After a load of crap I needed to some time away and I was presented with the chance to spend it on the West Coast. A job interview, a funky hostel, forests, mountains, and a conference all in the same week. When will I learn that I need to take things easy. I did also meet some interesting people along the way.
I’d been trying to schedule an interview with Richard Smith at Pacific Northwest National Labs for the past month and on May 17 I got an email from one of his administrators asking me if I could come out to Richland, WA and visit on the 22nd. Yes, very last minute, but this is an excellent lab and I was willing to jump at the opportunity. The timing was complicated by the fact that I had a concert Friday evening, my sister planned a party for me on Saturday, and to get to my connecting flight from Seattle to Richland in time I had to leave Boston at 6 pm from Logan. The ASMS conference was the following week, May 28 - June 1. Give my distaste for transcontinental flight I decided just to stay out in Washington for the whole time.
My choir’s concert on Friday went splendidly. A bunch of people, including my parents, came and everybody seemed to enjoy it. It’s sad to think that this might be the last concert that I sing with them. I stayed out way too long and didn’t get back home until 2 am. That was stupid.
Saturday I had to pack and buy some new shirts. My dress shirts were getting a bit ratty. The party was another success. My sister has always excelled at social planning. It’s a gift. Now I get to bed at 11 thinking I’ll get 5 hours of sleep and be fine. Little did I know that I would be woken up by a woman speaking loudly and incomprehensibly to her boyfriend at 2 am. He was trying to get to his “friends” apartment by climbing the balconies at the back by my building. The ass wanted me to let him in. I just called him an idiot and tried to get back to sleep. My roommate threatened to call the police. So I’m up again A 4 am to call a cap to the airport.
I got into Richland at 5:30 pm on Sunday completely whipped, as expected, and needed to get ready for my interview series that started at 8:15 am in the morning. Over the next 9 hours, I spoke with 12 different people. Very hard to keep everybody straight. At the end of the day, I could see that this would be a good place for me to do a post-doc. Their infrastructure is amazing.
The only real negative is that Richland is about 2-3 hours from everything. Well, everything except some brush and dirt. Yes, the middle of no where. But, it is still a decent place to live and the Smith’s lab is a community in a of its self. My next decision is to see which projects I might want to work on. That is one of the final steps to see if I might be a good match for their lab.
Until last Saturday I was hanging out in Olympia (see some pictures) at Chez Cascadia, a very, very chill private hostel. When you visit these sorts of places you expect to meet some characters. I was greeted at the front door by two men who were staying at the hostel. We started chatting Nobody was around to show me where to put my junk or to give any money to. I should explain a bit how this place works. You call to make a reservation, and you might reach somebody who knows what is going on, if they are there. The place was always open while I was there and since there was usually somebody around it wasn’t really an issue.
Getting back to the two fellows who I meet at the front door. One guy was about 25 with longhair and other was scruffy looking and probably in his 40s. After chatting for a while we ended up in the back yard and the scruffy guy was sharing has “life saving” martial arts move, he only called “1,2… 3.” After going out to get some beer and sitting in the dark garage I discovered that I had a red “A” on my ass. This was the hostel manager’s (Alex) artwork and I spent the next half hour getting it out of my pants in the bathroom sink. Dinner that night was a communal vegetarian meal featuring mustard greens grown in the back yard. Oddly the place felt like a home, especially after the pleasant English woman can downstairs to make her evening cup of tea. Chatting with the 25 year old fellow, Robert, I found out that he used to work for Dell tech support and not had a job making flavored skewer at Seasoned Skewers. So he’s a 20 something that hasn’t found his place yet.
Another character was Charles and his girlfriend Tammy (”Coco”). Charles depicted himself as a man with a sorted past. At Almost 50 he has been hanging out in the Seattle metro area for almost a year, waiting for his kidnappers to come to trial. A half Japanese, half Jewish, Hawaiian, usually based out of Vancouver, he claimed at different times to be be supported on a trust fund managed by his father, have smuggled all sorts of illicit and semi-legal stuff all over the world. His latest predicament was when he was trying to pay back at $1,200 debt, or at least that is what he told the police. Charles let me read the police transcript of an interview taken after he came out of a four-day comma. He was in the apartment of a female “friend” and the guys he owned the money too were coming to collect. Things got out of hand, and he was completely beaten up by his attackers with anything they could find in the apartment, bound at the hands and feet, and thrown into the trunk of a car. Before the trunk closed he stuck his hand in the latch, breaking four fingers. But, this allowed him to jam the latch, and force is way out of the trunk while the car was moving. Rolling out of the car he calls out for help and passes out. For a reason that was not clear to me he was cut from his trust fund money and is now living essentially hand to mouth, although he claimed to have spent $3000 in the last month on his girlfriend. He also claimed have a BA in nursing and was a software engineer that owned three companies in Canada, one of which was pending purchase by Microsoft.
Now anything I’ve heard so far is mostly believable. Really the only part I didn’t really trust was the tech company holdings. Than came the part that made me realize that this guy’s mind work differently than most people’s. Charles claimed to be telekinetic and could alter reality, opening a portal into an alternate dimension. Now I was essentially raised New Age and have a very open mind, but when you calm to have devised a method to allow other people to view demonic entities I have to apply a large amount of doubt. The device he described consisted of a clear tube with a piece of “carbonized alloy” a fixed to the end. The metal is heated briefly, and smoke is produced. First, the smoke acts normally, and begins to flow to the front of the tube. Once the head is removed, the smoke starts to drift back to the metal plate, and the viewer looks down the tube. Charles then intones an incantation in Aramaic that he learned in Africa, and the smoke starts to take on shapes. First, as little floating beads than as human bodies and skulls. The climax ends with seeing an image of the what would appear to be the Horned God or the popular image of Satan as a honred beast. What ever it was Chales stated that most people felt a vrey primal fear upon viewing the image. Now Charles claimed to have done tons of objective tests and research to try and find some scientific explanation for this phenomenon, but could not find one. He wanted me to put him in contact with someone in the physical or natural sciences that could help him achieve some validity. I advised him to do a series of double-blind tests and to leave some of the metaphysical and occult parts out of his method description. He wanted to show me, but I never did get to see his demons.
When I wasn’t hanging out with the residents of “Crazy Town,” I was out on the Olympic National Park or at the local college trying to make some headway on my latest round of dissertation edits. The Olympic Peninsula is amazing, now I know what the term “temperate rain forest.” I hiked in about 3 miles to Lena Lake. I got a late start that day, so I couldn’t get in a full day of hiking. The train was amazing though. The Evergreen State College was pleasant enough, but I could tell that it was the right college for Olympia (or as I was calling it, Cambridge, MA on dope). For example, they have a farmers market outside the library every Thursday and I read in the school newspaper that the students were demanding “proper” composting toilets at the organic farm. Lots of Birks, outdoor ware, hiking boots, and a general granola feel. It was crunchier than my alma mater. Ahh, memories.
Four days was enough in Olympia. It was time to get to a bigger city. Things were a bit too layed back there, but it was a good place to take a breather.
