I’m on vacation. Sort of. Last week, I spent up in sunny, hot, and dry Boulder, Colorado writing away while watching myself bleed out through parched sinuses. Yuck! Exactly. This week finds me on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington wandering through the scenery and trying to figure out why nobody from Canada can drive faster than five-miles-per-hour (eight-kilometers-per-hour for my soon-to-be-insulted friends from the Northern Annex) less than the speed limit. Even downhill. It makes no sense. But at least now I’m back in my new home State and my sinuses are doing backflips of joy in the humidity. And, on this vacation, I’m seeing things I have never seen before. Fortunately, my eyes are still mine.

Yesterday I left Seattle and wandered to the northern part of the peninsula and up the inaptly-named Hurricane Ridge where the weather was calm and – as I’ve found more typical than they’d like you to believe – clear and sunny. The place was filthy with deer. The pesky ruminants wandered through the visitors, aimlessly, like a Japanese tour group in Paris after the person who carries the placard with the number on it gets hit by a taxi driver speeding up the Champs d’Elysee. They weren’t aggressively seeking handouts like the bears were but just walking around while people from the Midwest wandered after them with their digital cameras snapping away. This is such a prevalent activity that if you go to YouTube and search for “deer hurricane ridge” you will find an hour or two of enchanting footage of the photogenic fawns getting only close enough to the tourists for their load of Lyme infected ticks to make the leap to their new hosts for the road trip back to Missouri.

On the way back down the mountain I had to pass the same Canadian car twice – it was moving at precisely five MPH (oh you know) less than the speed limit, even around the curves where the yellow signs tell you to slow down. How did it get in front of me when I just passed it a couple miles back? I can only conclude that they have some kind of transporter beam or something in their Toyotas that we in the Lower Provinces are denied. Both times the Dodge Caliber I had rented was up to the task and despite very worrisome brakes I eventually banished the Canadian to the rear-view mirror. Regarding the Dodge all I can say is “What a piece of junk”. Given the fact that Chrysler was owned for a brief period by Mercedes-Benz you’d think that they would have learned something about building a car that doesn’t feel like the road is about to eject it into the void. Downhill brake use was something to be avoided at all costs and if downshifting didn’t slow me down enough I was forced to resort to a Flintstonian automotive maneuver I last tried in a Triumph Spitfire on an icy road in Pennsylvania in 1974.

Down the hill and heading west along with me and the other creeping Canadians were just about every other road-tripper loose on the highway. All of us were aiming at the only target available for overnight accommodations within fifty miles: the sleepy town of Forks, Washington. The difference between us was that they already had something with which I am unfamiliar, namely reservations. I, as I usually do, was winging it. Now, Forks is a town that has exactly two things going for it which are 1) that it is the only town on the western side of the Olympic Penninsula anywhere close to the National Park and 2) that it is the only town on the western side of the Olympic Penninsula. However, given the town’s self-promotional activities, it thinks there is something else in its favor, and something worth, as they say, coming to Forks and setting a spell. Forks annually experiences some two-hundred eleven days of precipitation (of course it was sunny, clear and warm while I was here) and is cloudy to partly cloudy 90% of the time (though you wouldn’t know it by me). This predictable lack of sunshine and the resultant darkness makes the place perfect for Vampires.

Forks is the setting for the fictional Twilight Saga written by Stephanie Meyer. Until I drove into Forks, other than seeing a commercial for the movie on TV, I had no clue that there even was a Twilight Saga. Oh, there are three movies? I had no idea. Clearly, I have been away for too long. In any event the town, given that there is absolutely nothing happening here, has latched onto Twilight like a tick onto a tourist from Missouri. Everywhere you look there is Twilight this and Twilight that. Enter a restaurant and you are more likely to be greeted by a life-size cardboard cutout of the stars of the movie than you are by the hostess. There are more teenaged female tourists in town than there were deer on Hurricane Ridge so I guess Twilight was a pretty good thing for business here in Forks.

There is, of course, a downside. That being that Ms. Meyer had never been to Forks prior to writing the books and as the hordes descended on Forks they searched for the actual places where the scenes were set. Since those places didn’t exist, the winsome fans did what people the world over do when confronted with a discontinuity between literary fiction and reality. They made shit up. They arbitrarily decided which real houses were the fictional houses in which the characters lived and where the various scenes took place. They did fan-like things like swoon when the front door to a presumptive character’s house opened and held candlelight vigils and otherwise made themselves annoying to the non-fictional residents. But Forks decided to play along and see if they could make a buck off the deal. I mean, really, there’s nothing else to do here.

But all these vampire hunters left my unreserved self with a problem. Where was I going to sleep? I visited the Twilight inspired Forks Visitor Center and made phone calls to all of the Twilight themed hotels in town. Every inn was full or booked down to the “Twilight Suite” which was a few hundred dollars a night out of my range. At last I struck gold in the form of Bagby’s Town Motel a place which looks exactly like it sounds it would. It gives one the impression of having been hastily built in the 1930s to serve as a stopover for the bootleggers running hooch down from Canada. The décor is what you’d get if you took twenty grandmothers and gave them some sewing machines, a couple hundred bolts of random fabric, and a pound or two of meth. Every visible surface is quilted or tatted or cross-stitched. An uninterrupted garden spreads across the property with about ten-thousand bird feeders stuffed amongst the flowers. Hundreds of hanging planters adorn the eaves. The reception area is filled with a very creepy assortment of dolls, somehow appropriate given the vampire theme of the town. But they had a room in my budget, so I checked into the Hotel of the Night of the Living Grandma and tried to ignore the matching pink quilts and pillow covers. 

It turned out that Twilight didn’t end at the edge of town. I headed down to the town of La Push on the Quileute Indian Reservation to dine at what the grandma at the crocheted hotel desk said was the best fish restaurant she’d ever eaten at. My mistake. On my way down I passed a large sign demarking the “Treaty Boundary” which I assumed was the edge of the Reservation. How wrong I was. Apparently the Reservation was not only home to the Quileute tribe but also to the werewolves from Twilight. Could I actually be so uninformed? An uneasy truce was negotiated between the fictional vampires and werewolves and some plucky business-person decided to mark the line and make a few bucks from having the sign on his or her property. 

I arrived at the Reservation and spent some pre-dinner time wandering around. It was very nice but I was a bit surprised by the lack of actual Indians. OK, I did see one guy out walking his dog, but that was it. There was a good-sized resort, a commercial marina, and the afore-recommended restaurant, but everybody in the place was white – tourists, workers, everybody. I didn’t figure it out until the next day when driving through the Reservation again I was stopped at a construction site where all of the workers were Native American. In a flash it came together, the new houses and shiny pickup trucks were the product of the Indians keeping all the high-paying jobs for themselves and importing minimum-wage white people from economically despondent areas like Forks to serve fried foods to the tourists who flock in to look for werewolves and leave their money behind. I love it that the universe is not without a sense of historical irony.

The next day I set out to accomplish the real purpose of my trip out here. It is August seventeenth and those of you who have been following for a while will remember back exactly eight months ago when I set out on my little journey from the south-easternmost point of the continental U.S. and headed to Seattle. People, as a group, like to mark things with symbolic events. We have birthday parties, weddings, divorces, funerals, graduation ceremonies – solemnizations that are not the actual event but merely serve to mark some underlying occurrence. So today, I am standing at Cape Flattery, Washington looking across the Strait of Juan de Fuca at Canada. My standing at the north-westernmost point of the continental U.S. will serve as the symbolic end of a trip that has taken me from sunny Florida in the southeast through the geographic center in Kansas, and on to the far northwest. With my flag planted at my symbolic endpoint I can declare that my relocation adventure is officially over. My move is finished. Done. Accomplished.And now, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python, for something completely different.