Travelogue: the Pacific Northwest

Just got back from a week in the Pacific Northwest and wrote about my experience.

Here are some things you can say to the tune of Everybody dance now, the chorus to the 1990 hit song “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” by C+C Music Factory:

Himalayan pink salt
Governmental shutdown
Unexpected plot twist
Adolescent meltdown
Bureaucratic capture
Satan in the manger
Overpopulation
Independent bookstore
Bigfoot riding shotgun
Pacifism face-plant
Alcoholic doula
Macroscopic houndstooth
Elevated genre
Random words and phrases . . .

I thought of all these while in sight of the Pacific Ocean. In those swirling waters, I saw many whales with my friends. We were vacationing in the Pacific Northwest. Also, the whole time we were surrounded by redwoods. If you don’t know, redwoods are tall.

But they are more than just tall. While we were passing through them on a tourist train through the Mendocino National Forest, the conductor flicked on the PA to say, “The only oligarchs out here are these trees.”

It was a poignant reminder of how nature is better and more powerful than people.

Also, on a whale-watching tour, the guide opened a cooler and said anyone who saw a whale had to chug a beer. I told the guide that made it seem like we were being penalized for whale sightings. He then called me a whale—like it was an epithet—and asked everyone who could see me to raise their hands. Everyone on the boat did, and then he gave them all a beer and then pulled out a shotgun and made them chug them.

After we got back from whale-watching, my friends and I got drunk in a jacuzzi. There were way too many of us packed into an absurdly small jacuzzi.

Crowded-ass jacuzzi

The phrase popped into my head because I had been listening to that C+C Music Factory song.

In the jacuzzi, we invented a new kind of alcohol distilled from sea mist and redwoods. While drunk on the idea of it, we had the idea to form a book club where we only read the first pages of books.

First page only book club

We ran out of money so we had to abandon our Airbnb for the woods, where we camped for free out under the stars, which you could barely see for all the redwoods blocking out the night sky.

Running out of money

In the morning, I was woken up by a hummingbird repeatedly needling my sleeping bag like it thought it was a flower. Its long sharp beak punctured the sleeping bag many times, and I felt like a pincushion in the redwoods.

I was later told by a park ranger that my sleeping bag was the same color as the favorite flower of the species of hummingbird that lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Hummingbird alarm clock

Later on, I was in a gem shop worrying about whether any of the gems were toxic and if I was breathing “evil air” given off by some of the more exotic rocks.

The gemologist running the shop told me this was not a realistic concern.

As I lifted and examined all the rocks I now believed to be safe—some of them had very beautiful crystalline structures and unexpected colors—I reflected that meaningless worry steals so much more time from one’s life than the sensation of expanded time produced by pleasurable daydreams and happy flights of fancy.

I began to regret bitterly that human beings had imaginations, and since I kept these regrets to myself, the gemologist did not assuage them.

Worries overwhelm me

I also wrote the following poems, unrelated to the Pacific Northwest, throughout my travels:

Getting a brain implant
so I can sell ad space
in my own peripheral vision,
a place I never look.

*

Flicking the neck of an hourglass,
loosening up its clogged sands.

*

Santa costume
caked in a sewer grate.

Peanut-brittle guitar pick.

A rat pushing a stroller
carrying a giant brain.

*

Cave painting
no one finds.

Grayscale
Skittles.

Jesus dying upgrading God’s
subscription to all our prayers
from free to paid.

*

On the drive back home we had to go through what felt like a million miles of twisty mountain highways until we could no longer see the whales spouting in the ocean.

Eventually even the redwood canopy abated, giving way to the green, green foothills of wine country.

We stopped at a town that had a booming wine industry and drank some. It was better than the wine we usually drink. I gained a massive respect for wine after my very first sip. But since I was no longer in the Pacific Northwest, I missed that area.

I missed the whales, the redwoods, the sea mist, the banana slugs, and the jacuzzi waters.

I realized it was probably my body missing the phytoncides that the redwood forests are suffused with.

In case you don’t know, phytoncides are antimicrobial organic compounds released by plants to help fend off bacterial and fungal infections. When people breathe them in, they get the same antifungal, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory benefits. That’s why people who live in forests have lower levels of bad health.

Antifungal compounds

Some people just go walk around in the woods and call it “forest bathing” because they are immersing themselves in these beneficial phytoncides.

When I got home, slaughtered by exhaustion, I had an idea for a Weird “Al” Yankovic song that uses the same beat as the song by C+C Music Factory. But instead of all the lyrics being about dancing, it’s a love song about someone dreaming of forest bathing with someone they love, i.e., just walking around in the woods and absorbing phytoncides together.

Forest bathing with you

*

A final poem I wrote while on vacation:

Whenever I am happy, I am haunted by my own lack of depression, especially when I’m faced with what a normal person would consider a depression-inducing situation. I call this feeling depression-haunted happiness, or the depression of being too happy. I’m not identifying this state in order to complain about being in it, but simply to give it a name in the same spirit of Adam, assigned by God to assign language to things in Eden.

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