Kent

This weekend, Biff and I drove out to the area where I grew up. According to various stories on the news, Kent had become a sort of white trash capitol of the Pacific Northwest – drunken trailer park child abuse stories, guys accidentally killing themselves by putting their lava lamps on kitchen stoves, a city full of Walmart shoppers to say the least.

Okay, keep your smart ass comments to yourselves…

I was at first shocked by the ginormous extent of mini-malls where there were once fields and forest, I sort of wanted to cry. We got back away from the highway and closer to the house where I lived. While there was a whole new crop of housing developments, there was still quite a bit of wilderness around.

We went a little further out to a town called Black Diamond that I remembered from childhood. It’s a town that grew out of coal mining. They keep a little stretch of road all antiquey with an old timey jail and train car, and I was heartened to know that the Balck Diamond Bakery with its 100 year+ brick oven was still operating.

It was raining, and Biff and I walked outside a bit, eating cookies from the bakery, playing with a dog, checking out the meager but sort of fun things Black Diamond had to offer… I was a little lost in the hazy mesh of memory and present, but as I looked around the wooded valley out there, smelled the rain and fireplace smoke and the evergreens, I realized that I was pretty happy that I was able to grow up in the middle of nowhere, while the middle of nowhere was still there.