Sorry, but this column has ADHD.
The last five months got lost somewhere, and it has messed with my focus.
I suspect the Vashon Time Vortex (VTV) is to blame. It’s where all real world schedules and intentions go to die.
I’ve been overworked and in the VTV, which is really twisted. Four people in one day tell me I look tired — and on Vashon, where it’s OK to be completely disheveled, that’s a message. A break is in order, to un-warp my Weird Vashon view on reality.
I’ve been trying to get away lately, with varying degrees of success. I decide to try again.
My two-day “retreat” lands me at Salish Lodge, right above Snoqualmie Falls. Wow: It’s very different from Vashon.
The last mile is a smooth, winding road with golf-course manicured grass, past upscale mini-malls packed with tinted-glass SUVs and road signs clearly over-designed by an ad firm. I think, for a moment, that we should get some of those, then shake my head violently.
As I pull in, a young man runs to my car and calls me “sir” six times in four sentences. (I say “sir” and “madam” on Vashon, but weirdly, only at the post office.)
The room is implausibly nice. They have a towel menu. At our house, we have only defective IKEA towels — another excellent comparison to home. There’s cable TV, too, of course. Now I know many Island-ers enjoy cable, but we’re part of Vashon’s Kill Your Television cult, so this is novel. I plop onto a massive bed, entirely covered with absurdly large pillows, and hit the remote. I surf. Whoa, this is way more ADHD than my life in the woods.
One show has a wildly overweight purple zoot-suited preacher with impeccable facial hair, giving a sermon in a stadium about how children these days expect food served to them rather than learning to serve. Good message, if ironic from a guy that big. Vashon probably couldn’t fill a stadium church, unless it was weekly sermons on the evil of kids expecting inflammatory food.
The other show is called “1000 Ways to Die,” consisting of gruesomely realistic dramatizations of a wedding singer choking on his mic and a knife-juggling chef crushed by a massive ornamental Buddha head, #487 and #212, respectively. OMG, so amazing, and so much weirder than Vashon! Perspective, hello!
In February, we try to get away, to Mexico, only we end up going with nine other families, including 22 children. Basically, we bring Vashon with us. We drink just a tiny bit of tequila and wander around en masse, group-processing our possible restaurant venues. Locals stare. Then we announce, loudly, that our children are unvaccinated, and they flee. I get sick on the last day, but a kind of sick you can’t get on Vashon, so it’s special.
We get home to discover Vashon has coyotes. Who knew? I see a picture of one at Pandora’s Box, but it seems similar to that famous Bigfoot video, like it’s really a beleaguered little dog wearing a coyote suit, looking back at the camera, embarrassed. Vashon’s weird again.
The strangest reality twist happens after I visit my parents in Minnesota a couple months later. A visit to their city condo always provides perspective. At long last, they have come to accept my bizarre island home, even threatening to move here — but to Bainbridge.
My return amounts to a true Vashon Twilight Zone (VTZ) moment. I stop at Thriftway, prepared to tell the eight people I am sure to run into about my trip. But I see no one I know. I don’t even recognize anyone, in the whole store!
I pause, fearing madness, abduction, premature senility. Mid-convulsion, I realize it is the first beautiful Saturday of late spring, and the summer people are out. Suddenly I love them!
I then see that the Island can do that too — make you anonymous. It’s another perspective tweak, Vashon’s specialty. I laugh at being back.
It takes getting away to appreciate how this place works its magic. Maybe it does bring on premature senility, and I’m OK with that.
Welcome to Vashon: Lose your mind, find your home.
— Kevin Joyce is a writer, humorist and frequent emcee.
