Gem among the dross

I didn't want to make it sound like I was slagging off on everything in Aberdeen, even though I couldn't help noticing that probably something between six and eight out of ten people I saw walking the streets today was obese.

And not just cute-n-cuddly, round-n-roly-poly big but freaking huge; big-ass butts and ginormous legs and big honkin' peniculae lapping down over their hips (what in the service we used to call "Dunlaps' Disease" because your gut done lapped over onto your legs...). I mean...the fuck? Is the county seat of Grays Harbor County some sort of secret repository in the National Strategic Morbidly Obese Caucasian Reserve or something?

So not only were these people walking around looking all poor and beat down, but they were...well, huge.

I know the connection between poverty and bad diet and obesity, but...damn. Like heart attacks walking around in bad clothes.

That was pretty depressing.

Anyway, I wanted to say that I did find something of value here; the 8th Street Alehouse.

The pub fries were crisp and savory and hot and with the spicy remoulade were a perfect match to the malty house ale, and the steamed clams were resonant with brine and sweet with butter and were a boon companion to the grapefruit IPA (and I don't say that lightly - I am typically not a fruit-beer fan!)

What turned out to be amusing was the couple at the next table turned out to be in the consulting business as well; she a hydrologist and fisheries specialist, he an air and water contaminant analyst. He couldn't remember the name of the old Chicago Cub's broadcaster (Jack Brickhouse was the man's name, by the way, a memory from my mother's summers listening to the Cub on the radio...)and that led us to talking about this and that and eventually found out what we did for livings. So we spent a bunch of time talking about funny consulting things.

(BTW - In case you don't know GFT conventions, if I show pictures of people who either haven't explicitly given me permission to show their faces or I haven't been in a position to ask, I only show their legs and/or feet. It seems like a compromise that lets me preserve their privacy but show something of them on a medium that is as visual as literary...)

Anyway, the 8th Street Alehouse was a good place to be after a long day in the hot sun wrangling samplers full of goo.

(Aberdeen, as you can imagine, is built on tens of feet of sloppy Chehalis River alluvium. For a day's drilling that's fine. For a week? Christ, it's like punching the clock. How many samplers full of gray duck shit can you stare at, pocket-pen, torvane, and worm-roll before shoving the goop in a baggie and moving on to the next sampler full of gray duck shit? Before getting bored out of your fucking skull, I mean..?)

And it's probably worth a look back in after tomorrow's day-full-of-duck-shit; I haven't tried the fish and chips yet.

There's only one teesny little problem...

The 8th Street Ale House is in Hoquiam.

So I guess Aberdeen still pretty much just sucks pipe.

Down and out in Aberdeen

I had never been to Aberdeen, Washington, before.

I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with this place. It's on the inside of the long Willapa Bay embayment that forms the far southwest part of Washington State, where the Chehalis River empties into the big estuary.

Aberdeen clings to the south edge of the Olympic Mountains massif and appears to be a very typical sort of Northwest coastal town; wedged between the mountains and the sea, shoved into the shelf of flatlands that are entirely too likely to disappear when the inevitable tidal inundation rises up from the dark Pacific beyond.

I wasn't sure why the sign at the end of Washington Highway 12 read "Come As you Are" until I turned into 2nd Street looking for one of my drilling locations and came across "Kurt Cobain Landing", the truly bizarre and tacky little park at the end of a dead-end street in the Felony Flats neighborhood.

The effect on a passing stranger is unsettling. The Flats have not materially changed since Cobain's time; the little houses and cheap apartments are dingy and rundown, the streets weave drunkenly as the shoddy paving crumbles away. The "park" itself is nothing more than a stand of trees behind the crash barrier at the end of the street, a sign with a picture of Cobain, a fugly cement guitar standing strangely erect from a dark block, priapic fretboard pointed skyward.

The Young Street Bridge further on is supposed to have a thicket of Cobain-inspired graffitti underneath, but I was busy and couldn't take the time to wander over and peek at others' necrophilia.

I spent the better part of a sunny afternoon driving around Aberdeen and neighboring Hoquiam and marveling at the sheer unattractive poverty of the place. The place is, for lack of a better word, a dump.

Don't mistake me; I've lived in the Northwest a long time now and I understand what most of these coastal towns are. These are the land's end, the far edge of the wealthy nation that sprawls across the continent behind them. This is hardscrabble land, Trump country. There was never much here. Timber and fish, for the most part, the land too steep and stony to farm, the great cities behind the wall of mountains too distant for commerce.

The fishing was never easy; the salmon runs hammered flat by fishwheels and gillnets, the ocean cold and cruel as the storms of winter claw down out of the Gulf of Alaska, and the timber...the locals will tell you that the hippies and the tree-huggers locked up the timber.

The reality is that the first lumbermen felled all the huge trees with careless greed and never restored the mountains. The forests, when they were replanted, were steep and costly to log, and the timber companies found it more profitable to ship the logs they did fell directly to Asia. The big mills closed, one by one, and never reopened.

The jobs are gone, the wealth - what little there was of it - is gone, it seems like even the hope is gone. The people are gone; Aberdeen has never regained the people it lost after the Depression. About sixteen thousand grim, grungy looking people still live here but even in the cheerful July sunshine Aberdeen looks depressing.

No wonder Cobain killed himself.

At least there's work for me here, and beginning tomorrow we will do it, our drill roaring and grinding through the dumpy streets of Felony Flats.

As Cobain might have said; nevermind.