Dead Letter Department #18

(did you miss dead letter department #17? catch up here!)

weather report

Well, here’s a screenshot of what the app was telling me yesterday:

It’s been bad: the main highway that runs north to Vancouver BC & south to Seattle was closed in both directions for a while. A couple of north county towns are basically underwater & Facebook was nothing but folks with big trucks & fishing boats offering help to go retrieve stranded people.

Because I have the common sense of a potato, I went walking around my neighborhood a little bit so I could peer into the rushing creek that runs parallel to my street, right through the park & down to the shoreline. Sometimes I forget it’s there, just another quiet neighbor, but as soon as I stepped out onto the back porch I could hear the water roaring. When I got to the overpass it was foaming and frothing, way up over the banks. Loud water is hypnotic after a minute, like you could almost tip over into it without really intending to, so I kept going into the park where I ran into someone grimly pushing his toddler on a swing as the rains shot down, both of them apparently desperate to get out of the house, and a guy who showed me pictures of how bad it was in other parts of town. “I’ve been here forty years,” he told me, “and only seen it this bad twice before.” The next street was a river, currents shooting down invisible pavement, and the bridge to the other side of the park was essentially underwater so I didn’t go any farther.

All the emergency updates from the city said not to go wandering around and getting in the way of people who actually had to be out there, which is an excellent point and kept me in bounds for the rest of the day, sending texts to various local people to make sure they were safe & dry & not making foolish commuting decisions. My friend got back to her house right before the highway washed out—it’s covered with six inches of mud in places now, after the landslides.  There’s something very strange about I-5 being inaccessible. Highways are such a commonplace that they feel eternal, impossible to break, and then the one I drive on almost every day snaps like a thread, severing the way out. Of course they’re just another built thing on the landscape, but I guess I forgot that.

Today the sun is out, but the rivers are still rising. I keep learning little bits of things: floods take twelve hours to crest after the rains stop. Damns & spillways are open. The king tide last night made it worse. Ferndale’s evacuating the neighborhood closest to the river as I write this. 500 people were displaced.

I respectfully checked the creek again this morning, threw a couple sticks in just to watch them immediately get pulled under and vanish. I went to the grocery store mostly so I could see proof that other people are still out there & commerce is still occurring. An old work friend, when asked how she was doing, would occasionally quote her great-uncle: “I’m upright and taking nourishment,” & I think about that a lot. So far the house is dry & standing.

reading room

I’m near the midway point of Kevin Kwan’s Sex & Vanity, the namedroppiest, most frosting-only confection. I’ve also been re-reading Daniel Lavery’s Something That May Shock & Discredit You, which I may talk about once I’ve thought about it a little more. A used book store has graciously provided me with a copy of L.M. Montgomery’s early selected journals, so get ready for a lot of opinions about her. I do like reading journals & letters from other writers, even if it always makes me feel like I should be keeping a better journal of my own. It feels like a bit of company, even across a divide of a hundred years, even though one of us is dead & the other not.

In other eyehole/earhole news, I have developed a slight obsession with listening to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack as I’m driving around. I recommend this practice: it brings drama to the grocery store commute, and it’s nice to imagine that your band of like-minded heroes is just around the corner, perhaps in the cereal aisle.

(sequel)

The thing I forgot to tell you about the hair is that I had bleached it out in a fit of—I don’t know, desire for visible change—a few months back, and now that I’ve cut it I have cleverly & very unintentionally managed to reinvent frosted tips. The aesthetic around here gets more questionable every day.

one weird thing

I opened my car door the other day and found a razor blade perfectly positioned on the curve of the lower frame. The razor blade was only medium-clean, marred by a little stripe of rust. I am not accustomed to carrying razor blades on my person so I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who left it there. The logical answer is that it was used to scrape something at the dealership and accidentally left behind by them, but I kept thinking of other explanations: a truly ineffectual attempt at a break-in. Someone who is trying to be threatening, but in the most oblique possible way. If it was you who lost it, or left it there intentionally, you can tell me. I won’t be mad.

one good thing

I had to go use the coin counting machine at Winco the other day & it was the first time I’d ever been in there. I immediately got so overwhelmed that I vaguely clocked the incredible pinata display (I want a pinata very much now) & got to work with my pewter vase full of change. There’s a little rejection slot where the non-countables fall out, & in it I found the usual pile of Canadian currency but also a 2 cent coin from New Zealand, an English half-penny, a 1966 Austrian schilling, and a lone Vermont quarter, finally proving what my Vermont friends have long claimed, that it is basically a separate & distinct country. Coinstar believes it, so it must be true!

write back

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you back here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime if you find yourself lying in a coinslot, uncountable, I hope a collector who will appreciate your true worth comes along to scoop you up.