A Nostalgia Laden Goodbye Journey: Part Two
For some context here's Part One, or just dive right into the narrative, it's all good!
There are some tenets that I tend to live by. One of them is "Don't wreck a good thing." Another is knowing when it's the right time to leave a function. I come from a long line of bull fecal matter artists. When I was a kid, if my parents said it was time to leave, we had a good hour and a half let to play. This is not a joke, and for some reasons that part of my upbringing made me hyper sensitive to people's actual feelings about the company they keep.
We had been standing around burning slash piles at my friend's celebration of life gathering, reminiscing and playing the six degrees of separation game with all manner of funeral attendees. My friend's daughter introduced me to the director of Thompson Falls' library, and an hour slipped away as we tore up the verbal rug in library themed land. That conversation was magical. My brother and I discovered that our cousin went to school with a bunch of guys in attendance, and my parents discovered a man who lived and worked in many of the logging camps and towns that we did in Alaska at about the same time. The verbal cow pies were stackin high!
It was getting dark and I was standing next to my friend, she had her arm around me and as she talked to a friend next to us, I took a moment to observe her demeanor. Even though she was truly happy to see us all, you could see the slight stump in her posture that one takes on when they are experiencing grief. She was emanating a sense of relief that her father was suffering no more, as his illness was horrid, yet at the same time her overall pallor was one of exhaustion. I gave her a quick squeeze and said,
"I'm gonna go grab my Bro, we're going to take off."
You see, it's great to be there for your friends, and it's great to have loved ones around when you lose someone, but it's also just as great to know when a person you care about needs a bit of space. I don't know, maybe I am just weird, but all three of my friends looked overwhelmed and exhausted, and I didn't want to add to their already large pile of dealings.
"We'll stop by tomorrow and say goodbye on our way out."I told her mom as I got my fifty-fourth hug of the day.
"Good, come by and have coffee, we'll burn some more piles." she replied.
"That's a Texas sized 10-4 good buddy." I quipped in return, earning a smile.
Bro and I, about ninety minutes later per parental function leaving rules, finally got out of there and rolled into our hotel parking lot. The town was eerily not busy, a fact that was causing me some form of sentient discomfort. When I lived in Thompson Falls two decades prior, the place was hopping on Saturday nights. Where the heck was everybody?
Even though there was tons of food at the funeral, my Bro and I hadn't really ate, so we walked down the main drag to one of the two establishments that were open on a Saturday night. We walked into the Mother Lode Restaurant and Lounge and pulled up a stump at the bar. There were a few people in the place, most in the various throes of meth and/or alcohol use. They all stopped what they were doing and stared at the Bro and I. We didn't pay them any mind and took our seats. A few minutes and a bunch of bar fly cackling later we had more appetizers than we knew what to do with, and we sat looking at all the booze lining the walls in a contemplative silence.
"What the hell has happened to this town." My brother mused as he gnawed on a mozzarella stick.
"It's pretty sad isn't it." I replied as the Skid next to me twitched to the beat of the music pouring out of the jukebox.
We finished our snacks and walked back to our hotel room. I paused by the shuttered old movie theater. The art deco building is one of my favorite places. The Bro and I watched Independence Day in that theater, and we both took a moment to laugh as we reminisced about the sound going out right when the alien split open in the dissection scene. Every human in that theater threw popcorn at the screen til the sound was fixed. It was glorious!
Mom and Dad had returned to the hotel by the time we got back and we sat in their room conversing and winding down for the night. Before long we were all talked out and we turned in for the evening, plans made for breakfast the following morning.
Morning came and soon we were all seated in Minnie's Cafe. We had heard that it was the place to eat breakfast, so we were ready to be awed. Overwhelmed was more like it, the breakfast that my dad and brother ordered was more like half a buffet line. Their plates arrived with a biscuit the size of a tire stuffed with a sausage patty and scrambled egg. Over the top of that gut filler was at least a liter of gravy, and on the side was a mountain of hashbrowns that had been fried in bacon grease. None of us left hungry. Heck, I left with another meal!
After wandering back out to our friends and spending a couple of hours burning slash, we headed home. It was then announced that my Bro was going to take Thompson Pass home. I hadn't been over the hill that way since 2002, so I was game. Back then the road was still gravel for most of the way, so I was pleasantly surprised to be told it was paved. How fancy.
Fall is really pretty in our neck of the woods, for we have a large amount of Tamarack (Larch) trees. They are conifers that lose their needles. Before they do so, they turn a bright yellow color, and our forests have big swaths of fall color for us to gaze upon. We stopped at the top of Thompson Pass at a lookout to take it all in. I must admit I do so enjoy where I dwell.
As we dropped down into Idaho, we followed the Coeur d'Alene River. Now, the last time I went through that drainage there was a whole lot of nothing, other than a few little settlements here and there. Just over the pass, the only thing you see for miles. besides forest, are the signs of the mining that was done in the last century. Mountains of tailings are stacked alongside the river as you wind down the mountain side. Nature is reclaiming those big mounds of rock as nature tends to do.
It was as we got further down the river that I noticed something. Travel trailers and hook ups were everywhere. Those were most definitely not there the last time I rolled through. Mile after mile we drove, and mile after mile there were tons of trailer hook ups. When I asked my brother about it he just laughed and told me to come up there in July.
Apparently the thing to do for the urban populace of Post Falls, Coeur d'Alene, and Hayden is to tube the Coeur d'Alene River. During the summer the river is packed full of tubers and kayakers, all drifting and drinking their way down towards the freeway. Here lately I have been getting brain smacked by just how populated where I live has become, but the tubing tempest really hit me hard. The sheer volume of people was hard for me to compute. Could where I live really be that gentrified?
I mean, my driveway and local roads have been clogged with Mercedes and Land Rovers, housing prices have exploded, and in the library I have been seeing an uptick of people who dwell on a much higher socioeconomic scale than most those in our communities. My form was hit with a touch of ironic and pensive amusement as I thought about the fact that I had just left a life remembrance gathering of a man who embodied an all are welcome philosophy, yet here I was witnessing a scene of demographic evolution and kind of fussing about the change to be honest.
Perhaps that is the greatest thing that I took with me from this past weekend in life celebration land, life is always moving forward, things will always change, but those whom you love will always be steadfastly with you. And that tidbit you can tuck in your hat and tip at everyone you know.
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's scrappy and not at all sassy iPhone.