I’m not from Port Angeles

But sometimes I feel like I am. Kelly has reported this effect in nearly everyone with whom she has a strong friendship. It’s very strange – one day you suddenly wake up and realize, apropos of nothing, that everyone you know is either from Port Angeles or at most one degree removed from someone who is. You’re basically forced to conclude that if you’re not from Port Angeles in actuality, you might as well be. The difference is tiny.

So it was that, on Saturday, driving to Lake Sutherland, a body of water a dozen or so miles outside of Port Angeles that Kelly never shuts up about, I sort of felt like I was coming home. To guide me, I had only Kelly’s mumbled instructions, which I’d scrawled onto a spare piece of notebook paper and which spent most of the trip flying around the interior of the car like a rare bird, flapping in the hot air roaring through all four lowered windows. At around the Hood Canal bridge I started to understand what kind of journey I’d committed myself to, but by then it was far too late to turn back – not that I would even consider such a cowardly action. Suffice it to say that it’s a long, long, long long way to Port Angeles, and when it’s ninety degrees outside it seems longer. By the time I pulled up to the charming lakeside cabin, I was ready to jump in the water and drink a beer, but I didn’t know which order I preferred. Luckily, Kelly had a keg cup with my name written on it prepared for me, and led me first thing down to the dock and onto her friend Chris Hartman’s boat. “You brought me boat-cohol!” I was overjoyed.

Lake Sutherland is a backwoods paradise. There’s nothing to do except lie in the sun, swim in the crystal-clear water, drink beer (a keg of PBR was on ice when I arrived) and relax. We did a lot of those activities until the sun went down, then drank a lot around the fire until the absurdly early hour of midnight, when everyone got too tired and went home. The oddest thing happened when I tried to stage a little guitar session with Jacob Melly, who is back fresh from a year in Spain – we got rapped out. A couple of Kelly’s more, shall we say, “rural” friends busted up Jacob’s and my renditions of The Shins, Neutral Milk Hotel, et al to start reciting verses by Kid Rock. The big one whose name I forget even had a little dance to go with one the songs. My initial amusement quickly gave way to chagrin.

I also met Owen, who Kelly has always claimed was a profound factor in her upbringing and adolescence. When I first saw Owen, I did a double-take – he looks exactly like Nathan. We’re not talking a passing resemblance, here. They could be brothers. After I recovered from the shock of seeing my roommate’s doppelganger, Owen and I got on famously. He’s a swell guy.

Sunday, as Chris Hartman cleaned out his cabin and everyone else wandered away to whence they came, Kelly tried to convince me to go smelting with her and her parents at Kalaloch instead of driving home, as I’d planned. Smelt are tiny little fish, sort of like herring, that come to the beach in big schools to spawn right after high tide. You wade out into the water with a big ol’ net and scoop as many as you can carry out of the waves, then stagger back up shore under the joint load of fish and the six beers you drank while waiting for the smelt to hit, dump off your load, and repeat the process. You can get quite a few fish in this manner, apparently, and also pretty drunk. I thought about Kelly’s proposal over breakfast at a little diner called “Granny’s”, which I still haven’t forgiven for being out of biscuits and gravy. Really, how can you purport to be a “country diner” if you allow yourself to run out of your principal breakfast food? Eventually I agreed to come along and smelt, which involved another hour and a half of driving.

Smelting was uneventful. Contrary to my expectations, Kelly’s parents and their friends weren’t waist-deep in the ocean when we climbed down the steep trail to the beach. Kelly had insisted we arrive no later than 3:30, so I naturally assumed the tide would come about then as well, but in fact it wasn’t due until 6:30. We had a good time: ate some food; drank some beer; played with the fire; joked around with the grown-ups. Didn’t catch any fish, or even attempt to do so. I needed to be at work on Monday, so at around 7:30 I announced I was leaving for Seattle. Kelly’s mom, Debby, wanted a ride back to Port Angeles, so she came along. Talking to Debby about Kelly’s childhood wasn’t exactly illuminating, but it definitely confirmed my deep-seated views on Kelly’s character. We had, in her own words, “a nice visit” as I drove her back into town.

Oh, by the way, Nathan: if you’re reading this, I tried to ask your permission to drive your car to Port Angeles, but couldn’t get a hold of you. I left a message at the front desk of Costa Rica, so you should go pick that up when you get a chance.