Memorial Day is when we give ourselves permission to begin acting as if it's summer. The weekend is almost a third of a season from it, but one experiences it as summer, in part because it is the first of three long weekends that give us time off of work to contemplate the progress of yet another year, allowing us to notice we've reached the sunny part of it.
In most places (and this is one of those rare things that has little red state/blue state correlation) summer means that people are looking for an opportunity to get away from the heat. In most coastal areas summer means going closer to the coast - New Yorkers head to the Hamptons, the poor wretches in LA drive to Manhattan Beach for the day or hope they know someone with a beach house up the coast. Western Washington stands out in one respect from most of the country in that the only sure way to experience adequate summer heat is to head inland.
And it's only in this broader context that a place like Crescent Bar can be understood. It is only because of this geographical oddity that such a place has become part of my Memorial Day ritual.
We leave Seattle after a full day of work and a dinner of take-out lamb schawarma. I have a beer with dinner before we leave. It's a very relaxed way to prepare for a road trip.
After just under three hours in the car we get to a flat piece of land that was dredged into an "island" sometime in the middle of the last century for reasons that remain unclear to me. It sits snug against the base of an 800-foot basalt cliff, leaving it in shadow until late morning. Shortly after it was dredged, a golf course and vacation housing were constructed by a company formed as Crescent Bar, Inc., still in existence and holding a long-term leasehold interest in the property under a complicated regime that involves various other interests and/or titles vested in the Federal Government, the Port of Grant County and Grant County PUD. The housing on the island, then and now, consists of either attached condominium units oriented in a closed square around a central pool or a sprawling trailer park comprised of a couple of hundred lots spread across a commonly-maintained greenbelt and sparsely outfitted with recreational appurtenances. My family bought one of the former in or around 1990 and exchanged it for lot 176 in the trailer park five or six years later, as I remember it. I feel this fact bears repeating: since the mid-'90s my family has owned property in a trailer park.
It's a park model, specifically. For those not familiar with the distinctions among trailers, Wikipedia will tell you:
Ours has one bathroom, a full kitchen minus a dishwasher, one bedroom, one hide-a-bed, a deck more less equal in size to the interior square footage, a non-attached "bunkhouse" with A/C, an outdoor heater beneath an awning, a propane grill and three televisions. It has a view of the river, which one can reach by crossing the street. I believe my mom and stepdad acquired it for about $75,000 in the mid-nineties. It peaked in value in the mid-2000s, probably in the mid-hundred-thousands, and is currently worth next-to-nothing based on some lease and regulatory issues involving the whole island that are entirely too complicated to get into here.
We arrive Friday at 9:30 p.m. and it's still warm outside. The sky is clear and apres-sunset blue in the west. We're met by friends spending the weekend who have arrived a half-dozen hours ahead of us. I'm handed an uncapped beer as I arrive. Passion Pit is playing on the outdoor speakers. It's quiet out and Jupiter is punctuating the twilight directly overhead, impossibly bright in the absence of urban pollution. Too short a distance across the grass in one neighbor's driveway is a hideous, white, covered trailer with doors that hinge downward and double as ramps for unloading ATVs. Across the street is another neighbor's compact box truck, which he uses to do some sort of business stocking stores or restaurants or something along those lines. It's at least as hideous as the ATV trailer. But this huge basalt monolith is still visible above them both, rising to heights you might reasonably measure by stacking football fields end-to-end. It's existentially significant and beautiful. Above that the Milky Way has started to materialize.
You don't have to be paying special attention to start to recognize that this is a place of stark contradictions. Great weather, breathtaking geography, but otherwise the worst of what our built environment and our culture have to offer. Take a petit-bourgeois fantasy land of leisure and impose on it a dire lack of discernment and you end up with something like Crescent Bar. It is a resort town without basic impulse control. It is what hell looks like to architects and city planners.
But it's also undeniably fun, in a guilty sort of way. Transportation around the island is mostly accomplished by golf cart, which is stupid fun if you're being honest with yourself, and if you're not a teetotaler or in recovery it's impossible not to take a perverse pleasure in drinking while driving, which - due to the golf cart culture and private roads - is entirely normalized here. And this highlights something else important in understanding this place - there's something sordidly atavistic about it. The experience is both seedy and intoxicating at once.
Boating is big draw. One can keep a boat on a private buoy free of charge just steps away from one's park model. The buoys are illegal under both state and federal law and no one cares at all. Boating and golfing represent the high watermark of refinement at Crescent Bar.
We don't boat this Memorial Day because the near-catastrophic failure of the Wanapum dam has left Crescent Bar high and dry for the summer. Waterfront lots now face improbably large beaches. From the residential side of the island there is no water to be seen at all, just scoured sand.
We lay in the hot sun and read while it rains in Seattle. We grill oysters with garlic and butter and cook the first Copper River salmon of the year. We drink beers brewed with fresh hops sourced only a few miles away in the Yakima Valley.
The people around here knew my parents. Everyone I talk to says some variation of "I was sorry to hear about your dad," which although factually inaccurate has the appropriate emotional content. The strongest symbol of my stepfather here (aside from the numerous storage lockers filled with useful, but mostly unessential tools and materials) is the taxidermied beak of a Pacific blue marlin he caught in 1985. It's grown dusty and shabby with age. Among other cleaning I do around the place, I apply furniture polish to the plaque to which it's mounted (which turns out to be a plastic veneer, not real wood) and dust the beak, but it does almost nothing to improve its aspect.
Before bed we have bourbon and French brut. When it's fully dark I haul out my 20-year-old telescope, the mirror a little dusty, the reflected image a little hazy from unkind decades. Everything visible in the night sky was here before us and will outlast us by lengths of time impossible to comprehend.
Sunday morning we leave before noon. We return to Seattle to a spirit-dampening rain, the smell of dilute bum piss on alley walls, the inexplicable scent of burnt toast in our unit. The Folk Life festival is going on few blocks away.
We have dinner at some friends' house in Montlake, where we eat exquisite bo ssam, and the experience of waking up in a trailer park and later closing out the day in a status-conscious urban neighborhood with career-related dinner conversation in a carefully curated home over a decent tempranillo gives the day an almost surreal quality. I was raised and still live in a milieu that contains these two worlds in stark proximity. I suspect both worlds inform my character and this suspicion introduces a dire dilemma into my experience of life. Summer has arrived. Long live summer.
In most places (and this is one of those rare things that has little red state/blue state correlation) summer means that people are looking for an opportunity to get away from the heat. In most coastal areas summer means going closer to the coast - New Yorkers head to the Hamptons, the poor wretches in LA drive to Manhattan Beach for the day or hope they know someone with a beach house up the coast. Western Washington stands out in one respect from most of the country in that the only sure way to experience adequate summer heat is to head inland.
And it's only in this broader context that a place like Crescent Bar can be understood. It is only because of this geographical oddity that such a place has become part of my Memorial Day ritual.
We leave Seattle after a full day of work and a dinner of take-out lamb schawarma. I have a beer with dinner before we leave. It's a very relaxed way to prepare for a road trip.
After just under three hours in the car we get to a flat piece of land that was dredged into an "island" sometime in the middle of the last century for reasons that remain unclear to me. It sits snug against the base of an 800-foot basalt cliff, leaving it in shadow until late morning. Shortly after it was dredged, a golf course and vacation housing were constructed by a company formed as Crescent Bar, Inc., still in existence and holding a long-term leasehold interest in the property under a complicated regime that involves various other interests and/or titles vested in the Federal Government, the Port of Grant County and Grant County PUD. The housing on the island, then and now, consists of either attached condominium units oriented in a closed square around a central pool or a sprawling trailer park comprised of a couple of hundred lots spread across a commonly-maintained greenbelt and sparsely outfitted with recreational appurtenances. My family bought one of the former in or around 1990 and exchanged it for lot 176 in the trailer park five or six years later, as I remember it. I feel this fact bears repeating: since the mid-'90s my family has owned property in a trailer park.
It's a park model, specifically. For those not familiar with the distinctions among trailers, Wikipedia will tell you:
Park model trailers, although considered recreational vehicles, are transportable and primarily designed for long-term or permanent placement at a destination where an RV or mobile home is allowed. When set up, park models are connected to the utilities necessary to operate home style fixtures and appliances. Park models are popular with people for use as a cottage, vacation or retirement home.
Ours has one bathroom, a full kitchen minus a dishwasher, one bedroom, one hide-a-bed, a deck more less equal in size to the interior square footage, a non-attached "bunkhouse" with A/C, an outdoor heater beneath an awning, a propane grill and three televisions. It has a view of the river, which one can reach by crossing the street. I believe my mom and stepdad acquired it for about $75,000 in the mid-nineties. It peaked in value in the mid-2000s, probably in the mid-hundred-thousands, and is currently worth next-to-nothing based on some lease and regulatory issues involving the whole island that are entirely too complicated to get into here.
We arrive Friday at 9:30 p.m. and it's still warm outside. The sky is clear and apres-sunset blue in the west. We're met by friends spending the weekend who have arrived a half-dozen hours ahead of us. I'm handed an uncapped beer as I arrive. Passion Pit is playing on the outdoor speakers. It's quiet out and Jupiter is punctuating the twilight directly overhead, impossibly bright in the absence of urban pollution. Too short a distance across the grass in one neighbor's driveway is a hideous, white, covered trailer with doors that hinge downward and double as ramps for unloading ATVs. Across the street is another neighbor's compact box truck, which he uses to do some sort of business stocking stores or restaurants or something along those lines. It's at least as hideous as the ATV trailer. But this huge basalt monolith is still visible above them both, rising to heights you might reasonably measure by stacking football fields end-to-end. It's existentially significant and beautiful. Above that the Milky Way has started to materialize.
You don't have to be paying special attention to start to recognize that this is a place of stark contradictions. Great weather, breathtaking geography, but otherwise the worst of what our built environment and our culture have to offer. Take a petit-bourgeois fantasy land of leisure and impose on it a dire lack of discernment and you end up with something like Crescent Bar. It is a resort town without basic impulse control. It is what hell looks like to architects and city planners.
But it's also undeniably fun, in a guilty sort of way. Transportation around the island is mostly accomplished by golf cart, which is stupid fun if you're being honest with yourself, and if you're not a teetotaler or in recovery it's impossible not to take a perverse pleasure in drinking while driving, which - due to the golf cart culture and private roads - is entirely normalized here. And this highlights something else important in understanding this place - there's something sordidly atavistic about it. The experience is both seedy and intoxicating at once.
Boating is big draw. One can keep a boat on a private buoy free of charge just steps away from one's park model. The buoys are illegal under both state and federal law and no one cares at all. Boating and golfing represent the high watermark of refinement at Crescent Bar.
We don't boat this Memorial Day because the near-catastrophic failure of the Wanapum dam has left Crescent Bar high and dry for the summer. Waterfront lots now face improbably large beaches. From the residential side of the island there is no water to be seen at all, just scoured sand.
We lay in the hot sun and read while it rains in Seattle. We grill oysters with garlic and butter and cook the first Copper River salmon of the year. We drink beers brewed with fresh hops sourced only a few miles away in the Yakima Valley.
The people around here knew my parents. Everyone I talk to says some variation of "I was sorry to hear about your dad," which although factually inaccurate has the appropriate emotional content. The strongest symbol of my stepfather here (aside from the numerous storage lockers filled with useful, but mostly unessential tools and materials) is the taxidermied beak of a Pacific blue marlin he caught in 1985. It's grown dusty and shabby with age. Among other cleaning I do around the place, I apply furniture polish to the plaque to which it's mounted (which turns out to be a plastic veneer, not real wood) and dust the beak, but it does almost nothing to improve its aspect.
Before bed we have bourbon and French brut. When it's fully dark I haul out my 20-year-old telescope, the mirror a little dusty, the reflected image a little hazy from unkind decades. Everything visible in the night sky was here before us and will outlast us by lengths of time impossible to comprehend.
Sunday morning we leave before noon. We return to Seattle to a spirit-dampening rain, the smell of dilute bum piss on alley walls, the inexplicable scent of burnt toast in our unit. The Folk Life festival is going on few blocks away.
We have dinner at some friends' house in Montlake, where we eat exquisite bo ssam, and the experience of waking up in a trailer park and later closing out the day in a status-conscious urban neighborhood with career-related dinner conversation in a carefully curated home over a decent tempranillo gives the day an almost surreal quality. I was raised and still live in a milieu that contains these two worlds in stark proximity. I suspect both worlds inform my character and this suspicion introduces a dire dilemma into my experience of life. Summer has arrived. Long live summer.
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