Week One, August 2008
As inconceivable as it seems, summer is already winding down, as evidenced by the condensation on the windshield this morning and a tired tangle of pea vines out back. How can there have been no recognizable spring or summer this year? What happened to that global warming thing that was supposed to be tossing us into a planet-wide frying pan? We seem to have leapt from late winter to autumn.
I wanted to accomplish so many things this summer! Remember the Jane Austen project? I still have one more novel to read - “Lady Susan”. Never heard of it? Neither had I. Probably just as well, since it is unlikely I will read it. My a.d.d. kicked in big time this week, plunging me into revising last autumn’s novel project - probably because it is set in Westport, Washington, my favorite vacation spot - and boy! am I ready for a vacation!! So, I present to you Chapter One of “RV-GO Down to the Sea”, intending nothing more than saving myself from coming up with new material for the blog - in other words, I'm cheating! After all, it's summer (I think). At the very least you can enjoy the pretty pictures from Westport - who knows, you might fall in love with the place too.
(“RV-GO Down to the Sea” is the first of a series of mystery novels featuring Cora Jane Dooley, a sixty-ish divorced waitress setting out into the world in a used Minnie Winnie RV.)
RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA
Chapter 1
I lingered in Boise only long enough to make sure my ex was in prison for the rest of his poisonous, unnatural life. The trial wrapped up on Monday with sentencing on Thursday morning. They don’t dawdle in Boise when it’s a slam dunk. That weekend I held the largest yard sale ever seen on Adams Avenue and by Monday my condo wore a brand new “sold” sign. I bought a ten year old Minnie Winnie RV from the Norwegian-American next door and in two day’s time I was headed out of town.
The RV’s vanity plate read RV-GO, which was an exact rendering of my neighbor’s heavily accented attempt to say “Here we go”. I decided to keep the name. It made me laugh, and I could use every laugh that came my way at that juncture of my not uneventful excuse for a life. But I would change my own name. I was not about to keep the psycho's. Not after all the publicity. So then and there I thumbed through the Boise telephone directory for inspiration and re-christened myself Cora Jane Dooley. C.J. to her friends, had my ex left me any.
Getting out of Idaho is a piece of cake. The state is a slim blade of land wedged between six better known western states. No matter whether I went east, west, or south I would be out of Idaho before my bacon and eggs wore off so I pointed RV-GO up the first on ramp I came to and chased the sun into Oregon on I-84. I had never driven an RV before. The first hundred miles my two hands clenched the steering wheel so tightly my arms went numb to the shoulder. With every semi that swooshed on past I felt sure its wake would catapult RV-GO into a leafy gulch.
Eventually, I relaxed into my ride. By the Blue Mountains RV-GO was pretty much on autopilot humming over the asphalt while its driver mulled over her major life issues. Sixty-five years old, no husband, no children, no pets, no job, no home. What’s not to like? Well, quite a lot actually. At least I had retained my sense of humor and all my own teeth, had very little silver in my short brown hair and my joints still worked most of the time. Retirement might have been an attractive option had I ever held a job long enough to build a nest egg the ex couldn’t decimate. I hadn’t stayed in the Navy long enough to qualify for a pension - the Viet Nam war soured me on a military career. My work history jiggled around a lot after those years - everything from cooking on an Alaskan salmon cannery vessel to pumping cappuccino from a tiny (unheated) espresso cart after college football games. But I always came back to waitressing (“server” being the p.c. term or so I hear). I loved the contact with people - even the weird ones (some boring days the weird ones were the only thing that got me through to clock out). But even when tips were good there was never enough money to plunk down into a savings account. That was before I met and married Mr. Big Shot.
That was worlds away and long ago now. Useless looking back over the wouldas and couldas. Any money the psycho might have contributed toward his wife’s elder years was long gone into the plush bank accounts of his defense attorneys. At least somebody was getting something out of all this, I thought. Still, I was never the Bingo and shuffleboard type. So it was probably just as well. I would have been climbing the walls in outside of a week with that kind of lifestyle.
The Oregon countryside was coloring up to fire engine red and lemon yellow as the highway streamed golden toward the setting sun. When I reached Pendleton I bought a new wool coat at the woolen mill outlet. Then, after devouring a mushroom cheese burger at the local Shari’s Restaurant, I pulled RV-GO into a Motel 6 parking lot before I remembered that my new transport came equipped with a queen sized bed. I’ll have to get up to speed with the RV lifestyle, I muttered to myself. Well, since I also need to gas the thing up I will pump the gas station attendant for directions to an RV park while my yard sale money pours into the tank. For some reason Oregon does not trust people to pump their own fuel, but in this case that turned to my advantage. The teenage girl pumping gasoline into the RV knew just were I could find a K.O.A. Campground. Turned out I had passed it on my way into town without seeing it.
I had first night jitters worse than on my faintly remembered (and later regretted) honeymoon. Not the foggiest notion how to attach the RV to the various plugs and hoses at the campground. Fortunately Doug, the manager, was gentle and patient as he introduced me to the mysteries of sleep-overs on the open road. He also managed to locate the Winnebego’s yellowing owners manual wedged under the passenger seat and recommended I put in a few hours of intense study before I wend another mile. Point taken.
Only after I’d changed into sweat pants and a t-shirt and had brushed my teeth in the microscopic sink did the voice of my rational mind (which closely resembles the tone my late mother used to use) call me every kind of idiot. What was a woman of “a certain age” doing alone in a tin can in the middle of the night somewhere west of nowhere? Was I out of my mind? Possibly. Perverts of every description could be at that moment prying open the door like tabby cats after sardines. I might as well hang a sign on the bumper saying victim in residence!
At last my sense of perspective kicked in. I had survived worse fates than cat burglars, hadn’t I? Such as living in not-so-blissful wedded ignorance twenty years with a man every newspaper in my home town now called “The Boise Butcher”. What, I pondered, could possibly come at me down life’s lonely road to top that experience? Such events tend to toughen a gal up in no time at all. So, after checking to see if I had locked RV-GO, I slipped between my cool queen size sheets and turned out the bedside lamp. I would be fine. I just knew it. Well, I fervently hoped it at any rate.
Next morning, after unplugging RV-GO from the various utilities (with Doug’s help again), I followed the Columbia River into Portland, then hung a right onto northbound Interstate 5. I was aiming for Seattle with a half formed idea of escaping the country into British Columbia. However, just outside of Centralia RV-GO inexplicably exited at a sign that said, “To Ocean Beaches” and before I knew it the old Minnie Winnie was roaring along on West 12 toward the Pacific.
How had that happened? Maybe I had chickened out after all at the prospect of driving the rig through a big city. Or maybe the old RV had a mind of its own. At any rate, a beach sounded pretty inviting. Maybe just what I needed was to sit on a log watching the sun set into the sea. There was something about salt water had always drawn me - thus the Navy stint and the two years on the cannery ships, I guess. I gravitate toward water like a drought parched coyote. I had not realized how much I had missed being near salt water all those years in Idaho. At the shore I could collect my thoughts. Heaven knows they needed collecting. They were all over the map.
Not that I possessed an actual map. Maps are for people who care where they end up. They are for the goal oriented, not me. Not anymore. My only goal at this point was to leave behind as much asphalt as possible, as if the more highway that disappeared into dust the less hold a fractured past would have over me. I drove on. Through tiny towns with unpronounceable names, through dark shaggy forests, past rolling green farm land dotted with black cows, and over narrow bridges spanning unseen streams. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the center line. When there was one. Every once in a while when the road became so vague I was sure I was lost in the wilderness, there would be another West 12 sign. As long as I was continuing west I had to get to the ocean eventually. Or I hoped that was how it worked. Undoubtedly I missed a lot of pretty views and interesting roadside attractions. Perhaps I would return to them eventually, I thought. Anything was possible.
West 12 geared down to thirty miles an hour and spit me out in a town called Aberdeen. It looked like a nice enough town but it wasn’t the ocean. I had have to keep going. Three blocks into Aberdeen I spotted a large green sign that said “Westport”. Now that sounded promising. I followed its verdant arrow. A place with port in its name, I thought, must by definition be on the ocean. Any old port, storm or no, would do for me. Especially since I was getting hungry for a big salty order of fish and chips. Surely port meant there would be fresh fish and someone frying it for starving travelers.
I drove over a spidery iron draw bridge, then through miles of stunted trees and brown brush. Mine was the only vehicle on the road. Where was this Westport? It seemed hours since the turn off. At least the weather was holding itself clear and golden, a pure and shining early Autumn day clinging to Summer for dear life.
Every so often I glimpsed a flash of silver water off to the right between trees and at one point the road skirted a stinky tide flat but no buildings, much less a port, materialized. Maybe I should have picked up a map after all, I thought. What if Westport is a hundred miles down the coast with nowhere along the way to gas up or buy lunch or even turn the RV around? What will I do then? For one uncomfortable moment I suspected I was not nearly as fancy free as I wanted to believe I was. My whole life had narrowed down to where I could park, plug in, or replenish the RV.
On the verge of giving up on ever reaching the mythical Westport or any sort of port, the highway slimmed even further, shook itself as if from a dream, swooped to the right and plunged over a sand hill - and there it was - village on a harbor. But as my dad used to say, there wasn’t much “there” there. I don’t know what I had expected but this was certainly no big flourishing sea port. I took in the entire town at one glance as I drove down the hill - all four blocks worth of Westport.
The first structure I came to was a Chevron station beside a red-roofed salmon pink building called Queenie’s Surf and Turf. RV-GO snuggled up to the pump like a long lost brother. Civilization! Filling an empty Winnie takes quite a chunk of time, giving its soon-to-be-impoverished owner a few minutes to check out her surroundings. An easy task since the whole town was visible end to end from the gas pumps. I saw a tic-tac-toe grid of sandy streets squatting on a spatula-flat crescent of land cradling a boat-clogged harbor. That was pretty much it. What was obviously the main street was lined on one side with low clapboard buildings and on the other by a network of piers and docks that nearly obscured the surface of the water halfway out across the bay. I figured I could probably count the number of town buildings on two hands and half a foot, but to count the boats tied up at the innumerable floating docks would require a jar full of centipedes.
“My dad has one like that,” said the bald, grease-clad attendant as I pushed my Visa card his way over the counter. For a fraction of a second I thought he meant the plastic, then I noticed he was looking past me to the Winnebego.
“That’s nice. Has he had it long?” I said, signing the slip after a heart stopping glance at the total.
“Long enough. Keeps him flat broke,” he said. “You folks in town a while?”
A not so subtle ploy to find out if I was alone? Or the innocent assumption of a guy trying to be friendly? Was I getting a little paranoid? No doubt about it. I will have to watch that tendency, I told myself. Bitter, fearful old women develop unattractive facial landscapes.
“A few days. Is there an RV park around here, uh, Frank?” I asked, assuming the grimy embroidery on his overalls was his name .
“Yeah, a few. Flounder Inn’s got some hookups behind the cabins. Then down the road toward Grayland there’s a seniors only mobile park with RV spaces. Most of those are taken by the year-’rounders but there might be one open. I’d check there.”
“Thanks, I will. How do I find it?”
“See that road off to the left? Take that ‘bout half a mile and you’ll see it on the right. Manager is the blue mobile with the row boat in front.”
“Great,” I said, and then listening to my empty stomach, “Say, is Queenie’s a good place for lunch?”
“It manages. If you want something better go downtown across from Pier Nine. Bev’s Burgers By the Bay.”
“I was thinking more of fish and chips.”
“She does that too. Makes a bang-up clam chowder too.”
“Great. Thanks again,” I said, climbing back into RV-GO.
My next stop would be Bev’s, then the RV park. After I was feeling human again I would stock up my kitchen at the local grocery store. They must have one, I thought, and it couldn’t be too difficult to find among the collection of buildings that comprised what Frank had referred to as “downtown”.
Parking the 29’ motor home proved to be easier than I would have imagined. Every space along Westhaven Street seemed to have been scaled to accommodate trucks towing boats. And most of the spaces were empty. The street had a moth-eaten, closed-for-the-season look about it. Walls of sand bags filled the doorways of several shuttered shops - suggesting that winter storms could get pretty wild out here on the edge of the continent.
Bev’s was up a creaky staircase above Captain Garvin’s Charters. At the top of the stairs was a Seat Yourself sign. Which was the only indication they were open. Seeing that I was the only person in the dining room, I had my pick of tables. One by the window offered a panoramic view of the harbor. I staked my claim and sat myself down.
My chosen table sported a pink Formica top with boomerang-shaped squiggles in gray. I had not seen that stuff since my high school days of clearing tables at Harrold’s Horrible Hamburgers back in the late ‘50s. The restaurant’s knotty pine paneled walls were festooned with fishing nets punctuated with mounted trophy fish. The poor dead things appeared to be gaping in utter astonishment that fate had washed them up on such a foreign shore. I could identify with the sentiment. At any moment Rod Serling was sure to step from the shadows and welcome me to the Twilight Zone.
Instead, there appeared a pink-haired twenty-something in jeans and an acid green tank top.
“Crap!” she said when she saw me sitting there by the window.
“Sorry, are you closed?” I asked.
“Nah, we’re open. You just scared the shit out of me sitting there. Want coffee? I’ll get you a menu,” said Pink Hair.
“Sure, coffee would be great. But never mind the menu. Do you have fish and chips?” I said, though after seeing the fish on the walls I wasn’t as sure I shouldn’t change my mind.
“Yeah. You want regular fries or home fries? Breading or batter?”
“Regular and batter, please.”
“Okay. Sorry for saying ‘crap’,” she said and scooted off through the swinging kitchen door. I notice she had neglected to apologize for saying shit, however.
It did not look too promising that I would be delighted with my dining experience. Still, over the years I have eaten and even worked in worse joints. You never can tell. White linen napkins and silver plate are no guarantee your food will be edible.
While I waited for my order I studied the view from the window - primarily to keep my eyes from wandering toward the trophy walls. A flotilla of white boats dozed at their floating docks like milk cows in stanchions. A lone figure sat on an overturned bucket at the end of one pier trailing a line into gelid water. Three gulls circled the bay before fluttering themselves down onto the deck of a boat with the name Working Girl painted on its stern.
The boat’s name brought to mind a central issue I had been trying not to think about since arriving in town. I needed a job. The condo sale money had gone to buy RV-GO, whereupon the yard sale proceeds vanished into its gullet. My only steady income was a pathetically inadequate Social Security check. Clearly, my hefty dollop of freedom came with an equally massive absence of cash. I could use the credit card to get myself settled here but how would I handle the bill when it came due?
And how was I supposed to find a job in such a ghost town? Waiting tables was a highly portable profession, interesting if a person liked people, lucrative if you were clever and friendly. Wherever you go in this world, people have to eat which means there are likely to be restaurants, cafes, greasy spoons etc. to provide sustenance. Which was how I met the ex - he came in to eat at the Spaghetti Palace where I was working. And (because he wasn’t nearly as successful as he had led me to believe) over the twenty years of our marriage I must have worked every eatery in Boise except the McDonald's drive-through. Until that ugly afternoon when the police came to call on me at Chez Bob.
But looking around Bev’s empty dining room I knew I was up a creek without benefit of paddle. No huge demand for wait staff here. I would have to move on to a more populated locale sooner rather than later, especially with winter on its way. A sad thought, since I kind of liked what I had seen so far of the town. There can’t be many places where boats appeared to outnumber humans at least a hundred to one. That interested me. I wanted to know more about the people who managed to live here on the edge of America, where the next rest stop was Japan.
Pink Hair wandered back my way, leaving behind a mug of unexpectedly adequate coffee. Fresh brewed. Things were looking up it seemed. I cradled the mug with both hands and buried my nose in the rising aroma. Sipped hungrily. Ahh. Nothing like caffein for adjusting the point of view. I felt the tension between my shoulder blades uncoil a notch. I had a few days - maybe a few weeks - before I needed to hit the road again. Might as well take things as they come.
Before I knew it Pink slid a steaming plate of fish and chips before me. It was a work of art - fries crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, sprinkled with crunchy kosher salt. Fish butter-tender and juicy, encased in sizzling beer batter. Whoever the cook was he knew fried food, that was for sure. Over the years I have observed that the proof of a pro is not what they do with complicated Frenchified recipes but how well they handle simple classics like fried fish and tatters (and as an Idahoan I know my potatoes). It all comes down to attention to detail - quality of ingredients, oil temperature, timing. There was more to this town than first meets the eye, I decided. Frank at the Chevron had been right about Bev’s. If my luck held he’d be right about the mobile home park down the road.
While I dug lustily into my lunch a few more customers trickled in. Two hefty men wearing work clothes and baseball caps ordered fried chicken and beers. A middle aged woman accompanied by a squirmy young girl took the table next to mine. The woman - probably the grandmother, I thought - ordered tuna salad and iced tea for herself and a cheese burger and a milk for the kid. I would really have to stop noting other people’s orders if I wasn’t being paid for it, I thought.
Our pink haired waitress zoomed back and forth between the kitchen and dining room delivering everyone’s drinks and food, then swooped by to check on me.
“Everything okay? Can I get you anything else? Dessert? Got homemade apple pie.” she asked breathlessly.
“No thanks, I’m fine. Could you please tell the cook the food was wonderful! Just perfect!”
“That would be me, so thanks, I appreciate it.”
I was totally thunderstruck but hoped I didn’t show it.
“You’re working this shift all on your own? That’s amazing,” I said with complete sincerity. Better you than me, honey, I thought.
“Oh, well, I usually have help out front but Judy quit last week to go back to school,” said Pink. “It’s not too bad off season though, so I guess I’ll manage ‘til I can get someone else.”
I hesitated a mere heartbeat.
“My name is Cora Jane. If I buy a piece of that apple pie could I talk to you for a minute?” I said. “When you have the time.”
“That’d be cool. I’ll get the pie,” she said. “Better hurry. No telling when that storm will hit.”
Storm? What could she mean? The sky over the marina was periwinkle blue, the water smooth and still as a marble countertop. But as I should have remembered, having married the “Boise Butcher”, appearances can be tragically deceiving.
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