My wife and I part ways at the corner of a benign intersection by the farmers’ market. She is going to buy vegetables for the week and a meal that we are planning to have this evening, while I am going to walk the dogs along the nearby port of this Pacific Northwest town. I’ve never been partial to the farmers’ markets in this town. I like markets and I enjoy eating, but I have never understood why it has to be a one-day-a-week event, which makes the market seem more like an extravaganza than a place to buy food. I would prefer that the “market” took place six days a week—you know, like markets they have in any sizable village, town or in the more blue collar neighborhoods in big cities in Europe and Latin America and other places of the world—so then it would be just about the vegetables and local dairy products rather than the event of going to the market with families loaded up in their wagons and SUVs. At the market, there is a play area for the kids, a dog-sitting service because they don’t allow dogs at the market although we heard they used to, an environmental group selling bumper stickers, a group of high school musicians jamming on the street, a wayward homeless fellow with a well-behaved but undersized yellow Lab tied to a rope and a sign, which is all fine and dandy, but we just came to buy some vegetables.
The whole notion of the Saturday farmers’ market seems to reveal a dichotomy inherent to this town, making the act of going to it almost like a political act that divides the town between the fiction-reading, self-proclaimed environmentalist, organic warriors who drive Subarus with their clichéd bumper stickers promoting tolerance, unity, harmony and hatred for a certain former US president, their spoiled dogs fed on all-natural diets sitting in the back of their outdoorsy wagons, and those gun-toting, logging, salmon-fishing drivers of over-sized trucks that carry cliché bumper stickers that expound on the necessity to drill now, that remind us that gun control means using two hands and the idea that hard work erases poverty and therefore everybody should pay for their own damned selves, while their dogs seem to be a permanent fixture on their truck beds.
I do like the feeling of going to town because we live far away enough that it does seem like we are coming down to town for a county fair or as part of some other ritual that takes place only so often. More than a physical distance, maybe seven miles at most, we are psychologically remote from the bustling main street. By our house, there is an owl that hoots in the evening and paths that lead through the forest around our house—some leading to other roads and others to nowhere. A few of the neighbors have taken the trouble to mark the paths with dots painted white on the trees, although when the snows come, I wish they had been red dots; all the trees seem to confuse any notion of direction. There are three dogs that roam free through the forest neighborhood: Dallas, an oversized but pacified Rottweiler, whose owner looks like he came out of Deliverance as he treks the forest paths on his ATV looking for his dog; a black lab that some call the police dog because he patrols the neighborhood and a chocolate Weimaraner that can be seen laying in the ferns by the side of the road or playing with the local children on their bikes who sell lemonade or toss baseballs around (yes, they still do that here). Although it bothers me when I drive to know that I might run into one of the beasts on the loose, they seem to have a better life than those that are hidden behind the fences left alone to bark all day. One of these recluse captive dogs lives high up on a hill of massive evergreens and he barks like a hound—woo-woo, woo-woo—but I have no idea what breed he is because I have never seen him. Everyday his bark comes through the trees, and it looks like he is trapped in a tree house because he is so high up there in that same perch, stuck behind a fence or a fence of trees and frustrated. It does my wife and I a great good to escape the claustrophobia of the forest, the roaming dogs and the neighbors who seem like they never go to town, so going to the farmers’ market has become our Saturday ritual.
Typically, Saturday mornings we wake up late, have tea and avoid the huge multitude of drive-thru espresso stands that pop up like mushrooms around the Northwest (we even saw one with a bikini barista, which seems absurd in a place where the temperature maxes out at about 78, but she had to do something to distinguish herself from the six other drive-up espresso stands within sight). We then load the car, double-checking that we have our cloth shopping bags. We bring them everywhere in our car, but typically leave them when we go into the stores only to remember them again when we make it to the cash register. And of course we can’t forget our rain jackets. We might see a sliver of blue sky peeling its way through the canopy of forest but down by the port, clouds could be creeping in and threatening a potential all-day drizzle. Like a pilot going through his pre-flight check, I make sure that we have everything and race down the driveway, which stands at a forty-five degree angle. Living up here has made me a natural; my muscle memory urges me to pull the steering wheel at all the turns to avoid the overgrown ferns which make going down the hill somewhat treacherous. When we make it to the bottom, I remember what we forgot. The poop bags. I couldn’t possibly let the dogs mess up the town’s streets, being the dog ambassadors that we are. We race up the driveway to get the plastic bags stored up in the closet because again we left the cloth bags in the car the last time we went shopping.
And finally, after we weave our way down the hairpin turns of the steep mountain and roll through the residential neighborhoods of town, we park near a corner where a collection of hoodlums gather. One is wearing all black and his face is done up with makeup somewhat like the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s version of Batman, you know, the one with Heath Ledger. An older black guy with a grey sweatshirt stands or stumbles in place holding a radio. The music isn’t playing loudly but he is totally enraptured with it and his eyes seem to be going into a trance. A pack of what looks like runaways sit, their heads covered by black hoodies, their skin a pale white even though it looks like they spend most of their time outside on the corner. We carry on at a calmer pace on our walk after bristling by the corner and make it halfway down the street. An old man holding a hand-rolled cigarette and his little girl—maybe it’s his daughter, although he seems too old to be a father to a young girl and too young to be a grandpa—ask to pet the dogs. Actually before asking, he goes to touch them, leading her along too with a gesture that says Don’t be afraid. But at least he asks. And I tell him to go ahead and pet the big dog, he likes attention, but the little one doesn’t, so please don’t pet her. I can hear the little girl ask the man why and then he asks me as if he were her interpreter, and I respond that the little one had a hard childhood and that she’s afraid of humans, and the girl doesn’t seem to register, or maybe she does. The man is wearing a blue tank top and I can see old faded tattoos, possibly from his military days. He exhales a drag and some of the smoke goes into my face. The tobacco smells stale and worn-out, kind of like the man. And I’ve had enough so we keep walking.
So here we are again, my wife and I parting ways at the corner, saying that we’ll see each other in half an hour. She goes off to the market and I make my way to the port with the dogs. It isn’t so much of a port but a collection of brick buildings and rusty smokestacks and barbed wire fences worn down by the sea air. It is devoid of life except for some sea gulls. Ships come in and out of the port, but it is almost as if they are piloted by computers, as one never sees any human beings among all the machinery—the loading cranes, the semis and loading devices. Nevertheless, the smells of the port captivate the dogs, as if a world of ghosts inhabit the desolate moorings and docking areas, and the dogs can trace their histories through their noses. We see the usual pattern of cars parked along the sidewalk by the port and farmers’ market, which is as follows: beat-up Japanese pick-up, Subaru with canoe stacked on top, beat-up American pick-up, nice pick-up of Japanese origin, Toyota Prius... The pick-ups usually have camper tops and some have dogs, like German Shepherds, that snarl and bark aggressively through the sliver of openings of their campers’ windows.
As I wind my way back downtown, I see a pair of ladies walking a pair of identical white dogs. One lady is white, maybe in her early 60s; her clothes are expensive but decidedly outdoorsy, with a slight Native American motif. The other looks Central American of undeterminable age. At least, I think she is Central American. Once I walked up to a supermarket clerk that I thought was Mexican, and being bilingual (I did spend a semester in Granada in college), I spoke to her in Spanish to ask her where an item was. And she stared at me with a long, blank stare in a completely awkward silence, and I thought my Spanish must have gotten rusty. Finally, she said in perfect English: “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” I’m assuming that she was Native American because she had that Mayan look that some Mexicans have and maybe that’s why I confused them. But even brown people second-guess other brown people’s identities, a wise Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian once told me. Now you can see that assuming someone’s race is a very tricky business, and I try not to assume even though it comes to me about as naturally as squinting when the sun hits too hard on my eyes.
This Central American-looking lady is wearing a white sweater that at this distance looks like it could be from Nieman Marcus or from Sears. It’s hard to tell. The gray weather here combined with the drab buildings tends to dull the senses, which could explain why the cars all seem to be of one color: a forest green tinged with mud grey. You may see a burgundy pick-up every once in a while, but you’re so used to the monotony of green grey that you’re numb to new colors. And when you see someone dressed in a lot of colors, you just assume that they’re from out of town. I see the pair of ladies, and because maybe I’m conditioned to be prejudiced just like everybody else in the world, I think that the Central American lady is the white lady’s maid because having Latina maids is somewhat common where I’m from. Their identical toy poodles have hair that has been done by a stylist that has mastered the art of understatement. At first glance, each one looks like they haven’t been styled, but you can tell that a lot of thought went into arranging each hair of their manes just so, with the hair hanging over their faces, not enough to impede their vision but enough to flop neatly over their eyes. I wonder why the white lady can’t walk the two dogs by herself, like I am doing. Does she need to pay a maid to walk the other dog? Or maybe the Central American lady is a hired friend, a strange concept itself, one that I think I could write an entire novel about. Most likely, the two ladies are friends and it is my cynical tendencies that lead me to believe that the white lady pays the Central American lady to walk the dogs with her.
Nevertheless, I try to imagine the maid’s life because a hired friend sure must have a lot of duties, kind of like a dog. She probably has a husband who works in the breadbasket agricultural area south of the port town where all the Mexicans live. He’s probably pulling cabbage out of the dirt while their four kids are with her sister who has two kids of her own. And I remember that a guy at a cocktail party last night told me that they have some real good Mexican restaurants down there in that breadbasket area. My wife works at a fairly large technology company, and we were at the CEO’s house which is up on another hill north of ours in a neighborhood that should have been in California. The trees were all cut down, so there was a great view of the sunset over the Bay, unlike at our house where sometimes you forget that the sun even exists because the trees obstruct any views at all. In the CEO’s development, they replaced the trees with those over-manicured landscapes that are so common in housing tracts in California or other areas so arid that they don’t seem as though they could support human life, but nonetheless humans force the issue and build houses that look the same all over them and wonder why wildfires burn them all down once every five years, their memories so short that they build them again and blame it all on global warming. As this port town is so wet, the California-style neighborhood seemed out of place. And actually, the cocktail party didn’t have any cocktails, just beer and wine and a handful of alternative beverages. I spent most of the time standing in the kitchen looking at the cookbooks on the shelves, wondering if they were ever used. The party was catered, and the caterers seemed so young. I don’t remember being that young even though I’m not that old.
That guy at the cocktail party, who was telling me about the Mexican restaurants, was the husband of the CEO’s secretary. He was a lecturer at the local college in both the music and the economics departments. As a non-academic, the term lecturer is strange to me because it suggests a great orator giving a lecture in a huge, open auditorium layered in cold marble. But this guy taught violin and organized string quartets. He also knew a fair amount about regulation and was testifying in some anti-trust case while teaching a class on finance. I couldn’t hear all the details with all the ambient noise of conversations between salespeople and administrators. The guy had this beautiful dark brown, curly hair—I wanted to ask him where he got his hair cut but didn’t think I could afford his stylist, nor did I want him to think I was gay. His beautiful locks made him seem out of place here in the Northwest, and I later found out he was from New Jersey or Long Island, I can’t remember. Either way, he was another outsider to the Northwest. Like me. He looked kind of like how Kenny G did in the 80s but I didn’t want to insult him by saying this. Meanwhile, my wine glass was almost empty—I tend to drink too fast at these cocktail parties, so I have trained myself to stop at two drinks so as not to make an ass of myself.
Anyway, he was telling me about the Mexican food, and I blinked or got distracted by the trays of catered food, and before I knew it, he was telling me that he could fall asleep in any situation, even a loud cocktail party like this one, something I find quite remarkable because my bouts of insomnia can be triggered simply by having an afternoon tea. He could just count to ten and be asleep if he wanted, even moments after an espresso. No wonder he has the energy to be a lecturer in music and economics. He gets good sleep whenever he wants. I can’t remember why this topic came up. Even if my mind were supple, and it isn’t because it’s been dulled by attending cocktail parties such as these, and I could remember, I’m not sure that the topics that preceded our discussion of instant sleep would have any connection to his ramblings on sleep and Mexican food. And it was at that point that I saw the four matching silver dog trays with names engraved into a porcelain-like substance with calligraphy so beautiful that they were barely legible. Moments later, the CEO and his wife came up the carpeted stairs of their basement with two dogs each—all four dogs identical. Once again, the dogs had their hair styled in a way that suggested that the CEO’s wife wasn’t going for an outrageous do for her dogs (because they were obviously her dogs and the CEO was just being a good husband by helping to bring the menagerie up for their evening meal as the guests were slowly trickling out the door), but something to keep the dogs looking clean and “down to Earth” for the Pacific Northwest. The CEO and his wife weren’t from this port town either. I’m not good at guessing breeds but they were cute, I guess. And all four looked alike. Kind of like the poodles that I am seeing right now near the farmers’ market, one held by a white lady and the other by her hired friend.
My wife and I later meet at our predetermined corner. She tells me about the vegetables she got, and then asks me about my walk. I’m thinking that I’ll tell her about how I wrote a story in my head after seeing a couple of ladies walking their poodles, but end up telling her that I think our dogs like living in the Pacific Northwest. They like running in the forests and mountains and even coming to the farmers’ market, even if it doesn’t let them in, because we can go to the port. I tell her that I’m glad that our dogs came into our lives and that they don’t look alike and that they’re mutts that can walk with me almost everywhere. And she agrees, happy with her purchases and wondering why it took a walk around the port for me to come to these conclusions.
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