Franklin Falls
by Shelley Pineo-Jensen, Ph.D.
Part 1
published 8/22/24
published 8/22/24
As Loretta closed the outer door of her apartment building, the street lit up as lightning crackled the sky and thunder bloomed in the air. The hair on her arm stood straight out from her skin and a stab of lightening cracked the darkness as thunder smacked the Painted Ladies, reverberating off the buildings lining both sides of the otherwise quiet neighborhood.
The air smelled fried – frizzled. Across the street and down past the corner, light was fluttering from the roof of a hundred-year-old house that dominated the north-west corner of the intersection. Dark, with copper cornices, the mansion seemed to have a yellow hat – it was on fire! Loretta called 9-1-1 to report the fire and then sat in one of the dirty chairs on her front porch to wait for her car.
She heard sirens start up somewhere and then swoon and wobble their way to the fire. An ambulance roared up her empty street, coming to a stop to block the intersection from the south and the east, and then immediately back up, to let a fire engine past. Cars coming up the one-way street from the east attempted to squeeze past, in between the fire engine and the ambulance. Then a police car arrived, having driven the wrong way down Loretta’s one-way street, coming from the north. Two officers got out and commanded the scene – moving traffic back and away; firefighters were already spraying water on the ragged band of flame that was spreading out along the roof ridge.
Her driver pulled up in front of the 150-year-old row house and she dragged her little gray suitcase down the steps and told the driver he should back up, down the street to the south, or they would be there for hours. And so he did, back up his shiny black automobile all the way down the street to the last intersection, and thus Loretta was on her way to the airport. An expensive way to travel, but easier than negotiating a ride from any of her nearby family, in the middle of the night. A small price to pay, with greater prices coming soon enough.
When she got to Reagan International Airport, she waited in a line to buy a ticket to the coast. The staff seemed non-plussed and put-out by her request. No one buys a ticket at the airport – you buy a ticket on your phone. But Loretta was not interested in learning how to buy a ticket on her phone, that day, and was eventually able to purchase a ticket on a flight to Sea-Tac, requiring that she wait for four hours. Loretta made her way to her gate, found a spot with a window view, and took out her book, a one-volume collection of Dashiell Hammet’s novels. She was currently rereading Red Harvest. Loretta loved the part where the Continental Op wakes up to discover he may have killed a woman with an ice pick while in a laudanum haze. Solving the mystery of “if” he killed her – now that’s a nice twist.
It was long flight to Seattle and her seat was in the back of the plane, wedged between two men who thought they owned the armrests. She read her book and avoided eye contact for six hours, when she was not sleeping or pretending to be asleep. She ate all the food she had in her “personal item” – a Disney backpack containing some apples and graham crackers, and of course her book. She fingered a black and white on silver yin yang pendant on a black fabric cord hanging from her neck; she visualized being in balance with the universe – her body in the material world, her spirit connected to the eternal life force permeating – enlivening - the universe. Once every hour she got up and walked the length of the plane, all the way to the front, and then to the back, before squeezing into the tiny, slightly smelly bathroom at the back of the plane.
When they landed, she took her time getting to the car rental area. Loretta found she didn’t need to rush. She chose Avis because she didn’t want to get fucked around by one of the cheaper outfits. She didn’t want to get to some distant parking lot and discover that the car was not the type she had ordered, or that there was no car there at all, like Steve Martin’s dilemma in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. She rented a small automatic and was able to claim the car without a major incident.
After she started the engine, adjusted the seat and the mirror, and fiddled around with the radio, she sat still and did some deep breathing to refocus herself on her next task. Then she got out her phone and set a course for Olympia, the state capital. She was on her way to see the ocean, and the Pacific Rain Forest, and something else. What was it? Ferns? To smell Washington state? Something called her. Beckoned her. Lured her.
She finished setting up her highly intelligent phone to guide her journey and got on the I-5 Freeway. As she drove south it started raining, at first softly, and then harder and harder, finally pounding the landscape, making water bounce up as the drops pelted the earth. What should have been a 50-minute drive slowed to an hour and a half, as she stuck to the slow lane with the commerce trucks and other chicken-shit drivers like herself. It had been five years since she had driven this far in an automobile; she didn’t intend to get in a car wreck on the I-5 on the first day of the rest of her life.
Eventually, she reached Olympia, obscured by rain. She got onto the business loop of I-5 and pulled into a motel – a member of the OYO chain. It looked promisingly cheap – a former swimming pool at the front of the parking lot had been filled with dirt and was now covered with a low growth of recently wacked weeds. The dead cuttings lay listless on top of the struggling green elements.
The room cost less than her car to the airport; suspicious, she checked for bed bugs first thing upon walking in the door. Bright red pillowcases emblazoned with the OYO logo annoyed her eyes. She found the charger in her fanny pack and connected her phone to a USB port on the nightstand. She found her pills in her Mickey backpack and took her one night-time pill. Finally, she took off her clothes down to her underwear, got under the covers and was asleep within seconds.
The air smelled fried – frizzled. Across the street and down past the corner, light was fluttering from the roof of a hundred-year-old house that dominated the north-west corner of the intersection. Dark, with copper cornices, the mansion seemed to have a yellow hat – it was on fire! Loretta called 9-1-1 to report the fire and then sat in one of the dirty chairs on her front porch to wait for her car.
She heard sirens start up somewhere and then swoon and wobble their way to the fire. An ambulance roared up her empty street, coming to a stop to block the intersection from the south and the east, and then immediately back up, to let a fire engine past. Cars coming up the one-way street from the east attempted to squeeze past, in between the fire engine and the ambulance. Then a police car arrived, having driven the wrong way down Loretta’s one-way street, coming from the north. Two officers got out and commanded the scene – moving traffic back and away; firefighters were already spraying water on the ragged band of flame that was spreading out along the roof ridge.
Her driver pulled up in front of the 150-year-old row house and she dragged her little gray suitcase down the steps and told the driver he should back up, down the street to the south, or they would be there for hours. And so he did, back up his shiny black automobile all the way down the street to the last intersection, and thus Loretta was on her way to the airport. An expensive way to travel, but easier than negotiating a ride from any of her nearby family, in the middle of the night. A small price to pay, with greater prices coming soon enough.
When she got to Reagan International Airport, she waited in a line to buy a ticket to the coast. The staff seemed non-plussed and put-out by her request. No one buys a ticket at the airport – you buy a ticket on your phone. But Loretta was not interested in learning how to buy a ticket on her phone, that day, and was eventually able to purchase a ticket on a flight to Sea-Tac, requiring that she wait for four hours. Loretta made her way to her gate, found a spot with a window view, and took out her book, a one-volume collection of Dashiell Hammet’s novels. She was currently rereading Red Harvest. Loretta loved the part where the Continental Op wakes up to discover he may have killed a woman with an ice pick while in a laudanum haze. Solving the mystery of “if” he killed her – now that’s a nice twist.
It was long flight to Seattle and her seat was in the back of the plane, wedged between two men who thought they owned the armrests. She read her book and avoided eye contact for six hours, when she was not sleeping or pretending to be asleep. She ate all the food she had in her “personal item” – a Disney backpack containing some apples and graham crackers, and of course her book. She fingered a black and white on silver yin yang pendant on a black fabric cord hanging from her neck; she visualized being in balance with the universe – her body in the material world, her spirit connected to the eternal life force permeating – enlivening - the universe. Once every hour she got up and walked the length of the plane, all the way to the front, and then to the back, before squeezing into the tiny, slightly smelly bathroom at the back of the plane.
When they landed, she took her time getting to the car rental area. Loretta found she didn’t need to rush. She chose Avis because she didn’t want to get fucked around by one of the cheaper outfits. She didn’t want to get to some distant parking lot and discover that the car was not the type she had ordered, or that there was no car there at all, like Steve Martin’s dilemma in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. She rented a small automatic and was able to claim the car without a major incident.
After she started the engine, adjusted the seat and the mirror, and fiddled around with the radio, she sat still and did some deep breathing to refocus herself on her next task. Then she got out her phone and set a course for Olympia, the state capital. She was on her way to see the ocean, and the Pacific Rain Forest, and something else. What was it? Ferns? To smell Washington state? Something called her. Beckoned her. Lured her.
She finished setting up her highly intelligent phone to guide her journey and got on the I-5 Freeway. As she drove south it started raining, at first softly, and then harder and harder, finally pounding the landscape, making water bounce up as the drops pelted the earth. What should have been a 50-minute drive slowed to an hour and a half, as she stuck to the slow lane with the commerce trucks and other chicken-shit drivers like herself. It had been five years since she had driven this far in an automobile; she didn’t intend to get in a car wreck on the I-5 on the first day of the rest of her life.
Eventually, she reached Olympia, obscured by rain. She got onto the business loop of I-5 and pulled into a motel – a member of the OYO chain. It looked promisingly cheap – a former swimming pool at the front of the parking lot had been filled with dirt and was now covered with a low growth of recently wacked weeds. The dead cuttings lay listless on top of the struggling green elements.
The room cost less than her car to the airport; suspicious, she checked for bed bugs first thing upon walking in the door. Bright red pillowcases emblazoned with the OYO logo annoyed her eyes. She found the charger in her fanny pack and connected her phone to a USB port on the nightstand. She found her pills in her Mickey backpack and took her one night-time pill. Finally, she took off her clothes down to her underwear, got under the covers and was asleep within seconds.
Part 2
published 8/25/24
published 8/25/24
Bright and Early
Loretta slept in, past the time of the free breakfast, waking hungry. Her skin was tight and yet somehow also greasy. The inside of her mouth was coated with film and her hair was stringy and matted in one place.
She had been dreaming of the waterfall again. It left her with a feeling of dread, as it always did. On the edges, a clear pond; you could see right to the bottom, little fishes, waving grasses. Over at the far end, the water poured down as from a spigot, plunging deep, churning the water against straight gray rock cliff walls. Behind the falls, the hint of a cave. She moves towards the falls, each step heavier than the last, until she is plunged under the falls. She is drowning.
She shivered and tossed her head from side to side, to shake off the dream. Then she propped up the pillows behind her head and reached for her phone. There were 30 text messages waiting for her – from her children, from her mother, from her neighbor Frankie, and one from Arby’s, with a great offer on a new item: hamburgers.
She skimmed through the outrage and worry of her loved ones and chose to answer only the texts from the older of her two daughters. “I’m out,” was all she wrote. Then she silenced her phone again. It was all their problem now. She had more important matters that required her attention, starting with her sanity and moving to issues of freedom and respect. She allowed the feeling of weight to lift from her body – she could almost see it coming off her being, in waves of brown particles drifting out and away in a hazy aura.
She sat up, readjusting her pillows to a new posture, and got into the Notes app on her phone. She started a note entitled “TO DO” and then left it empty while she sorted through the dozens of lists already created. She threw away everything except the ones about movies she wanted to watch – she combined all of those together into one so that she now had only two notes and one of them was empty, but for the title.
To do, or not to do, that was the question. Item one – do nothing in particular. She nodded her head; I tell it to myself, and I agree, she thought. Then she got up and bathed in a shabby shower using stingy supplies – tiny bar of soap, slightly and unidentifiably scented shampoo, and a couple small gray-white towels. She had brought only the bare necessities for this journey; she would buy supplies if she ever stopped moving from motel to motel . . . she didn’t have a plan. She pined for the Pacific Ocean was her plan.
As she was checking out of the motel, she collected some brochures from a rack in the office. While she ate breakfast in a Denny’s near the freeway, she read about Port Angeles - it had whale watching - and Sol Duc in the Olympic National Forest – it had hot springs and a restaurant “on site.” She determined that Sol Duc would be a good place to have lunch on her way to the beach.
She gassed up the car and made good time. After seven years of living in a city on the east coast, the scenery was amazing to her. There were actual trees, not what passed for a forest on the Eastern Seaboard: a tick-filled tree farm decorated with kudzu. She enjoyed her neighborhood in Baltimore, loved the old houses and the college students, but the air never smelled like anything – it was neither good nor bad – it was non-existent.
She had the window rolled partway down so she could smell the fresh air . . . it invigorated her spirit. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, she thought. She inhaled deeply, a smile starting to curl just the edges of her mouth. Her first smile in months, she realized. Tears came to her eyes.
She looked for a place to pull over – a turnout with a view of Sequim Bay near the town of Blyn appeared on the right. She pulled over and got out of the car to cry. She thought of her mother, stuck in that basement apartment, abandoned by her primary caregiver. She cried but she found she didn’t care, didn’t feel guilty. Her mother had drifted away, first just losing at backgammon, not remembering how to lay out the pieces, then leaving the burner going after making tea, then criticizing others over her own deafness and inability to keep up with a conversation, finally leading to perpetual anger. Loretta felt unencumbered.
She thought of her children, unfairly burdened with the aged one, with her incompetence and venality, all traces of her former wit and intelligence completely erased from her brain. She cried but could find no mercy in her soul, no grain of human decency to help her children negotiate this new obligation. Loretta thought about the last years of her life, of using up every morsel of her charity and kindness out of duty to her ancestor. She cried hard but she did not regret any of it – not the decision to care for her mother and not the decision to walk away with nothing more than clean underwear and some headspace on her credit cards.
That reminds me. I need a toothbrush. And I will need to do laundry pretty soon. . . She took out her phone and opened her to do list: 1) toothbrush, 2) toothpaste, and 3) laundry.
She took a plain white handkerchief from her pocket and wiped off her face and blew her nose. It was refreshing to feel the free attention available after a discharge of emotion like that. She stood herself up straighter and taller and watched sea gulls swooping and calling over the water for a few minutes. She inhaled deeply the complex smells of sea, coastal grass, and a touch of creosote – from a nearby stack of blackened logs – telephone poles? Pier parts? Sunbeams lit up a bit of warmth on her face; a soft breeze coming up off the water cooled it back a bit. She savored the moment. Then she got back on the road.
She stopped in Port Angeles, not for whale watching, but rather to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, and some Earl Gray Tea. She used the bathroom, brushing her teeth with her new supplies. Spooning handfuls of water up from the tap, it was difficult to both rinse her mouth and keep her shirt dry, but she was careful. This was the only shirt she had, at the moment.
She stopped at a liquor store and purchased some miniature bottles of Rum Chata; she had decided that since booze can be held at room temperature, it would be a better choice than milk to lighten up her tea. Her final stop was a gas station; then she got back in the car to finish the drive to Sol Duc for lunch.
Loretta slept in, past the time of the free breakfast, waking hungry. Her skin was tight and yet somehow also greasy. The inside of her mouth was coated with film and her hair was stringy and matted in one place.
She had been dreaming of the waterfall again. It left her with a feeling of dread, as it always did. On the edges, a clear pond; you could see right to the bottom, little fishes, waving grasses. Over at the far end, the water poured down as from a spigot, plunging deep, churning the water against straight gray rock cliff walls. Behind the falls, the hint of a cave. She moves towards the falls, each step heavier than the last, until she is plunged under the falls. She is drowning.
She shivered and tossed her head from side to side, to shake off the dream. Then she propped up the pillows behind her head and reached for her phone. There were 30 text messages waiting for her – from her children, from her mother, from her neighbor Frankie, and one from Arby’s, with a great offer on a new item: hamburgers.
She skimmed through the outrage and worry of her loved ones and chose to answer only the texts from the older of her two daughters. “I’m out,” was all she wrote. Then she silenced her phone again. It was all their problem now. She had more important matters that required her attention, starting with her sanity and moving to issues of freedom and respect. She allowed the feeling of weight to lift from her body – she could almost see it coming off her being, in waves of brown particles drifting out and away in a hazy aura.
She sat up, readjusting her pillows to a new posture, and got into the Notes app on her phone. She started a note entitled “TO DO” and then left it empty while she sorted through the dozens of lists already created. She threw away everything except the ones about movies she wanted to watch – she combined all of those together into one so that she now had only two notes and one of them was empty, but for the title.
To do, or not to do, that was the question. Item one – do nothing in particular. She nodded her head; I tell it to myself, and I agree, she thought. Then she got up and bathed in a shabby shower using stingy supplies – tiny bar of soap, slightly and unidentifiably scented shampoo, and a couple small gray-white towels. She had brought only the bare necessities for this journey; she would buy supplies if she ever stopped moving from motel to motel . . . she didn’t have a plan. She pined for the Pacific Ocean was her plan.
As she was checking out of the motel, she collected some brochures from a rack in the office. While she ate breakfast in a Denny’s near the freeway, she read about Port Angeles - it had whale watching - and Sol Duc in the Olympic National Forest – it had hot springs and a restaurant “on site.” She determined that Sol Duc would be a good place to have lunch on her way to the beach.
She gassed up the car and made good time. After seven years of living in a city on the east coast, the scenery was amazing to her. There were actual trees, not what passed for a forest on the Eastern Seaboard: a tick-filled tree farm decorated with kudzu. She enjoyed her neighborhood in Baltimore, loved the old houses and the college students, but the air never smelled like anything – it was neither good nor bad – it was non-existent.
She had the window rolled partway down so she could smell the fresh air . . . it invigorated her spirit. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, she thought. She inhaled deeply, a smile starting to curl just the edges of her mouth. Her first smile in months, she realized. Tears came to her eyes.
She looked for a place to pull over – a turnout with a view of Sequim Bay near the town of Blyn appeared on the right. She pulled over and got out of the car to cry. She thought of her mother, stuck in that basement apartment, abandoned by her primary caregiver. She cried but she found she didn’t care, didn’t feel guilty. Her mother had drifted away, first just losing at backgammon, not remembering how to lay out the pieces, then leaving the burner going after making tea, then criticizing others over her own deafness and inability to keep up with a conversation, finally leading to perpetual anger. Loretta felt unencumbered.
She thought of her children, unfairly burdened with the aged one, with her incompetence and venality, all traces of her former wit and intelligence completely erased from her brain. She cried but could find no mercy in her soul, no grain of human decency to help her children negotiate this new obligation. Loretta thought about the last years of her life, of using up every morsel of her charity and kindness out of duty to her ancestor. She cried hard but she did not regret any of it – not the decision to care for her mother and not the decision to walk away with nothing more than clean underwear and some headspace on her credit cards.
That reminds me. I need a toothbrush. And I will need to do laundry pretty soon. . . She took out her phone and opened her to do list: 1) toothbrush, 2) toothpaste, and 3) laundry.
She took a plain white handkerchief from her pocket and wiped off her face and blew her nose. It was refreshing to feel the free attention available after a discharge of emotion like that. She stood herself up straighter and taller and watched sea gulls swooping and calling over the water for a few minutes. She inhaled deeply the complex smells of sea, coastal grass, and a touch of creosote – from a nearby stack of blackened logs – telephone poles? Pier parts? Sunbeams lit up a bit of warmth on her face; a soft breeze coming up off the water cooled it back a bit. She savored the moment. Then she got back on the road.
She stopped in Port Angeles, not for whale watching, but rather to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, and some Earl Gray Tea. She used the bathroom, brushing her teeth with her new supplies. Spooning handfuls of water up from the tap, it was difficult to both rinse her mouth and keep her shirt dry, but she was careful. This was the only shirt she had, at the moment.
She stopped at a liquor store and purchased some miniature bottles of Rum Chata; she had decided that since booze can be held at room temperature, it would be a better choice than milk to lighten up her tea. Her final stop was a gas station; then she got back in the car to finish the drive to Sol Duc for lunch.
Part 3
published 9/1/24
published 9/1/24
Sol Duc
On this cool day in May, the parking lot was not full. She parked near the restaurant and brushed her hair with a little collapsable brush she kept in her fanny pack. She put on a new coat of lip gloss and practiced smiling in the little mirror on the back of the brush. It looked like a rictus grimace to her, but it seemed to be the best she could do.
The restaurant was empty at that odd mid-afternoon time when no one eats. It was lovely, with large windows on three walls. The fourth wall was dominated by counter service. The walls were creamy yellow and there was old pale wood everywhere – the tables, the chairs, support beams, some of it actual logs and branches, shiny with varnish.
The hostess, a big blowsy woman with blond hair and dark roots seated Loretta at a table with a view of a creek. She dropped a greasy plastic-covered menu and said, “Your server will be with you in just a moment.”
Her server was a small woman with short black hair, several small rings in one ear, and a tattoo of a clenched fist on the inside of her right wrist. She could have been pretty, but her expression was bored with flashes of hostility. Marge ordered a turkey sandwich and a glass of unsweetened ice tea. $15 for a sandwich seemed outrageous, but the view was a soothing green. She twitched off the aggravation of the attitude of the waitress and the price of the sandwich with a tiny shimmy and took out her book.
She was aroused from her concentration by the sound of women’s voices, arguing, getting louder and more shrill. It was coming from the kitchen. She could see the cook put a plate up on the counter at the narrow opening between the kitchen and the counter service area. He rang a bell. The quarrel was escalating. He rang the bell again. And again.
With a crash of metal hitting a floor and the sound of a door slamming, the squabble was over. She heard a car starting, then its engine revving, and then a screeching of tires against gravel, then gone.
Through the swinging kitchen door, Blondie came running out into the restaurant, her keys in her hand. She rushed out the front door. Through the windows facing the parking lot, Marge watched as the large woman sprinted to an ancient white Cadillac, fired her up, and raced out of the parking lot.
I guess no one is going to serve me my sandwich, she thought. So she got up and walked behind the counter. She looked at the sandwich, looked at the ticket it rested upon, and looked at the cook. He nodded his head. She took the plate back to her table and ate some of her lunch. The sandwich was fabulous. It was large, with fresh sliced turkey, multigrain bread, thinly sliced tomato and red onion, alfalfa sprouts, and just the right amount of mayonnaise. But she didn’t have her iced tea or even a glass of water. Hmmmm.
Loretta got up and went back behind the counter and looked around. There was a fridge with a glass front – inside she found a gallon jug filled with a brown liquid. She found the glasses, took one, poured a bit of the liquid and tasted it. She filled her glass and went back to her table and read more of her book, glancing at the brook every so often. The waitress and the hostess had not returned.
She picked out a shirt from a small display of merchandise near the front door. It was stenciled with the words “Sol Duc.” She took it and her ticket over to the slender opening into the kitchen and called to the cook, who was standing at the back door smoking and blowing the fumes out the open doorway. “I wanna pay for this,” she called back to him.
“You gotta pay cash,” he growled.
“Okay.”
“You know how to make change?” His deep voice was querulous.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Can I trust you?” His voice softened a bit and he stared into her eyes.
“Always,” she replied. She found she was grinning a wide teary smile. She stared back at the middle-aged bald man in the dirty apron and waited.
“Just push the red button on the front left corner of the machine to pop it open,” the cook said gruffly. He turned and faced out the back door and continued to drag on his cigarette. Loretta thought she better give herself a nice tip and smirked.
Loretta was just closing the cash register when the door opened to admit a young couple. She picked up two menus from the hostess’ station and asked them if they wanted a window seat.
On this cool day in May, the parking lot was not full. She parked near the restaurant and brushed her hair with a little collapsable brush she kept in her fanny pack. She put on a new coat of lip gloss and practiced smiling in the little mirror on the back of the brush. It looked like a rictus grimace to her, but it seemed to be the best she could do.
The restaurant was empty at that odd mid-afternoon time when no one eats. It was lovely, with large windows on three walls. The fourth wall was dominated by counter service. The walls were creamy yellow and there was old pale wood everywhere – the tables, the chairs, support beams, some of it actual logs and branches, shiny with varnish.
The hostess, a big blowsy woman with blond hair and dark roots seated Loretta at a table with a view of a creek. She dropped a greasy plastic-covered menu and said, “Your server will be with you in just a moment.”
Her server was a small woman with short black hair, several small rings in one ear, and a tattoo of a clenched fist on the inside of her right wrist. She could have been pretty, but her expression was bored with flashes of hostility. Marge ordered a turkey sandwich and a glass of unsweetened ice tea. $15 for a sandwich seemed outrageous, but the view was a soothing green. She twitched off the aggravation of the attitude of the waitress and the price of the sandwich with a tiny shimmy and took out her book.
She was aroused from her concentration by the sound of women’s voices, arguing, getting louder and more shrill. It was coming from the kitchen. She could see the cook put a plate up on the counter at the narrow opening between the kitchen and the counter service area. He rang a bell. The quarrel was escalating. He rang the bell again. And again.
With a crash of metal hitting a floor and the sound of a door slamming, the squabble was over. She heard a car starting, then its engine revving, and then a screeching of tires against gravel, then gone.
Through the swinging kitchen door, Blondie came running out into the restaurant, her keys in her hand. She rushed out the front door. Through the windows facing the parking lot, Marge watched as the large woman sprinted to an ancient white Cadillac, fired her up, and raced out of the parking lot.
I guess no one is going to serve me my sandwich, she thought. So she got up and walked behind the counter. She looked at the sandwich, looked at the ticket it rested upon, and looked at the cook. He nodded his head. She took the plate back to her table and ate some of her lunch. The sandwich was fabulous. It was large, with fresh sliced turkey, multigrain bread, thinly sliced tomato and red onion, alfalfa sprouts, and just the right amount of mayonnaise. But she didn’t have her iced tea or even a glass of water. Hmmmm.
Loretta got up and went back behind the counter and looked around. There was a fridge with a glass front – inside she found a gallon jug filled with a brown liquid. She found the glasses, took one, poured a bit of the liquid and tasted it. She filled her glass and went back to her table and read more of her book, glancing at the brook every so often. The waitress and the hostess had not returned.
She picked out a shirt from a small display of merchandise near the front door. It was stenciled with the words “Sol Duc.” She took it and her ticket over to the slender opening into the kitchen and called to the cook, who was standing at the back door smoking and blowing the fumes out the open doorway. “I wanna pay for this,” she called back to him.
“You gotta pay cash,” he growled.
“Okay.”
“You know how to make change?” His deep voice was querulous.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Can I trust you?” His voice softened a bit and he stared into her eyes.
“Always,” she replied. She found she was grinning a wide teary smile. She stared back at the middle-aged bald man in the dirty apron and waited.
“Just push the red button on the front left corner of the machine to pop it open,” the cook said gruffly. He turned and faced out the back door and continued to drag on his cigarette. Loretta thought she better give herself a nice tip and smirked.
Loretta was just closing the cash register when the door opened to admit a young couple. She picked up two menus from the hostess’ station and asked them if they wanted a window seat.
Part 4
published 9/5/24
published 9/5/24
Life as a Waitress
At her hiring interview, she asked for help getting rid of her rental car. The chief boss, a thin, prim, exacting woman who preferred to be addressed as “Mrs. Bonifax” or “Mrs. B” for short, had one of the resort mechanics drive the company truck out to Port Angeles to pick Loretta up from the car rental drop-off.
Max was a talkative young goofball with silly ideas and a non-stop stream of chatter as they drove back to the resort. He would ask her questions but then interrupt her answer with ideas of his own. Apparently, he knew a lot about how the hot water to the swimming pool and baths got from nature into the facility. Water temperature, apparently, was very important. He told her if she ever needed a hand, she should ask him. He liked helping people, he told her. Loretta was grateful to be unchallenged by his shallow conversation and leaned back into the stiff crusty seat of the truck and enjoyed the view back to work.
Loretta rarely communicated with her family. They were all, as a unit, totally pissed off at her. She accepted their invective and their pleas, in the form of texts, emails, and voice messages. She skimmed the texts and deleted them, almost before reading them. She never answered any of them and eventually they stopped buzzing her phone. She never answered the phone calls – and reading the text versions of the voice messages was too grim. She deleted them too, as quickly as she could, trying not to get her mind too involved with that which she had left behind. She read the emails a little more carefully, but she never found anything actionable. With all their whining and complaining, they were actually handling the situation with Mother quite well. They moved her into a nursing home within a few weeks, with the eldest of her two children forced to take time off work to babysit Grandma. Her former neighbor, Frankie, had been a big help and had not given Loretta a hard time, either. In fact, Frankie had a pretty good understanding of what life for Loretta had been and was very understanding about the sudden departure.
Time passed. Loretta settled into the role of waitress/hostess of the Sol Duc Café. She never found out what happened to the previous employees – except they both lost their jobs for walking out in the middle of a shift.
Loretta got her choice of rooms newly vacated by “the angry women” as she thought of them. Both rooms were part of a collection of strips of small rooms behind the main building, pushed back up against a forested hill with only graveled paths to reach them. She chose the room at the end of the strip; it had an extra window looking out to the forest, just a few feet away. She had a single bed (yes, she checked for bed bugs upon first entering the room) and access to the laundry operation and the housekeeping supply sheds attached to the back of the main building.
Her wages weren’t much, but the free room and meal tickets allowed her to live a slow pace of life. The work at the restaurant was not challenging; for a few weeks it was just her and the cook (his name was Ted, but everyone just called him “Cook”). When management did start hiring more staff, for “the season,” she was the hostess and the senior waitstaff, so she didn’t have any power differential looming over her, some small-minded maggot playing “under my thumb” with her. She did her job pleasantly and efficiently, didn’t give Cook any grief, and management, namely Mrs. B, left them alone. She had bigger fish to fry.
Loretta was part of a skeleton crew when she first arrived, and they all seemed to have back stories that they declined to discuss. The housekeeping staff was mostly people with light-brown skin who spoke fluent Spanish to one another. This group sponsored a party every Friday around seven pm, at the forest-end of one of the other employee housing strips. These were potluck affairs, BYOB.
Here she learned that the angry women were jealous lovers who used to tear up the scenery with big dramatic fights. Generally, folks found it shocking that they had both lost their jobs, but it was also not surprising that such “passionate” people would make reckless decisions.
Part of the conversation would always land on a big party that they were planning for after Labor Day. It was to be held at a place called Franklin Falls, a place you couldn’t get to by car. A place that was hard to get to – you had to know the way. They discussed logistics like: How possible was it was to lug an ice chest on wheels up there? Could they bring a barbeque? The rational ones always pointed out that the path was steep, and it would be impossible to get big items up to the falls. The dreamers just wanted what they wanted and kept bringing up new and more ridiculous ideas such as rope and pullies and teamwork. The menu was negotiated freshly, each Friday. At the end of the party, 8:30 pm precisely, they sang “Goodnight Irene,” raucously, and then they would all clink glasses and bottles, toasting themselves. “Cheers to one! Cheers to all!” they would shout. Then they methodically cleaned up any evidence of their shindig, said their goodbyes, and headed to their various destinations.
The Nightmare
She hadn’t had the dream about the waterfall since she got to Sol Duc, but one morning in August, she woke up in a panic, sweating and trembling. A silent scream framed her lips, wordlessly expressing her terror.
She had been dreaming that she was somehow behind a waterfall in a shallow low-ceilinged cave that had been etched out of hard rock by a thousand years of water erosion. Some light came in through a narrow opening at the base of the falls, with water lapping up onto a mud shelf. The sound of the falls was muted. She crawled around the dimly lit space on slippery mud, moving away from the opening into the dark. She kept putting her hand out – reaching to find the ending, not wanting to bump her head. Soon she was in pitch black. Her hand brushed something sticking out of the mud. She thought it was a tree branch, but it was soft and bendy, almost squishy. Her eyes accustomed themselves to the low light. What was it? It was . . . a hand. It was a hand connected to more beneath the mud.
This new development in her dreams horrified her. The recurring nightmare of drowning, held down under water by the powerful force of a waterfall had been bad enough, but this new thing, the hand of a dead person? She felt it still, clammy and soggy in her grip.
If everything in the dream was her, she tried to sort out the symbolism. In this new dream, she did not feel trapped in the cave. She wasn’t afraid until she found the hand and understood that it was connected to the rest of a body. A dead body. Was this her way of acknowledging that she was responsible for the shortening of her mother’s life? Was her mother dead to her now?
Her ideas didn’t make any sense to her; they didn’t resonate. What it felt more like was that there was something really scary to be found somewhere in her past, or perhaps in her future. But as she gazed out the window into the branches of green fir and red cedar, she found that she felt no anticipation, bad or good, . . . of anything. She was fine. Well except for the drowning and dead body of her dreams . . . she was great.
A robin landed on a branch near her window and seemed to be looking in at her. She smiled at the red-breasted fellow. She decided that she would have a stinky mud bath today. She got a nice discount . . .
At her hiring interview, she asked for help getting rid of her rental car. The chief boss, a thin, prim, exacting woman who preferred to be addressed as “Mrs. Bonifax” or “Mrs. B” for short, had one of the resort mechanics drive the company truck out to Port Angeles to pick Loretta up from the car rental drop-off.
Max was a talkative young goofball with silly ideas and a non-stop stream of chatter as they drove back to the resort. He would ask her questions but then interrupt her answer with ideas of his own. Apparently, he knew a lot about how the hot water to the swimming pool and baths got from nature into the facility. Water temperature, apparently, was very important. He told her if she ever needed a hand, she should ask him. He liked helping people, he told her. Loretta was grateful to be unchallenged by his shallow conversation and leaned back into the stiff crusty seat of the truck and enjoyed the view back to work.
Loretta rarely communicated with her family. They were all, as a unit, totally pissed off at her. She accepted their invective and their pleas, in the form of texts, emails, and voice messages. She skimmed the texts and deleted them, almost before reading them. She never answered any of them and eventually they stopped buzzing her phone. She never answered the phone calls – and reading the text versions of the voice messages was too grim. She deleted them too, as quickly as she could, trying not to get her mind too involved with that which she had left behind. She read the emails a little more carefully, but she never found anything actionable. With all their whining and complaining, they were actually handling the situation with Mother quite well. They moved her into a nursing home within a few weeks, with the eldest of her two children forced to take time off work to babysit Grandma. Her former neighbor, Frankie, had been a big help and had not given Loretta a hard time, either. In fact, Frankie had a pretty good understanding of what life for Loretta had been and was very understanding about the sudden departure.
Time passed. Loretta settled into the role of waitress/hostess of the Sol Duc Café. She never found out what happened to the previous employees – except they both lost their jobs for walking out in the middle of a shift.
Loretta got her choice of rooms newly vacated by “the angry women” as she thought of them. Both rooms were part of a collection of strips of small rooms behind the main building, pushed back up against a forested hill with only graveled paths to reach them. She chose the room at the end of the strip; it had an extra window looking out to the forest, just a few feet away. She had a single bed (yes, she checked for bed bugs upon first entering the room) and access to the laundry operation and the housekeeping supply sheds attached to the back of the main building.
Her wages weren’t much, but the free room and meal tickets allowed her to live a slow pace of life. The work at the restaurant was not challenging; for a few weeks it was just her and the cook (his name was Ted, but everyone just called him “Cook”). When management did start hiring more staff, for “the season,” she was the hostess and the senior waitstaff, so she didn’t have any power differential looming over her, some small-minded maggot playing “under my thumb” with her. She did her job pleasantly and efficiently, didn’t give Cook any grief, and management, namely Mrs. B, left them alone. She had bigger fish to fry.
Loretta was part of a skeleton crew when she first arrived, and they all seemed to have back stories that they declined to discuss. The housekeeping staff was mostly people with light-brown skin who spoke fluent Spanish to one another. This group sponsored a party every Friday around seven pm, at the forest-end of one of the other employee housing strips. These were potluck affairs, BYOB.
Here she learned that the angry women were jealous lovers who used to tear up the scenery with big dramatic fights. Generally, folks found it shocking that they had both lost their jobs, but it was also not surprising that such “passionate” people would make reckless decisions.
Part of the conversation would always land on a big party that they were planning for after Labor Day. It was to be held at a place called Franklin Falls, a place you couldn’t get to by car. A place that was hard to get to – you had to know the way. They discussed logistics like: How possible was it was to lug an ice chest on wheels up there? Could they bring a barbeque? The rational ones always pointed out that the path was steep, and it would be impossible to get big items up to the falls. The dreamers just wanted what they wanted and kept bringing up new and more ridiculous ideas such as rope and pullies and teamwork. The menu was negotiated freshly, each Friday. At the end of the party, 8:30 pm precisely, they sang “Goodnight Irene,” raucously, and then they would all clink glasses and bottles, toasting themselves. “Cheers to one! Cheers to all!” they would shout. Then they methodically cleaned up any evidence of their shindig, said their goodbyes, and headed to their various destinations.
The Nightmare
She hadn’t had the dream about the waterfall since she got to Sol Duc, but one morning in August, she woke up in a panic, sweating and trembling. A silent scream framed her lips, wordlessly expressing her terror.
She had been dreaming that she was somehow behind a waterfall in a shallow low-ceilinged cave that had been etched out of hard rock by a thousand years of water erosion. Some light came in through a narrow opening at the base of the falls, with water lapping up onto a mud shelf. The sound of the falls was muted. She crawled around the dimly lit space on slippery mud, moving away from the opening into the dark. She kept putting her hand out – reaching to find the ending, not wanting to bump her head. Soon she was in pitch black. Her hand brushed something sticking out of the mud. She thought it was a tree branch, but it was soft and bendy, almost squishy. Her eyes accustomed themselves to the low light. What was it? It was . . . a hand. It was a hand connected to more beneath the mud.
This new development in her dreams horrified her. The recurring nightmare of drowning, held down under water by the powerful force of a waterfall had been bad enough, but this new thing, the hand of a dead person? She felt it still, clammy and soggy in her grip.
If everything in the dream was her, she tried to sort out the symbolism. In this new dream, she did not feel trapped in the cave. She wasn’t afraid until she found the hand and understood that it was connected to the rest of a body. A dead body. Was this her way of acknowledging that she was responsible for the shortening of her mother’s life? Was her mother dead to her now?
Her ideas didn’t make any sense to her; they didn’t resonate. What it felt more like was that there was something really scary to be found somewhere in her past, or perhaps in her future. But as she gazed out the window into the branches of green fir and red cedar, she found that she felt no anticipation, bad or good, . . . of anything. She was fine. Well except for the drowning and dead body of her dreams . . . she was great.
A robin landed on a branch near her window and seemed to be looking in at her. She smiled at the red-breasted fellow. She decided that she would have a stinky mud bath today. She got a nice discount . . .
Part 5
published 9/8/24
published 9/8/24
The Big Party
The morning of the big party, Loretta was called down to the café to help with a minor flood in the kitchen. Cook and Max were there. Max had stopped water from gushing out of a broken pipe and was in the middle of replacing a section of pipe. Water was everywhere.
Sloshing around in the inch of water that had not escaped over the door sill, Cook had moved all of the obviously wet items up onto every available horizontal surface in the kitchen and was selecting items that were now unusable. He set Loretta to work searching for anything food related that had been missed that should be examined. As Cooked worked through the questionable items, discarded things began to pile up outside the back door.
Max left to get the “big” shop vac and was back in a few minutes in the company truck. He quickly got to work sucking up all the water on the floor while Loretta and Cook took a break, sitting on a couple of broken restaurant chairs out by the dumpsters. Cook lit up an unfiltered Camel and told her his plan of attack on recovering the kitchen.
“First, we’ll make sure that the floor and the wet part of the walls are real clean – mop ‘em up with disinfectant. And the table legs. And the bottoms of the shelves. Systematic-like. And we gotta find all the stuff that was hit with the water. I think the food’s all sorted, but we better make sure. Then we need to wash all the dishes what got wet. I don’t want nobody getting sick on account of this mess.”
Curious residents arrived to pick through the waste and take stores back to their rooms – Loretta wondered how someone would use a giant wet bag of flour but voiced no opinion. She learned that one carload of staff had already gone to set up flags on the trail to the party location. It was a tricky path; it was hard to figure out the way to the somewhat inaccessible falls.
She was supposed to be getting a ride to the party with one of the carloads, but she thought about the dirty dishes in the kitchen and knew it was unlikely that she would be done in time to get a ride to the big party. She had really been looking forward to it and she did not correct the sadness that took over her facial expression as she walked back to the kitchen to continue with the clean-up project.
“Why the sad face, pretty lady?” said Max. Having loaded the shop vac into the back of the truck, he was gathering up a stack of towels to soak up water from the nooks and crannies of the flood.
“Looks like I’m going to miss the party,” Loretta told him.
“Ah, it’s not that much,” he replied. “I’ve been a few times. It’s a long walk back. Poison ivy. You could stay here with me and help me fix the leak in the big hot tub, after I get done here.”
Loretta laughed, “I think I’ll pass. And I’ve never been there. I was really looking forward to this thing. Most of the kids are leaving tomorrow. This is the goodbye party.”
“Well,” Max hesitated, “I have to go into town to get some blades. I could make a detour and take you to the trail head. Would that work?”
“Oh Max! That would be great! Thanks!”
A few hours later, they drove out to the shore, turned west and drove for fifteen minutes, and then turned off into the forest on an unmarked narrow asphalt road that appeared, at first, to be a driveway. The road twisted and turned up into the hills, with dirt roads leading away on either side, probably driveways. After about twenty minutes of car-sick road, they reached the end of the line. You could tell this was the place because there were half a dozen cars parked along the sides of the road, nearly blocking the way in some cases.
Max pointed out the first flag. It would have been hard to recognize that there was even a path there without the marker. It was a faded battered disc-golf flag emblazoned with the number “5.”
“Well, somebody’s not really OCD,” Loretta said to Max. Then she had to explain what OCD meant. Then she had to explain why “5” should not be the first flag.
Eventually, Max got the joke and chuckled. “You are one funny chick,” he said.
Loretta grabbed her bag of towel and swimsuit, thanked Max, and got out of the truck. Max drove away, cranking up the volume of some music that appeared to be little more than a loud drum beat. She studied the trail, such as it was.
The Path Not Taken
Loretta followed flags that led her straight up the side of a hill, and then zig-zagged down the other side. In some places it seemed to be more like deer paths than any kind of legitimate trail. Finally, she got to a place where there were choices in several directions. A flag was laying on the ground, useless to her. She walked down the track that seemed the widest, but it petered out after about 100 feet, dead-ending at the base of a dirt cliff. She made her way back to the downed marker and took a new tack – up the hillside.
She was hoping to find a vantage point that would give her direction to this mysterious falls. It was hard work, and she was sweaty from her efforts and a bit scratched by tree branches, but she was rewarded by a view from the top of the hill. She had arrived at bare rocks she could scramble. Keeping her center of gravity low, she explored in all directions. At one end of the rock mass, she was gratified to see a wide stream at the bottom of the adjacent ravine. She could just make out the top of the falls. The sun was behind that point, though so high in the sky that it was hard to be certain of the bearing, but she thought, “south.”
She looked around the rocky top to find an easy way down in the direction of her proposed travel. She wasn’t going down the way she came up; she couldn’t really tell which way she had come up anyway. Things were working well for a while; the terrain was a gentle slope at first, just grassy, then low shrubs. But she reached a place that was too steep, so she headed off to the right. She felt that “to the right” would take her to the picnic spot or back to the road.
She stopped to reconnoiter at the lip of another patch of steep terrain, atop a small dirt cliff, when the ground beneath her gave way and she was sliding down, her feet bouncing of each tuft of turf, her bag waving about in the air behind her. Down and down she slid, surfing the incline, trying to aim for the trees on her left, with little success.
With apprehension rising, she realized that there appeared to be an actual cliff below her now. Quickly, inexorably, the chasm approached her and then she was upon it and then she was hurtling through the air.
The morning of the big party, Loretta was called down to the café to help with a minor flood in the kitchen. Cook and Max were there. Max had stopped water from gushing out of a broken pipe and was in the middle of replacing a section of pipe. Water was everywhere.
Sloshing around in the inch of water that had not escaped over the door sill, Cook had moved all of the obviously wet items up onto every available horizontal surface in the kitchen and was selecting items that were now unusable. He set Loretta to work searching for anything food related that had been missed that should be examined. As Cooked worked through the questionable items, discarded things began to pile up outside the back door.
Max left to get the “big” shop vac and was back in a few minutes in the company truck. He quickly got to work sucking up all the water on the floor while Loretta and Cook took a break, sitting on a couple of broken restaurant chairs out by the dumpsters. Cook lit up an unfiltered Camel and told her his plan of attack on recovering the kitchen.
“First, we’ll make sure that the floor and the wet part of the walls are real clean – mop ‘em up with disinfectant. And the table legs. And the bottoms of the shelves. Systematic-like. And we gotta find all the stuff that was hit with the water. I think the food’s all sorted, but we better make sure. Then we need to wash all the dishes what got wet. I don’t want nobody getting sick on account of this mess.”
Curious residents arrived to pick through the waste and take stores back to their rooms – Loretta wondered how someone would use a giant wet bag of flour but voiced no opinion. She learned that one carload of staff had already gone to set up flags on the trail to the party location. It was a tricky path; it was hard to figure out the way to the somewhat inaccessible falls.
She was supposed to be getting a ride to the party with one of the carloads, but she thought about the dirty dishes in the kitchen and knew it was unlikely that she would be done in time to get a ride to the big party. She had really been looking forward to it and she did not correct the sadness that took over her facial expression as she walked back to the kitchen to continue with the clean-up project.
“Why the sad face, pretty lady?” said Max. Having loaded the shop vac into the back of the truck, he was gathering up a stack of towels to soak up water from the nooks and crannies of the flood.
“Looks like I’m going to miss the party,” Loretta told him.
“Ah, it’s not that much,” he replied. “I’ve been a few times. It’s a long walk back. Poison ivy. You could stay here with me and help me fix the leak in the big hot tub, after I get done here.”
Loretta laughed, “I think I’ll pass. And I’ve never been there. I was really looking forward to this thing. Most of the kids are leaving tomorrow. This is the goodbye party.”
“Well,” Max hesitated, “I have to go into town to get some blades. I could make a detour and take you to the trail head. Would that work?”
“Oh Max! That would be great! Thanks!”
A few hours later, they drove out to the shore, turned west and drove for fifteen minutes, and then turned off into the forest on an unmarked narrow asphalt road that appeared, at first, to be a driveway. The road twisted and turned up into the hills, with dirt roads leading away on either side, probably driveways. After about twenty minutes of car-sick road, they reached the end of the line. You could tell this was the place because there were half a dozen cars parked along the sides of the road, nearly blocking the way in some cases.
Max pointed out the first flag. It would have been hard to recognize that there was even a path there without the marker. It was a faded battered disc-golf flag emblazoned with the number “5.”
“Well, somebody’s not really OCD,” Loretta said to Max. Then she had to explain what OCD meant. Then she had to explain why “5” should not be the first flag.
Eventually, Max got the joke and chuckled. “You are one funny chick,” he said.
Loretta grabbed her bag of towel and swimsuit, thanked Max, and got out of the truck. Max drove away, cranking up the volume of some music that appeared to be little more than a loud drum beat. She studied the trail, such as it was.
The Path Not Taken
Loretta followed flags that led her straight up the side of a hill, and then zig-zagged down the other side. In some places it seemed to be more like deer paths than any kind of legitimate trail. Finally, she got to a place where there were choices in several directions. A flag was laying on the ground, useless to her. She walked down the track that seemed the widest, but it petered out after about 100 feet, dead-ending at the base of a dirt cliff. She made her way back to the downed marker and took a new tack – up the hillside.
She was hoping to find a vantage point that would give her direction to this mysterious falls. It was hard work, and she was sweaty from her efforts and a bit scratched by tree branches, but she was rewarded by a view from the top of the hill. She had arrived at bare rocks she could scramble. Keeping her center of gravity low, she explored in all directions. At one end of the rock mass, she was gratified to see a wide stream at the bottom of the adjacent ravine. She could just make out the top of the falls. The sun was behind that point, though so high in the sky that it was hard to be certain of the bearing, but she thought, “south.”
She looked around the rocky top to find an easy way down in the direction of her proposed travel. She wasn’t going down the way she came up; she couldn’t really tell which way she had come up anyway. Things were working well for a while; the terrain was a gentle slope at first, just grassy, then low shrubs. But she reached a place that was too steep, so she headed off to the right. She felt that “to the right” would take her to the picnic spot or back to the road.
She stopped to reconnoiter at the lip of another patch of steep terrain, atop a small dirt cliff, when the ground beneath her gave way and she was sliding down, her feet bouncing of each tuft of turf, her bag waving about in the air behind her. Down and down she slid, surfing the incline, trying to aim for the trees on her left, with little success.
With apprehension rising, she realized that there appeared to be an actual cliff below her now. Quickly, inexorably, the chasm approached her and then she was upon it and then she was hurtling through the air.
