I met Sean on a bleak, drizzly January morning in the ever-growing suburban enclave of Burien, where we sat down with his teenage son Aiden for an avalanche of calories at the Smarty Pants Grill, a kind of biker-themed bar and restaurant where I inhaled a breakfast burrito the size of a small log. I’d been back in the States for a few days and while I’d done my best to get down with the bounty of grub always on display, this was the first time in the trip that I’d truly plunged into the stroke-infested waters of real American overeating. I devoured the whole thing, even slurping the remnants of sour cream and salsa from my glistening fingers. It was glorious, even if afterwards I felt like an anaconda that had just eaten a wild boar.

The description of this ridiculous breakfast admittedly does little to add to the narrative of this story, other than to drive home the point that I was back in the warm, blubbery embrace of the USA, going big on a meal with a friend that I’d known longer than almost any other. It was cold and pissing rain. I was hungover and felt like someone had just poured concrete into my digestive tract, but still filled with the kind of placid, radiating joy that only comes with being back home with your people. After all, there’s no bullshitting old friends and family. They know exactly who you are, so it’s a waste of time to bother with the masks and walls that may be a daily part of your life elsewhere.

While a lot had changed in the years since I’d last been back in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle had been largely transformed into a glimmering techno hellscape), as soon as we pulled off of I-5 onto the Mounts Road Exit I felt as if I had been transported back in time. Sure, the little dirt track leading into the forested bowels of Ft. Lewis had been paved into a proper road, and there were fewer scars and potholes on the blacktop of the Old Pacific Highway, but as soon as we entered that tunnel of trees enveloping the road, I knew in my gut exactly where we were and, more importantly, where we were going.

At a few points the blanket of trees relented and, through the swirling mist, offered glimpses of the farmland and river delta in the distance, bucolic vistas that have always made my heart soar. A flood of sense-memories rushed over me, and suddenly I could smell the cow shit and  fresh-cut hay of the early summer; I could hear the rush of the river, the pop and bang of fireworks, the revving of two-stroke dirt bikes, and mournful lows of dairy cows.

More than anything I felt a quickening of the heart, an anticipation of the world I was about to enter, this landscape of timber, pasture, trailer courts, mud, cul-de-sacs, dump trucks, helicopters, beer cans on the side of the road, BB guns, loose dogs, chainsaws, and steady, worn-down locals. The culmination of this had not only served to form my psyche, but branded its roadmap into my DNA, so much so that decades later, half a world away, I was still possessed by not only daily visions of Nisqually Valley, but also the sounds, smells, and tastes of the place. How is it that such a chunk of geography can maintain such a hold on you? No wonder my heart was racing as we cruised down that two-laned road. 

There would be no valley without the river, and as we rolled up on the bridge I told Sean to slow down so I could take in its steady, gurgling flow. Being mid-winter, the river was green and fat, pushing up all the way to the edge of its banks as it carried an incalculable amount of soil and glacial silt from the flanks of Mt. Rainier. For a moment the three of us sat in silence as we trundled over that concrete span and reached the other side, which is the beginning of the populated part of the valley.

Sean immediately pulled off into the Riverside Manor, the perpetually yellow cluster of apartments erected just feet from the capricious river years ago. Little had changed in this mossy collection of low income housing, and as we rolled through the small complex I had flashbacks of taking the school bus and the clutches of kids waiting at the bus hut, which was painted the same sad mustard hue as the mildewy little apartments they called home.

This, in retrospect, is class consciousness. At the time I didn’t even realize that most of my friends were poor. But the fact is that Nisqually Valley is home to some deep, real American-style poverty: run-down houses and dilapidated trailers, junked out cars in the front yard, along with the the chemical maelstrom that so often follows such destitution—booze, meth, pills, and now, free-flowing streams of fentanyl.

I had it good, didn’t I? I lived in a big house in one of the nice parts of the valley, at least when it came to the lowlands. But Sean didn’t have it so good. He spent the lion’s share of his youth in a single-wide with his sister and single mother in a lot just across the street from Riverside Manor. The trees offered cover to a smattering of trailers placed on precarious ground, since the river surged just footsteps away from, and it didn’t take too long for the Nisqually to bursts her banks and wash away those cheap homes made of thin aluminum, plastic, and the odd bit of particle board.

Sean’s little house had been claimed by the river some thirty years before, long after he had managed to escape its claustrophobic environs. We pulled up the mud track leading to where the trailer had once stood, only to come to an iron gate, the kind that blocks road logging roads off from public access all over the rain-soaked hills of the Pacific Northwest. Sean stopped the car, killed the engine, turned to Aiden, and said, “Do you want to see where I grew up?”

The three of us disembarked from the cocoon of the SUV, and for the first time, I took in a lungful of that valley air, which hit my system like a drug—a blast of Douglas fir, cedar, moss, and black soil. There’s really nothing like it. After hopping over the gate the path became fainter, but there was still enough to follow. Aidan and Sean made their way to the overgrown field that had once been the spot of the trailer, while I trudged my way through the grass, ferns, and salal to the banks of the river. 

I stumbled onto the ledge of turf that stood above the rush of glacial water and just started into the gurgling mass, hypnotized. As I gazed upstream, I imagined my future, which quickly sailed by as my present before sliding away as the past down the groove carved out by this ancient artery all the way into the ass end of Puget Sound. Raindrops began to pelt the top of my stocking-hat encased head, which, in turn, mixed with the hot tears which suddenly ran down in rivulets along my cheeks. The gravity of the river hit my spine in a place of zero language; I only knew that I was taking in a kind power that can tell stories that will outlive us all.

“Are you okay?” asked Sean, who now stood just a few feet behind me.

“Yeah,” I said, brushing away the tears. “Let’s go.”

As we marched back toward the car, we stopped at the spot where his trailer had been. It was a plot full of ferns, blackberry briars, and Oregon grape—-the typical undergrowth found in this corner of the country—but the history loomed heavy in the air.

Sean’s childhood hadn’t been the one of security and happiness that I had largely enjoyed. He’d suffered years of neglect and outright abuse. He described to us how one of his mom’s boyfriends had beat him, and how, in the summer, he would set up a tent on the edge of the property under the guise of yard camping (a popular pastime in our neck of the woods). He’d keep the flashlight turned on and then sneak away, most often fleeing to my house, where—like any neighborhood kid in need of a hot meal and safe place to sleep—he was always offered refuge, no questions asked. My parents were great like that. 

We made our way back to the car, crossed the threshold of the gate, and took a moment to lean on the half-rusted crossbar, while Sean addressed both his son and me.

“This gate,” he said, “is a reminder of who I am, and what I’ve become. On this side is the life I’ve built over the past few decades—a wife, a career, and you, Aiden. On the other side is who I was and what formed me. My past. The beautiful thing now is that I can come and go as I please, but once I’m back on this side, that side can’t harm me. Not anymore.”

*

The Riverbend Mobile Home Park had always been a hard place, but I remembered a relatively prosperous collection of trailers, at least when compared to Claudia’s, the valley’s other trailer park that largely housed military families and down-on-their luck locals. Time had not been kind to the Riverbend, however; things had clearly deteriorated over the decades, a kind of national rot that not only infected our physical places, but perhaps also our minds and souls.

The Riverbend was shocking in its state of neglect, with rain-streaked, half-collapsed mobile homes, abandoned motorcycles and cars, wood piles that dwarfed the lodgings, and even, in one case, a pair of shivering billy goats on a caved-in porch. This was a slice of Appalachia in the heart of the Pacific Northwest: stark, angry poverty enduring the unrelenting January rain, which just made it all the more uglier. As we rolled through I felt ashamed for gawking from the comfort of the car, but I was qualified to take it all in, I guess, since so much of my childhood had been spent riding BMX bikes through these lanes.

Sean and I swapped names of old classmates and friends who had called the Riverbend home in the day, such as Linda Castro (the object of a very mild, but real crush) and, of course, Mike and Eric Casino—whose childhood home we slowed down to take in—two brothers with considerable mental gifts who otherwise couldn’t have been more different. 

Their dad made aquariums for a living and was also an amateur astronomer. I remember one August night peering into his finest telescope—one of those short fat ones that cost thousands of dollars—and not only clearly taking in the rings of Saturn, but two or three of its moons. This, of course, blew my mind.

Mike Casino was a total 80’s metalhead with long dirty blond hair, tight jeans, leather jacket, and white hightops. He was arrogant, often funny, and clearly insecure. He also had a natural, effortless talent for guitar. Once I found myself in his chaotic little bedroom while he plugged into a fuzz pedal and an amp and played AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” note perfect—complete with lick and solo—on his shiny black Ibanez. Hearing someone replicate a rock and roll song in person was a first for me. Before that I had considered the whole affair hopeless wizardry.

Mike, of course, made me want to pick up the six string as well, even though he was a total dick when it came to my efforts to learn, scoffing at my attempts to improve, which gave me a complex that I carry to this day. Sure, I got the chords down eventually, but fast licks and solos have always eluded me, perhaps because early on I convinced myself—-with the help of Mike Casino—that they were beyond my ability. Never underestimate the power of discouragement.

Still, I looked up to him for his irascible, sharp mind, as well as his unassailable cockiness, which was certainly attractive to my twelve-year-old self. There was little nourishment in that department in Nisqually in the 80’s, and despite his faults, I’ll easily credit Mike Casino as an early role model, even if he largely met my admiration with scorn.

After our blight tour of the Riverbend Mobile Home Park, we pulled into the parking lot of the public fishing access spot, which was set up decades ago as a place where folks with disabilities—and anyone else—could cast their lines into the water. The quaint little red house that had overlooked the fishing hole was now a collapsed ruin of blackened beams, having succumbed to a fire some years before. Every bit of concrete of the fishing area was plastered in indecipherable graffiti, and just a few feet down on the sand of the riverbanks, a dude horked down a joint. The dank odor of the weed smoke wafted our way, a somehow fitting accompaniment to the surroundings.

The real reason we had stopped was to make a pilgrimage to the train trestle that spanned the Nisqually just a stone’s throw upstream—a local landmark—not to mention a test of bravery to the local boys when I was growing up. During the hottest days of summer, the most daring boys of the valley (of which I was never a member) would head up the train tracks, walk out halfway across the trestle, and jump into the surging depths of the river. Not all of them made it back to the surface, including Joey Leigh, a beautiful Indian boy who took that final plunge from the trestle’s iron frame when he was just sixteen. 

The three of us strolled along the crude path leading to the trestle, until we found ourselves in the shade of this structure that represented so much to us growing up. This was the local icon of progress, of strength, of balls. It was both immovable and dangerous, a dark expanse of metal that loomed overhead, supposedly dominating the wildest arm of nature that defined the valley. This was the settler’s handprint over the native world, and nothing could move it, right? The best you could do was mount the thing, jump off, and hope to emerge in one piece.

Sean’s son Aiden immediately struck me as smart, and proved it all day. He listened with glowing eyes to his father and me spilling over each other with stories of our youth, while offering sparingly, yet well-honed comments. He was clearly a bright, observant kid, and this came into focus under the trestle, when he looked down and noticed something in the sand. He leaned over and plucked what appeared to be a massive nut from the ground. I then detected something as well, and after brushing away the dusty grains, discovered a metal plate, which I lifted up for further inspection.

As we further scanned the sand underneath the trestle, we discovered a couple of other pieces of iron, and quickly surmised that these were parts of the railway bridge that had tumbled earthward over the years. It was obvious that the trestle—that symbol of valley strength—was falling apart before our eyes. How many random pieces had other people stumbled across? And how long before the whole structure collapsed back into the river it was designed to conquer? 

* 

Every time I’m back home I swing by the house I grew up in, stop for a minute or two, and take it all in. While the place has finally faded somewhat in my subconscious, I dreamed about it nightly for at least two decades after moving out in the late 80’s. The place is tectonic for me, in my bones, a thing beyond intellect and reason.

When Sean pulled in front of the house my immediate thought was the house looked largely the same, if slightly smaller, since most places you remember from your childhood are never as big as you think they were. This is probably the result of small size and a large imagination, but somehow, this time, the place lived up to its grand memory. Suddenly, The once towering trees in front had been cut down years before, and some of the property was fenced off, but all in all, the house looked happy, healthy, and most importantly, well-lived in.

A few teenage girls clustered around a car in the driveway, and an older man stood in the front yard. While I’d been by many times before over the years, I’d never knocked on the door nor bothered the residents. To do so would seem like a violation, despite my history, but this time he was right there, so I couldn’t help myself.

“Excuse me,” I said, waving him over. “I used to live here.”

“Oh,” he replied with a smile and friendly handshake. “You must be a Tharp.”

His name was Paul, and he had bought the place soon after my parents bankruptcy and subsequent default in 1988. He had lived there ever since, and those girls in the driveway were his granddaughter and her friends. It then occurred to me, after seeing this happiness firsthand, that several generations of two families had gotten to enjoy the big house at Memory Court. The tape was playing out before my eyes, and despite the traces of bitterness that still stung my tongue, the fact that Paul and his brood clearly thrived, and in doing so, made the place glow, filled me with an immense joy that surely help lifted us as we drove away and then up the hill, out of the valley.

*

After paying my respects at my parents’ and grandparents’ graves in Tumwater—followed by a deep pizza feed at Dirty Dave’s with my sister and her family—I found myself at McCoy’s, a beer-soaked, divey bar in downtown Oly that I make a pilgrimage to every time I’m in town. I just love the place as, to me, it’s the perfect PNW rock and roll joint, with Melvins on the jukebox and Rainier on draft for a couple of bucks a pop.

Now I had advertised on social media that I’d be there, and while most people were still in Covid hideout mode on this waterlogged Sunday afternoon, a few others made it out, including several members of the Haley family, who were our neighbors growing up in Nisqually. Brian, the youngest of three Haley boys (there were three Tharp boys who almost perfectly matched their age range) was my first real friend, and suddenly, decades later, I’m sipping beers with him, along with his wife, his big brother Scott, and his mom, Arlis, who was like a second mother to me when I was a kid, and, well into 80’s, held court (and a pint glass) like a champ.  

I’m not sure if anything feels better than swapping stories with the people who saw you grow up, the folks who really know what really makes you tick . Like I said earlier  there’s no hiding from your people—friends or family—-even years down the line, and as we sat on those stools telling Nisqually stories—with Thin Lizzy and the Ramones blaring in the background—I once again felt fortunate for getting to grow up in a place with such verve.

Nisqually Valley is so cool that, if you look on a map, it doesn’t even get a name. That’s because it’s not a place to go. It can only be really known by living there. And though I’ve been gone so long, it will never leave me, and every time I go back I realize that I’ve also never left it.

EPILOGUE

Mike Casino passed away last winter. His brother messaged me with the news while I was in Texas visiting my brother. Mike lived hard and fast, frequently behind bars and otherwise outdoors. He would sometimes join in my social media frenzy, not often coherent, but with a certain intelligence that still shone beneath the haze. Pour one out, offer a prayer, or light a smoke for another Valley Rat who’s left us before his time…