Winter wanderings

Outside of Southern California, it's actually winter. Berkeley was cold rain, dropped leaves still clouding the streets. Olympia was snow, snow that frosted every tree branch and made each building look edible. Vancouver Island is black and white. I've never seen such a monochrome world.

Most likely it hasn't made the news anywhere else, but over the past week Washington State has been deluged by snow storms. As people from outside the state (or my cousin who lives in the hills where such weather is normal) will tell you, it's not the amount of snow; it's that no one knows how to deal with it. To me, it sure looks like a lot. By the time I left, Olympia was under about two feet, at least. But a guy who used to live in Iowa used his tall frame and long arms to gesture, explaining how much is regular for his locale. One winter he saw two snow ploughs trying to attack a drift. One would ram up against it and get stuck, then the other one would pull it out of the snow, again and again.

While the midwest is cool with large dumps of frozen water, the Pacific northwest isn't dealing so well. Snow ploughs seem scarce and people don't seem to know how to use them properly. Olympia's downtown streets were full of ice and slush and snow and made for a bumpy bus ride out on Monday. Sea-Tac airport was canceling flights, trains stopped running and the Greyhound was a lost cause. Luckily, the local bus system was running so I was able to get up to Mt Vernon to visit my mysterious rural firefighting cousin by catching four of them one after the other. In Olympia, people stopped going to work and starting spending time roving in gangs down quiet streets, dragging sleds and looking for steep hills. Cars became more and more buried by the day. The liquor store did good business. I actually saw someone carrying a dead squirrel. I think he was going to eat it.

Ah, Olympia! A magical time of snowfall and fairy-dust frozen rain! I had to run out on Monday morning to catch said buses, so I feel I didn't give an appropriate goodbye to several people who had taken me, pretty much a random New Zealander fond of acoustic folk-pop, into their homes and their lives for nearly a week. The whole town made me seriously happy. Ability to walk places! Working bus system! Little bars and coffee shops! Sense of community! Friendly happy smart people! The number of exclamation marks in this paragraph already is a sign of how gosh-darn-exciting the place was. Maybe I won't go on my sub-culture analysing rant here, but you should know: I believe there is hope for the world. 

So what did I do for six days? Pretty little. Slept in past eleven every day, stayed up late. Saw 'Dreamgirls' of all things, and 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'. Cuddled Orson (a friendly cat with no tail), baked cookies, had long kitchen conversations, expressed amazement at the snow once every ten minutes. It was actually kind of great to be in a town where snowfall like that is unusual. I imagine if I'd been somewhere on the east coast, people would be all bitter and jaded.

I definitely feel like I'll back back in Olympia. For longer. The place sucks you in.

Getting out of there on the buses, I had an amazing run of luck. Every bus seemed to be running, I found every transferring stop, didn't have to wait in the cold too long. It's still one of the most nerve-racking things I find when I'm traveling, unfamiliar bus routes. I think this is due to a childhood incident that my mother will remember. My sister and I were coming back from an art class in Wellington, I must have been about eleven, and my dad put us on a bus to the train station where we would take the train back to our little seaside town. However, the final destination of the bus was not the train station, but a distant Wellington suburb called Eastbourne, about 45 minutes away. My poor little sister and I had never seen the train station stop from that side of the street before, and it was dark and unfamiliar and we were scared, so we stayed on the bus. By the time we passed the roundabout that said 'Petone' in flowers I knew we'd gone too far, so we had no choice but to stay on, all the way to the bus depot where the sympathetic bus driver let us use the phone to call Dad. We eventually arrived home to a very clucky mother. From memory there were hot water bottles. I am now painfully aware how easy it is to miss bus stops, and that in a foreign country it is unlikely that you will find hot water bottles when you eventually arrive at your destination.

Oh yes, I am now technically in another country. This morning I caught the ferry from Washington, where I was staying with a Cairns cousin named Craig. He lives in the country. There was a lot of snow there, and tall dark evergreens, and a grey lake. Cousin Craig kindly gave me some Marmite and pineapple lumps and Chelsea Golden Syrup. I also met his son, who's twelve, a pleasantly awkward age. It's funny, somewhere in recent years I've turned into the kind of older cousin who intimidates younger relatives, possibly the person that you always thought was old and big and you could never imagine turning into.

I'm now spending Christmas in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with very very distant older relatives who are similar to grandparents. Speaking of which, I should go and give my sets a call; after all, it's already Christmas in some countries.