Deceiver Trail

By Bill Pearse on March 7, 2026 • ( 1 )

The kids were up late monkeying around, you could hear them giggling in their room. It was the echo of little girls though that was a long time ago, now. They were playing a game on one of their tablets. We didn’t mind them keeping us up, it was a lot better than them being gone and we now had that prospect to consider, they’d both be off to college come fall.

We’d lose an hour of sleep with the clocks turning ahead but get it back come November. This was the opposite end, seasonally speaking. Little red leaves were budding on the shrub out front; just last week it was threadbare. I didn’t mind November but given the choice I’d always take spring.

Seattle has a bad reputation for rain and spring can be a long gray smear, to that end. So you have to find the in-between moments to get out in the light and breathe in the fresh scents.

Friday night we lit a fire and put on old music videos from the ‘70s, live performances of early Genesis, Roxy Music, Canned Heat, Captain Beefheart, Funkadelic, Fela Kuti. Notably the only act my wife asked me to skip was the Beefheart. In the Genesis set Peter Gabriel had his head shaved in the middle but just a bit, so it looked like he’d been cleaved by a hatchet, with white face-paint and heavy eye makeup, sometimes playing a flute. This is the period where he was into costumes; at one point dashing off stage and returning with a wolf’s mask and red dress. I’ll admit after a while I got used to it. The cut of the dress accentuated his slender pale arms. As he beat his tambourine and shouted at the end of the song I’d say it even worked.

One theme throughout the performances was the fact that everyone was clearly doing a lot of drugs, with the possible exception of Fela Kuti who just smoked cigarettes in between blowing his saxophone and working the audience to a call and response.

What a relief it must have been when the Sex Pistols finally showed up. Though I liked a lot of bands from the ‘70s there was a fair amount of wankery and self importance. They were too serious with their robes and flutes. The Sex Pistols gave us all hope we could lighten the fuck up.

I went back up Cougar Mountain to Shy Bear Pass, the Deceiver Trail. When I came down I was so tired my eyes were blurry and burning. I thought I won’t be able to do this always and that felt both good and bad at the same time. There was a lot of mud. I took a hot bath and delighted in scraping the dirt off my legs then swaddled myself in clean cotton and a wool sweater. We’d go to the mall and roam around all afternoon, outfit our incontinent dog in the new army green onesie I got expressly for that purpose: no more wriggling out of diapers now!

I sometimes took my noise-canceling headphones to the mall and pretended I was overstimulated and autistic so people wouldn’t engage with me. I just wanted to be with my family and clearly loved them a lot, to go to such lengths. It took 3-4x longer than you’d think it would for them to get ready so I worked my pillow into a knot and napped on the sofa in the meantime, dreaming about cake and glistening ferns, long walks in the woods.