Here are some pictures of Alyssa’s last night in town, just before she drove off in the opposite direction from the sunset. Thank you, Todd Sabel, for the great pictures!
Alyssa, my great friend and ‘partner in crime’ is moving tonight. She’s going to Cincinnati for an internship as part of her doctorate program, and at the same time, she and Luke are moving there together. You remember Luke; he’s the guy she met while he was living in New Zealand. It’s a great story, and you can read all about it here.
These last couple of years have been tumultuous and eventful for both of us, and we’ve really seen each other through some tough times. She’s really great, and Portland isn’t going to be the same without her.
The good news is that now I’ll have a cool new city to go explore and hang out in with my friends Alyssa and Luke. And where I once had just one friend, now I’ll have two.
But there’s certainly going to be an Alyssa-shaped hole in the universe now.
What a weekend it’s been already, and there are still two more whole days left.
I drove straight to Seattle after work on Friday, and had the easiest drive ever. I somehow managed to bypass all the traffic in Portland, and I-5 was moving along nicely the entire way up. I got to Seattle in record time, and after a bit of circling the block, got the best parking spot ever, right across from the movie theater.
“Paprika” was amazing. I was expecting a lot from it, and it totally delivered. If it plays in a theater anywhere else nearby, I’m going to see it again, and it will certainly be one to buy on DVD when it comes out. Jaw-dropping animation with plenty of surprises, a trippy mystery story with lots of twists and turns, and even a super-catchy theme song.
From there I went to stay up at LittleBrother’s house in Snohomish. It was midnight when I rolled in, but he heard me arrive, so he came down and we talked and played a couple of games of pool on their new pool table. We finally went to bed around 1:45.
At 6:45, I was awakened by Niece. She was already going a hundred miles an hour, which meant that resistance on my part was futile, so I got up and played with her and LitteBrother while BabyNephew was awakened and fed by Brother’sWife. Before they left for Yakima that morning, they each gave me a huge hug and said, “You’ve sure had a tough time lately. Hang in there. We’re really proud of you.” That just about made me cry.
Then, after feeling sick to my stomach all morning, I started to take a turn for the worse, so I went in and had a nice bout of. . .um. . .diarrhea. (Well? I did.) After that, I felt extremely weak, and after such an early morning of playing with Niece, I decided it was time for a little nap.
After said nap, I headed down to Seattle to meet my friend RoMo, who used to live here in Portland. We walked around in her neighborhood of Fremont for a long time and caught up on each other’s lives as 
we walked along the canal. Then we walked back up to my car and drove to the Ballard neighborhood, where we ate lunch at a sushi restaurant, where I had exactly one little bowl of miso soup and one piece of maguro nigiri before having to stop because my stomach was feeling so strange. She finished her sushi and beer and then we headed out. I coughed and said, “Wow. . .I barely kept everything down when I coughed just now.” She looked concerned and said, “Really? Do you need to go to the drug store across the street?” “I don’t think I’ll make it there,” I said, and walked into the alley behind the sushi restaurant, at which point the contents of my stomach erupted into the bushes three times.
We walked across to the drug store and I got some FamousPinkLiquid, which made the rest of the afternoon’s activities possible.
We explored a bit more in Ballard, then drove down to the Ballard Locks, a busy shipping canal, dam and fish ladder. It was all really beautiful and interesting. It’s easy to see that you could spend all day watching the different activities that go on there, plus the gardens and grounds are really beautiful too. In fact, we saw a wedding ceremony happening in a different section of the park.
So it’s already been quite a weekend, with an awesome movie, seeing family and a good friend for the first time in months, not to mention a whole bunch of cool sights and even some stomach difficulties to make for an eventful weekend.
Tomorrow, Crystin and I start work on the song for the movie soundtrack, and my neighbor and tango-band-mastermind Susan is leaving for Australia for three weeks. Right now I’m going to bed.
On this day, twenty seven years ago, Mount St. Helens erupted.
At the time, my family lived in Yakima, Washington, which was the first decent-sized town in the path of the ashfall. The eruption happened at about 8:30 a.m. We were just pulling up to St. Johns Episcopal Church, where my dad was the vicar, when someone called and said, “I just heard on the radio. . .Mount St. Helens erupted!” The handful of us who were there sat and thought for a few minutes, but when we saw the whole horizon turning black (on a cloudless morning), we decided we should try to get home if we could.
The ash cloud hit us halfway home. Instantly, visibility went to about two feet. It was like a warm, grey snowstorm, and it smelled horrible. We were driving about ten miles per hour, but we still almost hit a turn divider and ran off the road because we couldn’t see.
We did make it home safely, and good thing, too, because the ash fell for the next day or two. We ended up with about an inch and a half of ash everywhere. It killed plants and pets. It choked the fuel systems of cars. (Interestingly, I remember that people were able to drive their cars by stretching pantyhose over their carburetors. Isn’t that ingenious?)
I was nine years old, and I wasn’t scared at all. That’s the perfect age to be during something like that. Old enough to remember it, but young enough to be mesmerized by it.
The town completely shut down for about a week, while people shoveled their driveways and sidewalks, and street cleaners ran day and night. My brother and I would stand under the awning on the back patio and watch the ash falling for a long time. People were saying things like, “Don’t let the ash touch you, it’ll melt your skin!” and “If you breathe it in, it will kill you!” So when we did venture out, we wore those little breathing masks and sweltered in our winter coats, at least until we realized that it wasn’t THAT hot, and we could catch it in our hands.
I’ll never forget the video of the gigantic logging trucks being washed down the Toutle River, or the huge logs destroying bridges, or the picture of the newspaper photographer’s car buried by boiling mud.
One of our friends in the neighborhood drew a volcano in ball-point pen on a bunch of white T-shirts with a caption that said, “Mount St. Helens–a pain in the ASH!” O, the hilarity.
The local news had a field day with the eruption, as you can imagine. “WILL VEGETATION EVER GROW BACK?? WILL THE VOLCANO KILL YOUR PETS?? TUNE IN AT FIVE TO FIND OUT.” Well, most of the pets lived, and before too long, trees and plants were growing back stronger than before. I still remember the pictures in National Geographic of the first little sprouts growing up out of the ash.
It was an amazing experience, and one that I’ll remember as long as I live.
