This is a rather in-depth response to the assortment of texts, Twitters, and Facebook messages I have received to the effect of “what the hell are you doing in wenatchee?”
I woke up at 1:30 pm, which is what I do on Saturdays. It blows my mind when people are all like, “Yeah, since it was Saturday, I slept in and didn’t even get out of bed until nine.” My immediate reaction is: “Nine? Wow, yeah, that beats any of my records. I’m always out of bed by at least suppertime.”
So it’s 1:30 and I realize I have no plans for the day, or for tomorrow, and Kristen told me that Leavenworth is gorgeous this time of year, so I packed a small bag, left plenty of food and water for the cats, tossed Leo in the car and headed off to Leavenworth.
Somewhere along Highway 2, I passed a sign that said “Bob’s Corn Maze.” Intrigued, I took the exit and drove a ways down the road until I saw where all the cars were converging and pulled into the makeshift parking lot. Bob’s Corn Maze is idyllic: a working corn farm, nestled in rolling green hills pierced orange and red in places by the daggers of autumn, complete with a blacksmith’s shed and a mangy, roaming dog. *
In addition to the corn maze, they have a pumpkin patch, and families piled out of their minivans and pulled the wheelbarrows out of the trunks. The wheelbarrows are to carry the pumpkins back to the vans. The parents know to bring the wheelbarrows. I never would have thought to bring a wheelbarrow, even if I’d been planning to stop at Bob’s Corn Maze (and Pumpkin Patch) all along. It’s like when I was in Sequim and I didn’t know to bring my own bucket for berry-picking. I’m terribly ill-versed in the ways of small-town local attractions. I blame my mother. Just by default.
I thought it would be a lot of fun to walk around with Leo and check out all the families having fun. In retrospect, I have no idea why I thought that. It wasn’t fun at all. It was just depressing and made me sad that I don’t have kids of my own to drag off to a corn maze and/or pumpkin patch. The Pacific Northwest in general just seems to be teeming with family-friendly activities. I constantly find myself thinking, “Oh, yeah, that would be great to do with the kids.” Not that I have “the kids,” or the man containing the sperm that will form the beginnings of “the kids,” but I’m already planning their days and weeks. I never thought like that in Los Angeles. I think once you’ve sat in traffic on the 405, where it takes an hour to go five miles, and you contemplate the possibility of doing that with children you become slightly allergic to them for the next few weeks.
Anyway.
This place had ginormous pumpkins. And by “pumpkins” I actually mean pumpkins. I know. Weird, right?
Here’s one picture I took:
For a sense of the scale, please make sure you notice my dog in the shot. Yeah. HUGE pumpkins.
I took a bunch more pictures, but, being the methodical and thorough young woman that I am, I brought my mp3 player cord thinking it was my camera cord. So. I took that one picture with my cell phone camera. All other photos are currently inaccessible.
Leo and I left Bob’s Corn Maze depressed, me on account of all the happy families and Leo on account of how I made him leave before he could pee on each and every plant on the farm, and we headed to Leavenworth. The drive is certainly beautiful. The photos I took didn’t begin to capture the way the colors fall on the Cascades, the way the reds and oranges and yellows interrupt the long-winded green drapery. Like Bob Ross picked out a soft, broad brush and rubbed them in as an afterthought. “There we go,” he coos, in his rough, lolling whisper, “isn’t that nice? Isn’t that just what we needed?”
It was dark by the time we got to Leavenworth, but the city was very much alive, the streets trampled by Oktoberfest-goers. Of course, there were no hotel rooms available. I called everywhere. Finally a front desk employee suggested I call around in Wenatchee. I booked a room at the Convention Center hotel here, drove the twenty-odd miles from Leavenworth and settled in. We’re going to try for Leavenworth again tomorrow, in the light. I feel like an early settler saying that.
I continue to be enormously entertained by the politics in rural Washington. The same state that brought us the illustrious commissioner campaign of Hugh Haffner is also home to the state representative campaign of Courtney Cox. If you elect her, she’ll mandate regular Friday-night screenings of the Scream trilogy at the Chelan Theater. Free admission and popcorn. No, I’m kidding, she never said that, but she totally should.
Last thing: Arby’s. There are more Arby’s per square foot in Wenatchee than in any other city in the whole United States. And, no, I can’t prove that, but no one can prove that the Holocaust really happened, either. We all just take someone else’s word for it. So you can go ahead and doubt me on the Arby’s tip, but then think of the Holocaust, and how horrible it would have been if nobody believed those stories at the time.
What’s that?
* Daggers of Autumn = good band name
