This is me in '89

You can tell everything about a vacation spot from its postcards. Can't you? In this case, Washington State is all about Really Big Fish.

"Are you sure this isn't Vancouver?" I asked my husband as the rain bucketed down. One grows an amphibious skin after awhile in these climes, but it's still depressing on vacation. 

When it's not about Really Big Fish, Washington is about Really Big Logs, or else the men are the size of ants. Actually, this COULD be a real log. I've heard they have Really Big Trees.

I haven't written about Bigfoot yet, but I'm going to. For a while, two of the grandgirls were obsessed with him, and the whole family would watch Finding Bigfoot to gales of laughter. There are actually people who are Squatchers or Sasquologists, or whatever they call them. Bigfooters? Privately funded, I assume.

Slugs are another feature of Washington, though they're no bigger than the footlong banana-boat suckers we have around here. The first time I saw one, I wondered who had run over an anaconda. There were guts everywhere. This card reminds me a bit of the creepy artwork of Robert Crumb. It's something to do with a Gold Slug Card.

Why did I keep these?

At any rate, here we are in Washington State, in the town of LaConner, home of Tom Robbins. Did I ever look like this? I'm practically a kid, and my kids (now in their 40s) are zygotes.

The atmosphere was fishy, froggy, amphibious. Wet. Wet, wet, wet.

Since Humptulips was mentioned in Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction, I wanted to see if it really existed. It wasn't much, but I just had to be there. The nicest photo, in which I'm kneeling before the Humptulips sign, is gone. I gave it away. I got hooked into a Chain Art thing, a piece of nonsense that operated kind of like a chain letter. I dutifully sent off my poem about Humptulips, with photo, and never heard from anybody. Ever. It was eating lunch alone in the school cafeteria, all over again. 

I do wonder, sometimes (no I don't - I've forgotten all about it) whatever happened to the plans for Humptulips Valley Church. Maybe I should look it up. A lot has happened since 1989. For one thing, I've gained - umm - I don't want to think how many pounds. But I think I was on the too-thin side here and probably boomeranged, or bounced. 

The second-nicest photo of me standing by the Humptulips sign. The other one was discarded like a piece of trash. If you wanted a second print of something in those days, you had to rifle through a whole pile of slippery brown negatives and hold them up to the light, going, "No. . . no. . . no. . . ", until you got sick of the whole thing and gave up. 

And I apologize for any log-disparaging remarks I made: just look at this one! Jesus Christ, how do they MAKE logs this big? It looks as if it could swallow me up.

Romance in LaConner. Both of us looking ridiculously young.

I always try to find the community papers in any new place, because they tell you what's really going on. I kept a few memorable clippings, orange with age, but God these were hard to get into any sort of shape to post. I had to scan them, then sort of cut them apart, and the typeface ended up every different size. I especially like the Police Blotter - sounds like something out of Mayberry - and the lovely birthday tribute to Granmummu. I also like the fact that the Aberdeen News is called. . . 

POST-BLOG BLISS! I found that photo of the Humptulips sign! I must have made an extra copy of it, after all. I wish I had kept the accompanying poem that was meant to fulfill my obligation for "chain art". I got absolutely nothing back, and lost the poem. BUT I STILL HAVE THIS. 

Remember the Rolls-Royce guru?

A very long time ago, the family went on a vacation trip to Washington State. I wanted to see where Tom Robbins lived (and did) and poke around the tourist sights. It turned out to be dizzyingly beautiful country.

I knew I had kept a scrapbook, and that there were some crazy things in it - some of the weirdest postcards I've ever seen, and great stuff from the local newspapers. I remembered something particularly weird that I'd read in the LaConner paper. The memory of it was recently dredged up by a book I'm reading for at least the fourth time.

The article in the Channel Town Press, which I initially tried to take seriously, is about a fictional guru trying to set up shop with his Rolls-Royces and harem of wives/kids in LaConner. After a while I realized it was satire. I thought it was funny, especially Bag One's drawn-on beard (this was long before photoshop) and the Bag Dad Middle School.

It was years later that I reviewed a book for the Vancouver paper called The Promise of Paradise - a woman's intimate story of the perils of life with Rajneesh. This is the one that I keep reading over and over again. The one I'm reading right now.

Rajneesh, as in Bhagwan, the "Rolls-Royce Guru", built an incredibly wealthy worldwide empire which embodied all that is wrong with mass religion. Bhagwan's devotees had taken over a piece of land called Big Muddy Ranch near the small town of Antelope, Oregon. By the time this grotesque empire collapsed in a state of near-terrorism, the newly-created city of Rajneeshpuram was in an armed standoff with the citizens of Antelope. The erstwhile leader of the cult, a demented demigod named Sheela, was eventually charged with election fraud (rounding up homeless people to vote for sympathetic representation in local elections), poisoning hundreds of citizens, and a host of other crimes. By this time, Rajneeshpuram was being patrolled by armed guards dressed in camouflage. The utopia had become a police state. 

Thousands of people drank this particular flavour of Koolaid, in particular the author of The Promise of Paradise, Satya Bharti Franklin (given a new name, as per usual, when she joined the cult). Even as chaos and violence and death swirled around her, she kept writing about "waves of bliss" washing over her, and about how, in spite of everything (even abandoning her kids), her fourteen years with this self-righteous fucked-up power-tripping bastard had all been worth it.

I think LaConner must have felt the shock waves from this bizarre episode of cult aggression. It had all come too close for comfort, but they still had the good grace to joke about it. The piece was written only a couple of years after the meltdown became public knowledge. To quote Wikipedia: "The subsequent criminal investigation, the largest in Oregon history, confirmed that a secretive group had, unbeknownst to both government officials and nearly all Rajneeshpuram residents, engaged in a variety of criminal activities, including the attempted murder of Rajneesh's physician, wiretapping and bugging within the commune and within Rajneesh's home, poisonings of two public officials, and arson."

To me, this smacks of the "but we didn't know what was going on" claim of the German population after World War II. According to her detailed account based on private journals, Satya Bharti Franklin knew what was going on, and did not walk away from it. By then she felt a kind of paralysis which was widespread. Did they know what was going on? They knew enough.

I'm not sure why I keep reading about cults - oh, of course I do, they are bloody fascinating! These people did not question Sheela or Rajneesh or any of it, no matter how nasty or ludicrous the edicts became, but kept on humbly obeying. If they didn't, they weren't "surrendered" enough. Imagine an environment, a community, in which the ultimate goal is to surrender. To give up: personal freedom, sanity, decision-making, life. 

Anyway, I kept the Bag One clipping even before I knew anything at all about Bhagwan or Sheela or Satya Bharti Franklin, because I loved it. It was all part of the Washingtonian nuttiness I had come to cherish. 

But what of those throngs in red skirts, the faithful sanyassins who had given years of their lives (not to mention all their worldly goods) to this crazy creep? Did they just go on to some other prophet, tin god, addiction? How many of them joined Scientology? There must be a cult mind, and I must figure out what it is, because in spite of everything I have seen, it makes no sense to me at all.