Prosecco and Penis Straws - The Gift of Thought
This weekend I received an indescribable gift, but I will try to describe it anyway. I got it into my head to take a trip. So at noon on a Friday I sat on a stately, polished wooden bench inside the massive stone walls of Union Station waiting for a train. Carved letters on the archway above the station store and coffee shop read “Parcels, News, Cigars,” remnants of an era in which “parcel" was a commonly used word, people read newspapers, and cigars were considered a sundry item.
My trip began with a three hour train ride headed north where I sat gazing out the window at passing towns, lonely docks, and quiet ponds while munching a chocolate chip cookie and sipping black coffee. For the duration of the ride there was a group of women sitting behind me who were on their way to Seattle for a bachelorette party. They began the ride by loudly debating whether it would be acceptable to drink their smuggled Prosecco using penis straws to commemorate the occasion. Ultimately they decided against the straws, but greatly enjoyed their noontime bubbly. This might be what fueled the next conversation: choosing the best hashtag to honor Girls’ Weekend.
“Guys, if I write #v_gina, do you think people will, like, get it?”
Once it was decided that people would in fact, like, get it, they began passing around pictures of the dresses they might wear to their friend’s impending nuptials and asking whether or not said outfit was too “booby,” an invented adjective apparently meaning “revealing a lot of boob.” Somehow during the train ride they managed to befriend a young fireman who was also traveling to Seattle and convinced him to join them at a bar that evening and bring all of his fireman friends. Despite being thoroughly distracted from the essay I had wished to complete in this first leg of my journey, I couldn’t help but be amused at their good fortune. The bachelorette gods were surely smiling upon them this day.
When I arrived in Tacoma it was pouring rain. I had originally planned to take the bus another hour to my destination, but instead I happily accepted a ride from my host who was renting her home to me for the weekend. Kelly was a beautiful woman in her forties with long greying hair and the kind of slim figure and healthy glow of a person who has eaten vegan organic food and practiced yoga their entire lives. She welcomed me into her warm truck while her Goldendoodle puppy made himself at home on my lap. We drove along the coast of Puget Sound and she laid out the rules for the weekend, if they could be called rules.
“Make yourself at home. Eat whatever you’d like. Help yourself to the wine. You can lock the door when you leave if you want.” After a short ride through town I was deposited at the end of a long forest road at the top of a hill where a cluster of seaside cabins hid beneath the trees below.
As Kelly drove away I picked up my suitcase and began hiking the 208 solid wooden steps down to the ocean, pausing to look up at heavy branches hung with delicate moss. At the base of the hill was a long row of wooden homes built on stilts above the water, many with narrow bridges leading to porches and front doors.
Cabin 63 was a small structure with twinkling Christmas lights hung all year round which shared an entry with cabin 64. I pulled open a rickety gate and found the key on the wall behind a brightly painted ceramic figure of St. Mary. Stepping inside was like stepping into an enchanted hovel, one blessed with a spell of solitude. The world behind me vanished behind the closed door and before me was a cozy one room cabin with solid wooden furniture. Each piece looked as if it had been polished by the sea. Richly textured wool blankets rested on leather chairs and vibrant art from far off places decorated the walls. There was no television or dishwasher or blinking alarm clock. Everything about the place said handmade, unique, timeless. Across the room, a sliding glass door opened onto a deck where a vast expanse of ocean rolled out from underneath the house and across the bay to the land on the other side covered in dark pines and scant few houses.
“Jackpot,” I whispered under my breath, and walked out onto the deck where all I could hear was the light brush of water against the wooden posts beneath and the gentle hum of distant cars on a suspension bridge far across the water. I had the distinct feeling of being in a place where no living soul would find me unless I ventured out to be found. I wrapped myself in a blanket, pulled out my laptop, and sat down at the desk in front of a small picture window facing the bay and filled the small room with the sound of fingers tapping keys. I wrote for hours without distraction or fatigue. That night I slept soundly on a mattress in the loft over the living room listening to the sound of rain on the slanted roof just above my head.
On my second morning I returned to the desk which already felt like home, a steaming cup of coffee in hand, and sat looking out over the water just as a seal popped into view through my little window. His head floated above the water for a time, drifting with the current while he stared in my direction. Then he flipped his whole silver spotted body into the air before disappearing back down into the calm waters. My thoughts poured out onto paper that morning, like turning on a spigot full force. And when the words dried up and I needed movement to restore them, I hiked back up the wooden steps and a few streets over to Point Defiance Park, a forested peninsula jutting out into the bay. I ran for an hour on a 5-mile loop around the perimeter where no cars were permitted, breathing in the freshest air, feet pounding past a silhouette of pines with the ocean peeking out from behind in every direction.
In the afternoon I knocked on the door of the cabin two houses down where Kelly’s son, Ben, lived with his partner who was also named Ben. I marveled that the universe knew how much it tickled me when couples share the same name. Ben and Ben agreed to give me a ride back to the train station the next morning and invited me in for a drink in the meantime. Though I was touched by their hospitality, I decided not to break the spell of solitude. I thanked them and continued into town, passing a tree hung with bright blue bottles on my walk to a charming cafe on the corner of a quiet intersection.
This is how the weekend went - long stretches of productive work, peace and solitude, and myriad delightful surprises seemingly handpicked just for me. When my last morning came, I knew that I could have stayed forever, but I also knew that the extended calm had filled me up enough to face the bustle of the real world.
On the train ride back to Portland, quiet now without the bachelorettes, I thought about the gift. It was not the weekend itself or the cabin or the people I met or any of the experiences I had, I thought. The gift was the ability to enjoy them. In the months leading up to my trip, my own mind had become an inhospitable environment. For so long the edges of my thoughts had been jagged, the more they raced the more they crashed and bloodied one another. Had I taken the same train a few weeks earlier, I would not have heard the funny conversation or seen the moss covered branches or felt the welcome of the ocean, though they would have always been there.
At times it is a heavy burden, this constant swirling energy inside each of us that only we can fully know. It is the lens through which we view everything outside and there is no escaping it, not really. “Get out of your own head” is common advice, and it’s also nonsense. What an impossible, useless directive. We are in our minds and of our minds and our minds are all we have. Since escape is not an option, we march into the tumult, elbows out, hands over our faces, trying vainly to deflect the blows. We wade through rivers, we climb up hills and crawl under wire. We travel great distances. We slip and fall in the muck and brush ourselves off. We fight many battles and endure much strife, all to find this gift - To sit alone with our own thoughts and smile.