ROCK OF THE WESTIES

I have excellent news but I'm gonna make you wait for it. HA!

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We have had the most gorgeous, gradual Autumn here, warm and full of color.  We get windstorms and  rain, of course, this being Washington; but it isn't as utterly out of control as it was back in Sumas.  I am not seeing peoples' roofs go cartwheeling past my house every Fall and Winter, in other words. Nor have I lost all my belongings to high floodwaters recently. *ahem*

Last week, though, was that one wild, stormy week that always comes at the end of Fall.  We live on a bluff overlooking Puget Sound, in what is essentially a forest full of tall cottonwoods, the leaves of which turn a pure, saturated Canary yellow in Autumn. I wish you could have seen it!  The rain was hitting the windows in slashes and raising a fog as it hit the ground. The high winds  came ashore in enormous waves. All the yellow leaves went flying off the trees like billowing clouds of smoke, and then suddenly they went fountaining straight up into the black sky at the edge of the cliff!  This was huge weather.  Man I love a good storm! I sat here with my coffee and my Pat Metheny and was cozy and snug and watched it. 

I had soup too. It was seafood chowder.

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OK OK OK OK I AM SO STOKED!

Honestly I can't remember being this stoked in years! Decades! Several decades, even!

Here's why:

   IT'S OFFICIAL!!  

WE ARE NOT MOVING TO THE SOUTH!!!!

         

People, you have no idea how hard I've been sweating this.   

  

I'm going to indulge in a little whining here. It isn't punitive whining; I've blocked everyone in my family from this space. It's only "Wah wah poor me" whining. 

To continue. 

My Biker has always had a (big ol' inbred) bee in his bonnet about the South. It comes from a song that was popular back when he was growing up in Alaska. 

That song is

GREEN RIVER 

        grr rend tear argh        

Now I like Creedence. I do!  I like this song! I like their music! I do not, however, like what this song has done to my marriage. 

I get it. The Biker grew up in Alaska, so far North that he lived a good third of the year buried under 15 feet of snow, not seeing sunlight for three months at a time, in sub-zero cold, in a region so remote it could only be accessed by plane, with his entire dysfunctional family all crammed into one Quonset Hut. That is ROUGH. I get it. I do.  You'd need to have a dream limned in gold to look forward to, and for him, it was this 'Born on the bayou, barefoot girls dancin' in the moonlight, dootin' doo-doo' stuff. Images of warm weather all year 'round, sunny and lazy.  No walruses.   

I mean shit, I had my happy fantasy future too, all hippies and sitar music, backpacking through Europe and smoking pot braless and hobnobbing with Ram Dass and so forth. 

Ah, but then, you see, I was no longer 13.  I grew out of it.

NOT SO SOME PEOPLE.

Anyway, as soon as retirement began to loom on the horizon, suddenly We Were Moving To The South. 

Gonna happen, done deal, no argument brooked.   

And Lord, the fights we have had since then. 

Since we have lived here, though, all that changed.

I gave up and gave in. Fine, the man had a dream. I'd make myself like it.

Meanwhile, he was slowly coming to the realization that yes, it's hard to move to an area when it's being obliterated by hailstones the size of grapefruit, generational inbreeding, tornado clusters, an utter lack of giving a fuck, record hurricanes, or has completely washed off the side of a mountain...

 

...which is what happened to the town that was first on his list. I mean, all of the above issues plagued the place, but that last thing kinda...yeah. 

And this has held true over the past three years. Every single area he's been looking at (which, Lord love him, have been all the depopulated backwood slums where the median age is 72) have been flamboyantly destroyed by natural catastrophes, social catastrophes, or both.

A few days ago he sat me down and told me gently "We have to start looking at places on this side of the Rocky Mountains," which I took well.*  

I also marked the day down on the calendar: October 22.

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**I may have said "If you think that's a good idea," in a doubtful tone. 

Nothing hardens this man's resolve like anything that can possibly, possibly be construed as questioning his judgement. Was that manipulative on my part?  

Yes it was.