lacking culture even when compared to similarly founded places like Australia. When you visit Australia you really feel like you’re in a different
Seals in the Columbia River
On my first trip to Portland we all went on a cruise on the river and some wildlife showed up to say hi. kind of place, the entire feel of the country is different to the rest of the world. When you visit the USA you feel like you’re in Australia only without all of the things which make it Australian, or England without the Englishness. That has a lot to do with the worldwide proliferation of US companies and products, but even when I took that into account I couldn’t come up with an idea of a true “American identity” which wasn’t simply a subset of my own.
Basically, in my experience the USA has a lot of interesting natural wonders and things to see which make the country well worth visiting, but don’t go there expecting the cultural feasts of language, food, architecture, customs, traditional dress, worldviews, of national identity that you would hope for. If you want to see the USA’s version just go down to your local mall.
Ok Then, Enough Rubbish: My West-Coast Adventure
This is where the interesting stuff starts. Sorry about writing so much rubbish further up, I needed to do it for my own personal reasons. Thanks to the bad weather (which for me was good weather as I love
Brooding Skies
The clouds in the Northwest were always stunning. In Tacoma I could usually see many different kinds of brooding skies at any one time, they changed so drastically above me. to see snow despite the fact that I hate the cold) the railway south to California was blocked during my entire stay so I was limited to the states of Washington and Oregon.
Most of my time was spent in the quaint town of Tacoma, where Marjie lives. It didn’t click until after the fact, but the name Tacoma seemed to have passed my ears before, and it turned out that I was correct for this was the site of the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge (an infamous Engineering failure that gets drilled into first year students as an example of “how bad things will be if you get it wrong”). The town is almost exclusively suburbs with housing stretching endlessly away into the distance along the nearly Roman roads that they love so much over there (as an interesting aside, I find it easier to get lost in US grid systems that I do in the erratic roads of London simply because all the roads there look identical). In the distance, in the direction of the town center, stands Mt Rainier. The volcano sticks up in the middle of nowhere, dwarfing the surrounding peaks, and makes for a wonderful
Stream in the Gorge
On our day trip into the Columbia River Gorge just west of Portland. view on a clear afternoon.
On one of my very first nights in town I somehow got roped into a football (soccer) game with a team from Marjie’s work and very soon I found myself standing on an Astroturf field in the freezing cold night. In terms of being thrown into the deep end things couldn’t have gotten any worse. I was frozen solid and I had no recourse but to pull my long lethargic limbs out of atrophy as a means of warming up. It was a great laugh to be playing a game in such frigid conditions at such a ridiculous hour, but the pain stayed with me for a long time. The next day Marjie and I tried to walk out the resulting kinks in our muscles through Point Defiance Park, a wonderfully pristine section of forest which is practically within the confines of Tacoma. We walked down along the beach which fronts Puget Sound in the afternoon sun, trying our best to stay warm, while Bald Eagles and Seals came by to check on us. For some strange reason we returned to the park a few weeks later and tried to have a BBQ at
sunset only to realise that we had no lighting and it was stupidly cold and windy: yet another example of northerner’s madness. Also, inside the park is a really amazing (given where it is) Zoo where I got to see a Walrus for the first time.
For some reason the drinking culture in the USA is completely backwards. It is quite normal to find beers sold in eateries, restaurants and grocery store, but as soon as they try to build an establishment solely for the purpose of drinking, like a bar, the locals try to hide it in the most dark and dingy place available. Ninety percent of the bars I saw were the kind of dives that you wouldn’t take a girlfriend to: dark, underground, covered in neon lights and old band posters, smoke leaking through the doorway, and a tattoo parlour upstairs. How can bars be forced so deeply underground when it’s quite alright to buy grog at Safeway? Where are all the nice, airy, bright, open pubs where you take your family to for a Sunday lunch? Why can’t you go out and have one quiet drink in a public place without feeling like joining a
biker gang? Of course, there are a couple of decent pubs in each city, but only a couple and they are far outnumbered by their dingy competitors. I managed to find one in Tacoma, an Irish pub as it was, where Marjie’s friend Eric played traditional Irish music (and a bit of English I should add) on Wednesday night.
On a side note, it also took me a very long time before I managed to find a café that understood the concept of espresso. Talk about uncultured! If someone can tell me where I can find a proper café that can knock me up an all day breakfast and a nice cappuccino somewhere in Washington then I’ll be truly grateful. I did manage to find one with good reading material though, it was a 1927 edition of Popular Science Monthly, well worth the read.
Thanks to Marjie I did two things in Tacoma which actually amounted to something. The first was early on a Sunday morning when we both volunteered at a toy distribution centre. This place collects donations of toys which they then give to needy kids for Christmas, Easter and Birthdays. Along with a couple of
other girls from Marjie’s university we helped sort toys for their Easter baskets which posed a real problem for me. Imagine asking a fully grown man to decide whether a Barbie Doll ought to be given to the Toddler, 3-10, or 11-15 age group of girls! I simply had no idea so I spent a lot of time moving boxes around (I think that the strategy of the woman running the place was to get me out of the way whenever possible). On another day Marjie and I volunteered to help clean up a park with other people from her work. Over a number of years volunteers have cleaned up the old park, removed most of the invasive plants and the result is a really beautiful, clean place full of (what I can only presume to be) natural Washington type scenery. Both days were a good bit of fun, and they also resulted in me getting out of bed at a reasonable hour.
I spent a lot of time in Tacoma doing very little that bears mention here (as I’m sure you’ve been able to tell already) but that doesn’t mean that I was doing nothing at all. My
The "Scary" View
Looking down on the falls from the midway bridge. This scared the hell out of me. Why did you make me do it Marjie? evenings were, without exception, great times as that was when Marjie was not at work. I spent a lot of time cooking or watching movies, relaxing at home. I even went to the effort of cooking a secretive and special Valentine's Day feast which worked out perfectly despite the fact that I can’t read recipes to save my own life. Those times were when I was the happiest.
One thing which would have made Tacoma a whole lot better for me was if I had had some more friends there. I left the town just as I was starting to have some friends which is a big regret of mine. However, when Marjie and I attempted to organise a friendly game of cricket at a park near her house the only people who turned up were an inquisitive six year old and his dad. I can now announce that at least one American child can play the grand old game.
Meet The Parents
I soon discovered that as soon as I left Tacoma things were a whole lot more exciting. In an effort of total immersion my first soiree was a weekend trip to Portland to
meet Marjie's parents. As if that wasn't scary enough, instead of being met by her parents straight off, I was first to be introduced to the grand parents! That has to be twice as bad, doesn't it?
Well, in actuality I really didn't have anything to worry about (Marjie had been trying to convince me of this prior to the day) as they all practically knew me anyway as they had been reading this journal. Better still, Marjie's grandmother, Mary-Anne, was hugging me and saying how great it was to finally meet me from my very first step off the train. For my entire stay in Portland (and for my second one a few weeks later) it felt as though I were staying with my own family, Marjie's family is just that nice and friendly.
We spent the first day there with Skip and Mary-Anne, having a riverside lunch by the Columbia, crusing in Skip's boat around an island on the same river, and sitting about in their altogether too comfortable floating home. To their credit, it was actually Marjie who was first to bring out the embarassing children's photo album.
That evening I was finally introduced
Long Way Down
But at least there's a soft landing. to the parents at a Portland institution: McMenamins. This quirky chain of restaurant/hotel/whatever-else-they-feel-like places are built in whatever strange property acquisitions can be found. The two that I visited were in a refurbished school building and a poorhouse if I recall correctly. After a few awkward moments, and thanks to the din of the restaurant, I managed to survive the dinner in tact, in fact they actually seemed to like me. From that point on I was made to feel as much at home as I could ever have imagined. In the end it wasn't a scary experience at all.
Portland is a really beautiful city filled with some of the most laid back people I've met. If any place that I visited goes against expectations then it is Portland. One of these days it may have to separate from the USA just to get the attention that it deserves. Although it isn't packed full of people and doesn't have a massive sprawl of concrete for a CBD, the city makes you feel as though you are living somewhere big, exciting, and fun. It's the kind of place where you can fit in no matter how loud, weird or
Sorry Mary-K
Jim threw a snowball at me but I was good enough to catch it and throw it back. Jim decided to hide from my onslaught and left Mary-K to get the full impact down the back of her coat. She was completely unawares until that point. Sorry, I didn't mean it, honest. intriguing you are (perhaps it isn't as good as some parts of London for this, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't get away with a mirrorball suit here).
One morning, while in Portland, Marjie's mum took us both along to her work where she showed us around. She works for a glass manufacturing company which makes all sorts of glass which you have probably never seen or even considered. It all gets used for artistic purposes, often in relatively small pieces. In fact, the entire Northwest is obsessed with glass art and while I was there I saw both a glass museum (in Tacoma and well worth a look for the live glass blowing) and a glass-blowing studio/art shop. Glass art seems to be everywhere and everyone seems to be involved. I actually got rather attached to the stuff and will have to pick some up one of these days; unfortunately they aren't suited to being carried around in a backpack for a few months.
Just west of Portland the Columbia River surges through a gorge which makes for some really cold weather and some spectacular scenery so we spent a day driving around the gorge looking at various
sights. The Multnomah Falls were great, but my favourite part was when we got out of the car and went wandering along a hiking trail through the snow. I was walking along in deeper snow than I ever did around Everest and I loved every step of it!
The next day was similarly brilliant as Marjie and I borrowed a car and drove out to the Oregon coast. Now, I had been craving a beach for a while and my tan was fading so it seemed like a great idea to head out that way. However, when we arrived at the beach I was faced with the obvious fact that sunbathing, let alone swimming, was completely out of the question during Autumn in that part of the world. The chilling winds, intermittent rain, choppy waters and desolate-looking forest lent a surreal air to the place as I wandered along the shore. It looked like no coastline I'd ever seen before, and yet it still seemed familiar in some ways. We spent some time looking among the rocks for the various coloured life which somehow manages to thrive there before heading up to a peninsula where we could look out
Hiking into the Wilderness
Marjie and Jim head out along a hiking trail. along the cold and windswept landscape dotted with weathered rocks jutting out of the water. It was a marvellous place to see, but it left me craving a sunny and sandy beach just as I had come.
Some weeks later we returned to Portland on a whim (we decided to go the night beforehand) so that we could finally go snowshoeing out in the countryside. We quickly arranged everything for our two day excursion, caught the morning train down, tied on our elaborate shoes and set out under the watchful eye of Mt Hood. The shoes certainly made it easier to walk on the snow, but it didn't feel like it at the time as the motion came rather slowly to me. Nevertheless, the views from out there in the countryside when we were completely surrounded by snow covered forests were worth the effort as we headed down towards a frozen lake. Having never seen a frozen lake before I was happy enough at that, but to be seeing it on a beautifully sunny day in Oregon while a massive volcano sat awkwardly in the middle distance made the day truly special for me.
So, in the end
I would have to say that I really had a great time in the Pacific Northwest. I saw a lot of great places, perhaps not as many as I could have in the time that I was there, and I also got a lot of enjoyment out of living the normal life in Marjie's house. The USA is a great place to visit, but I would probably prefer to have a car while I was there to save all the effort of getting around. Also, they have really good beers over there, and some really wonderful people.
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Brandy
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Autumn
".... was completely out of the question during Autumn in that part of the world" I thought it was closer to Spring?