Too Many Peoples—How I Spent My Thanksgiving

by Jim Washburn

I traveled to the Soviet Union, back when there was one, and found it to be a land of surprises: radioactive cucumbers; kids getting high by drinking heated, strained shoe polish; an “Evil Empire” that couldn’t get it together enough to have working elevators, making one wonder if the arms race might not have better been left to the Otis Elevator Corp instead of the Pentagon.

Even liberal types like myself were leery of the place. Given all we heard about life behind the Iron Curtain, you expected prison, minus Johnny Cash. We entered via a steamer ferry from Helsinki, and the most surprising thing was learning that the Finns regarded the Soviet Union pretty much the way we do Tijuana. It was where they’d go slumming for a cheap, wasted weekend.

The ferry had a foreboding hammer and sickle on the smokestack, but inside there were discos and a casino. Once in the USSR, the Finns didn’t need much cash, or Levis, to trade for rubles aplenty to stay fucked up all weekend.

The wife and I started our Thanksgiving this year with a couple of days in Victoria, B.C, where we found that, to Canadians, the USA is the new Tijuana. After decades of their dollar being worth embarrassingly less than ours, it now is worth more, and is climbing by the day, thank you, George Bush. Businesses in B.C. were loath to take our cash, and retailers there were heavily discounting U.S. goods to the locals, attempting to stave the flood of Canucks crossing the border for bargains. Lock up your Wal-Marts!

Speaking of a southward “exodus,” The Globe and Mail newspaper of November 21 read, “Shopping trips to the United States hit a six-year high in September, with 2.07 million same-day car trips, when the loonie eclipsed the greenback for the first time in 31 years.”

That’s right, their dollar is nicknamed the loonie, and it’s worth more than ours.

We nearly didn’t make it out of the States. Earlier this year my good friends in the White House made it necessary to carry a passport when crossing back to the U.S. from Canada (they’ve temporarily backed off from this requirement at ground border crossings, after an outcry from locals on both sides, but it’s needed for air travel), so the airlines won’t let you on without one. No problem, mine was in my shirt pocket, until it wasn’t when I checked during the van ride to the airport. Mr. Van Man, turn this can around!!

You know those strangled mewling sounds that Harvey Keitel makes when one of his characters smacks up against the shabby desolation of his existence, like when his Bad Lieutenant is whacking off in the face of a teenaged traffic offender? I did a fair imitation of that sound, sans teen, while tearing through my ultra-cluttered garage, then at the stuffed trash bins, then the packing container crowded side yard, the patio, the music room, the office, the olive tree and the other spots where I and my shirt pocket had been between 5:30 and 7 am, putting the finishing touches on the yard and housework I’d crammed into the previous two days.

This was because our landlady had e-mailed to say she wanted to stop by while she was in town for Thanksgiving. I’ve been renting from her since 1976. She very kindly keeps our rent a good tot below the local norm, and in return, I try to give the impression that she’s left her house in the hands of a competent adult.

Some things around the abode might argue against that, such as the side yard, where I’ve gathered the greatest collection of cardboard boxes since Resurrection City, 1968. When time allows, I sell some of the choice detritus that clutters the rest of the house on eBay, and these boxes come in very handy. The rest of the time, they attract rain and wrack and look like a sagging hell. Remember the gazillions of packing peanuts I pursued through the yard a few weeks back? That’s what happens when wind gets at the boxes.

Sometimes I think all that keeps the wife and I from being poor white trash is a sunny attitude and a Pharaoh Sanders album.

The boxes were put in order, with many hacked up to be crammed the next morning into trash bins, then the yard needed mowing and trimming, a carpet of olive pits needed to be vacuumed off the lawn, the giant pokeweed had to be denuded of thousands of poisonous berries. (Pokeweed’s not common in California, but its berries provided the ink for the Declaration of Independence—that’s right, the Declaration was written in poison; how cool is that?—and the leaves when thrice boiled provided the matter for Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie.” A helpful hint: If you have a mystery plant or gardening problem, most communities have Master Gardeners organizations you can find online, and they’re itching to assist you.)

There was that, and the Western Exterminator man statue and other junk to be moved from the front bathroom, and such a lot of other things that needed completing in the pre-dawn of our travel day, all messes into which a passport could have fallen. Sleep-deprived; the clock ticking as the vacation intricately planned by my wife teetered on ruin; cursing th e idiot who’d put the passport in my shirt pocket; the fact it just would not materialize no matter how much stuff was flung aside—oh yes, there was mewling.

I tried imprecations. I tried willing the passport into existence. I tried seething. Every so often, I’d hear a sound on the periphery of my frazzled consciousness, and realize, “Wow, that’s my wife out there. She can really shriek!”

The passport turned up face-down in the absolute last place I looked. The van made it to the airport lickety-split. We sailed through check-in and security with time enow to have a $4.65 Egg McMuffin. Four and a half hours later and 34 degrees cooler, we were in Victoria, which these days looks like it’s under an alien invasion, what with construction cranes looming over its once-quaint downtown.

The locals we spoke with were not at all happy about the prediction that Victoria will be the next Vancouver. That city’s metropolitan population has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, to more than 2,180,000, with the fifth-highest population density on the hemisphere. Along with urban sprawl, Vancouver heaved upwards, with hi-rise condos housing many of the new Vancouvians.

Ditto in Victoria. From our room high up in the Marriott Hotel, we could look down on the quaint Greek restaurant where we’d dined during our honeymoon six years ago. We could look down even deeper into the huge construction pit right next to it, where signs promise gracious condo living from the mid-$400,000s—of loonies!—while at eye level a crane was working to raise up that promise.

Up in the hotel’s Concierge Lounge, the view is of the bay, for the moment. Two condo towers are abuilding in the foreground, and Mr. Concierge says when the final floors go on his nice view of the harbor, Government House and the Empress Hotel will be replaced by windows with other people staring back at you, wishing you were more scenic.

Over cinnamon-bun French toast and coffee, we watched a work crew finish smoothing the concrete floor of the some-teenth floor of the nearest condo tower. By cocktail hour, they were pouring pillars for the next floor. Goodbye, quaint.

Should you go to Victoria while the charm remains, get a ginger-ginseng beer at Hugo’s brewpub. Get several. They’ll knock you down and stand you right back up. Eat at least two meals at Il Terrazzo. Buy a silk dress in Fan Tan Alley. See the cool old Maritime Museum.

We took the ferry back to the States, to Port Angeles, Washington. This typically is one of the more easygoing ports of entry into the US. My dad and I once went to Victoria for lunch without our wallets, and, returning, the Customs agent accepted an expired fishing license as valid ID. This was also the crossing where, in December 1999, agents apprehended an al-Qaida operative with 130 pounds of bomb materials in his trunk, proving they won’t let just anyone in.

We spent Thanksgiving at my mom’s in lovely Sequim, Washington, where she’s lived on Sequim Bay just down the road from the John Wayne Marina (where the Duke docked his big ass boat on his northward jaunts) in a manufactured home for the last 20 years.

The house was in the woods then. So many people have built homes since that mom’s swath of trees is nearly the last bunch standing, and you can hear the highway where once the wind was the loudest sound.

It used to be a farming community, so predominantly Nordic in constituents that when I found a Sun Ra album in a thrift store there it felt tantamount to finding shark fossils in Nebraska. Sleepy? Here are actual excerpts from the police blotter in a 2002 issue of the Sequim Gazette:

Five years later, there are more car thefts and meth lab mishaps in the blotter. The town’s old family-owned market is gone, and Costco and Wal-Mart are there to make sure the other local businesses won’t last long. According to an article in the Peninsula Daily News, the state had estimated Sequim’s population would reach 5,330 this year. Instead, it’s passed 7,000. Based on acreage zoned for housing, it’s anticipated that another 15,800 folks might move in before the decade’s out.

People have to go somewhere. I’m sure locals bemoaned the first wave of retirees that brought my parents there two decades ago, much as the Native Americans must have bemoaned all the palefaced saps who planted there in the 1800s. Once they saw how things were trending, their last great act of defiance might have been giving every locale a ridiculous name. Sequim, by the way, is pronounced like quim with an S in front. Be sure to visit Queets, Moclips and Pysht when you’re up there. Humptulips, too. (Really—look ‘em up on Google Maps.)

We returned to SeaTac by way of the Bainbridge-Seattle ferry. I’d thought Seattle was about as built-out as it could get, but from the ferry one could spot no fewer than 13 construction cranes doing their Rainbow Claw thing in the downtown area. My friend Karl met us at the Ferry, and explained that whatever money Paul Allen hasn’t spent buying sports teams and Jimi Hendrix’ jockstrap he’s used to scarf up downtown properties and redevelop them. To keep up their present level of market saturation, Starbucks is going to have to open locations on every floor of these new buildings.

Spot a trend here? When I went to UCI in the ’70s, you could walk across the street and find cattle grazing. Now Irvine’s taking steps into hi-rise living. We’re movin’ on up! Soon it’ll be bunk-bedroom communities as high as the eye can see, and drafty warehouse stores to supply ’em, and 18-lane freeways, as we use up all the water, the forests, the air and land, all for want of someone in the public eye saying, “For Christ’s sake, put a condom on it, folks!”

When other organisms exhibit the kind of uncontrolled growth humanity has, it’s called cancer. Cancer bad: It causes unsightly growths. It kills the host. It eats your liver and never offers to share.

Rather than continuing to build and consume away our dwindling resources, wouldn’t it make more sense to realize that maybe we missed the update download on our “be fruitful and multiply” software? Between 1850 and 1900 the world’s population increased by less than 400 million—from 1.26 billion to 1.65—which seems more than plenty to me. From 1900 to 1950 it added another 871 million. From 1950 to now over 4 billion more people have joined the party, bringing us to 6.6 billion. By mid-century, we’re predicted to be closing in on 9 billion. Do I hear 10? Going once, going twice! Gone. By then Sequim will look like Irvine; Irvine will look like Hong Kong; and we’ll all, every one of us, be sounding like Harvey Keitel.

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