Thoughts From a Cup of Coffee

I had to get new brakes and an oil change on one of the cars this morning, and I went to the diner across the street to have some coffee while I waited. I made a few necessary phone calls, and still had some time to wait, so I started writing down my thoughts. This isn't complete -- hell, it's barely coherent in places -- but I thought I would post it at the risk of getting some feedback that might turn it into a larger piece.

*******

Orting – purgatory between the ass-end of nowhere and the hell of suburbia.

Which, in my opinion, makes it pretty damn fine. Sort of the last bastion of small town life with small businesses that are owned by the people who work in them. The houses don't all look the same, either, so a person walking around doesn't lose track of where they are like some sort of real life Twilight Zone.

The trees are big and the main road is slow and check this – people actually stop for crosswalks.

I found it surprisingly easy to get attached to Orting over the last two years. I found a mechanic that I like – part of the reason I'm sitting here writing this. After two years, I know why people choose to live in a valley wher Mount Rainier could wipe the entire slate clean. Partially because of the mountain itself is just so damn beautiful. And partially because there's a security in what's familiar...in something that feels familiar the second you step into it.

I suppose that's what's kept me going in a way –- what made me feel that my work was important enough to keep on with. I don't want to see this town live under the threat of destruction.

Not that any effort of mine would sincle handedly keep the mud and debris of a lahar from sluicing down the mountain, through the river beds, and inundating the valley. BUT, it COULD supply the people here with a measure of security.

Maybe it's the danger itself that makes Orting attractive though: a sort of inherent fragility and temporary-ness, like a sandcastle, or a sunset, or a spiderweb. The fact that they will be gone makes them all the more striking.

There's something about a place where a person can walk to just about anywhere they need to be that is sheer novelty in the modern world, too.

Then there's the rivers. The Puyallup is one thing, but it's the Carbon that really calls me. The Carbon River is tucked away from the streets and highways (for now) and the sandy trail along the tree-lined bank offers little patches of Zen where a person can stop and drift, alter their perspective for a while. Pretend that modern life has gone away for a whiel and let the mind run with the current, knowing that ll the water that has worn the rocks smooth and sheared the banks starts at the lowest glacier in the continental United States. Water from ice that has been there for millenia and witnessed all of our hurrying and complications and urgency without being affected by our blundering ways. It doesn't get swept along by our busy-ness, and thus reminds a person who the greater force is....

The mountain and the rivers move according to their own time, without regard for our occupation or advancements. They've covered the valley in mud and silt, and they'll do it again. This is something that doesn't bear questioning. It was events like these that made Orting thrive in the first place, by depositing the rich soil that gave rise to family farms.

Those are being broken up little by little, sold to developers to build carbon copy houses on, with only six feet between them.

Inevitably, though, the mountain will reclaim them, and it will be lieft to the archaeologists and the geologists of the future to sort out what a mess we made of things before the earth set it right again.