02-Oct-2006
SEATTLE -- You stand at the base of these things and feel so small -- Space Needle, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty. But never so small as standing by a dead volcano. I remember the first time I came around the bend to see Shasta up ahead, looming like an ivory-tipped pimple on the Sierra landscape. I leaned back a little further in the driver's seat the closer I got. At its base, unlike one of those manmade phallic symbols, Shasta invites those who approach to watch their asses: a dead volcano, perhaps, but the steep warning of a Mt. St. Helens is omnipresent. Don't be getting too comfortable.
And so it is with Rainier. The Seattle skyline may be marked by its patch of skyscrapers at one end of the peninsula and the oddly anachronistic Space Needle at the other -- a picture we have come to appreciate in "Frazier," "Sleepless in Seattle" and more lately, "Grey's Anatomy," -- but the real eyecatcher when the ever-present overcast lifts is Rainier, rising off an autumn plain like a mute challenge. When it is visible, it dominates, reminding everyone in these parts who's boss.
I spent the week here, getting acquainted with an old friend. Ed Wilson lives here with his brother Bob and between the two lies a saga of our times -- an instructive morality play that involves family, patriotism, betrayal, blind ambition, naked avarice, lots of money and the multiple mendacity that is America's espionage and counterespionage industry. At 78, Ed calls himself a mercenary betrayed: 22 years in prison for crimes he never did commit and is still in the process of disproving. How and why it all happened is the next story I hope to tell.
A new Robert Frost poem was discovered this week, which reminds me that I have miles to go before I sleep. Rainier must be sleeping, still tired and retired after busting up out of the Cascades so many centuries back. I wonder if he (she?) will ever come back to life?
Meanwhile, my own life demands my attention. My bags are packed and the day is new. I salute Seattle's magic mountain as I head on out. The city sandwiched between Volcano and Sound is a mighty fine place to sample the sea, but it ain't home. And that's where I'm going... Home to my Murph.
