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favorite quirks of the Chevy S10

Triscuits box say, “A tasty romance awaits!”

by CSLi on September 10, 2008

little Ben
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Little Ben, waiting to exhale...

little Ben, waiting to exhale….

TThe Chevy’s latest quirk is to decelerate on inclines to a disturbing 30mph; as we wound slowly up the road Kate murmured under her breath “This is not Seattle”. I’d been telling her for weeks that we would stay in Seattle, the City of Flowers, because in a silly way I thought my friend Jamie lives there. She doesn’t. She lives in the Cascade Mountains, on the outskirts of Redmond, WA. We passed a building with a jubilant sign declaring “Teriyaki Milk Barn!” and took a left.

I called Jamie five times, crossing little bridges, passing farms pastoral and weird, twisting our way up the mountainside. I looked forward to seeing the home she’s made with her husband, Bryan, a video game developer from Everett. What’s little Jamie been up to all these years?

I can’t really say how we met; she was a grade beneath me in high school, but her smarty-pants program and mine often threw us together. Was it a party? Doubtful–I rarely got invited. Soccer? Model U.N.? Shucks, I forget. She helped me with math homework, I made ouija boards for her friends. In the summer of my junior year, I left home and stayed with her family till graduation. I was given a room of my own and loved it. Jamie seemed to me then a kind of “golden child”: pretty, blonde, smart, friends with the freaks and the geeks (this was before they got their own show), possessing of gentle parents who allowed her a cool boyfriend, and –to top it all off– her mother raised rabbits in the backyard.

The last time I saw her, Jamie was living on Monroe Avenue in Rochester, tending her store that sold chain mail jewelry and black-black dresses, and…I seem to recall a certain little pair of…shiny Boots of Leather? Downy sins of streetlight fancies? You can only wear those things in TOWN, Mavis, not in the country.

We turned up a driveway, rounded the bend and rolled to a stop. A screen door slammed shut and out came Jamie, wearing a black hoodie and slim-fit jeans. From her purple house scrambled a pack of dogs, many dogs! and I knew that Jamie was the same sweet kid of my heart’s memory.
These are the sort of people you want your children around: they’re vegetarians, succumb to ice cream once in a while, compost their own food scraps, and rehabilitate abused animals. He paints, she welds, he cooks, she sews. Sore from our own domestic attempts, Kate and I took heart in the love these two so clearly shared.

Maybe there is hope for us yet. Who knows? Maybe there is lots of hope.

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CAUTION: Thin Crust over Scalding Mud!!

by CSLi on August 24, 2008

Yellowstone National Park
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Geysers at Yellowstone National Park

Geysers at Yellowstone National Park

NNo one told me there would be no internet or cell service in Yellowstone. oh nary a warning.
But it’s all right, I am what they call a “happy camper”. We can pitch the tent in under fifteen minutes if we feel like it, and we can go for long stretches of road in Kate’s trusty ‘94 Chevy pickup. At night, the headlights have taken to turning on and off at random–Kate has to drive with her left hand on the headlight button, ready. Also, the car beeps four times when you turn off the ignition. We like to think it’s saying “Good-bye” and not “There is something wrong with me”. When we stop anywhere we haul the backpacks, suitcase and books into the seat area so we can lock them up.

Yesterday, Kate wanted to see the geysers and, especially, Old Faithful. This big geyser used to erupt every hour but now clocks in approximately every ninety minutes. Earthquakes like the 1959 Hebgen Lake Earthquake and the 1983 Borah Peak, in Idaho, are responsible for this change. Scientists and other smart people (Kate) believe that the Yellowstone Caldera is long overdue–about 30,000 years overdue–and that the whole place could blow any minute. That’s okay…we’re ready. I suggested we might want to just stay in Yellowstone. We could enjoy a magical life, an instantaneous death–and be surrounded by wild animals.

The geysers are everywhere, in jewel-like colors. This one looks like an old lady’s sapphire brooch, that one a milky drink you can buy in chinatown. Nearly all of them steaming and bubbly. Japanese tourists with their tiny digital cameras, kanji-ing away like there’s no tomorrow (maybe there isn’t! We’re all gonna blow!), Norwegian couples in breezy linen clothes. We all want to peer into the jewel-like depths of our planet, our awe tinged with a bit of the grotesque. What was that phrase? “The lure of the abyss”. mm-Hmm, something like that. Kate and I wondered how, if the ground in some areas is merely “Thin crust over Scalding Mud!”, they could calculate where to safely build the boardwalk. In some places there are a measly four inches from the edge of the walkway to the gurgling, hot pools.

On the way back to the car, I bought a cone of ice cream. We set up camp for the night and had dinner at The Outpost Restaurant in West Yellowstone, just outside of the park. Not the best of ideas–this state has not yet been set up for vegetarians. But I needed to make a few phone calls, charge up the ‘tops, and wash my face with hot water.

Kate is still licking her wounds. I hope this trip can help her see that life is big, bigger than the both of us.

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