You can smell Tacoma coming from miles away. Rounding the bend on the freeway, how the sky opens up like it did that day driving to the beach after college, to live there the whole summer. The size of the sky felt like the rest of my life, everything I could do, endless. Baked out of my mind, the largest bag of weed ever, enough of it to last the whole summer though it was gone in a week.

In the Starbucks drive thru lobby off the freeway it’s just past 6 on a Saturday and already they’re slammed, literally running behind the counter with pitchers and headsets and the manager with a tablet. It’s thirty years since I started work at Starbucks. They have to keep the toilet paper dispenser keyed or people will steal it. This is the kind of thing you learn working food service. I splash cold water on my face, try to ignore how bad I look in the mirror. Outside it smells like sweet, wet, freshly cut grass and the sound of the freeway picking up. Welcome to Napavine a big sign says, with American flags on either side: For a Day or a Lifetime.

Driving to see my childhood chum Loren and once more it is typical Portland. As soon as I pull into town there is a middle-aged man who’s probably gay holding a toddler on his shoulder and pointing to the arc of water from a garden sprinkler in someone’s front yard. He’s wearing flip flops and graying. There’s a road sign that says Deaf Children and then the first of the transgender people, jogging with bad makeup. Then another in a goth outfit with a very small dog on a leash. Portland.

We drive to the vegan breakfast place in the FOPO neighborhood (Foster Powell) then downtown to Loren’s neighbor’s art gallery. John buys and flips art, furniture, sculpture, has neck tats and more that look like they were done by friends: a Jack of diamonds holding a broadsword, snakes, vines, an all-around vibe of hard times up and down his arms. But now he’s doing just what he wants to do, surrounding himself with art.

Plant-based ice cream (Loren gets the rose hip cardamom but it tastes like soap), a chicken sandwich that’s not chicken. Tossing the frisbee in the park with his son Arthur, the three of us only children: me, Loren, Arthur. Hard to agree on what to do when everyone wants to do just what they want to do. There is no compromise, we are only children.

Loren and I have known each other since the fifth grade and still remember one of our first sleepovers when we watched Salem’s Lot and Loren woke me in the middle of the night pawing at the window like one of the vampire kids, Danny Glick.

He still collects records and his living room is more plants and art than anything: that and the albums on the floor, not arranged alphabetically as far as I can see, though he knows where everything is and DJs all night. Waking from a nap to the Ethiopian harpist, all of it strange but always perfect.

Driving home from Portland early on a Sunday, the first snatch of mountains to the west and those purple hills in the morning sun. My mind already onto the rest of the day and our plans. Stopping at the same Starbucks in the same thing I wore yesterday though no one recognizes me. They are all standing behind the counter with no other customers but me, and I come and go just like the rest.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest