This morning, Ft. Clatsup on the Columbia River in Oregon, this afternoon back in my own apartment in Torrance.

I just got back from about a week up north in Washington and Oregon. I took Amtrak up as far as Oakland on March 31, stayed overnight, then caught Southwest Airlines up to Seattle the next day. Friends Olivia and Mark Szarko picked me up at Seatac airport and whisked me off to their house on the north side of town (Shoreline). Mark just got hired for a couple of years by the library at MIT, so they’re in their last months in Seattle before picking up and moving to Boston.

With Mark and Olivia, the main adventures are usually gastronomic. Saturday night we drove down to the “Belltown” part of downtown Seattle, blocks from the famous Needle. It’s been a bit run-down for years, but it’s on its way back, and the first tender new life from the cold ground is usually restaurants. We window shopped at about eight before finally settling on Lola’s, which serves Greek/Mediterranean food. It felt a bit like a Roman orgy at times: quail wings in pistachio paste and honeycomb, a pâté of Kalamata olives and figs … Another night I treated them to a huge Indian meal at a strangely named “Cedars” restaurant in the campus town of the University of Washington (where Mark works). It wasn’t all eating; we did have a day trip over (minus car) to Bainbridge Island just across from Seattle via ferry. We walked around and … well, yes, we did eat there, too: lunch then a afternoon tea with pastries at a bakery.

Monday, I was thrilled to meet (after over 40 years!) a family that I knew well in my Aramco childhood in Dhahran back in the ‘60s: Pastor Paul and Joanne Hackett and their son David. (The other two children couldn’t make it.) They were there only two years but managed to have a huge impact on my life during that time. Not only were David and I best playmates, trading Superman comics and playing Monopoly, but Joanne was a decent pianist who could play (gasp!) Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” and other two-handed pieces. She was an inspiration to me to continue on in piano. She also taught us scores of old campfire songs like “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea” and “Found a Peanut”. David amazed me by taking out a very organized scrapbook of those early years – he even had a copy of one of my first piano recitals (with all Mrs. Gorman’s students) in 1966 and a program from one of the wonderful outdoor Christmas Nativity pageants Aramcons managed to put on every December until the Muslim government of Arabia stepped in and banned them in the ‘80s. We laughed at old slides of our two families on various outings to the beach or the Saudi town of Hofuf.

Tuesday, I met with other old-timer Aramcons, Betty Crose and her two (grown) daughters: Anne and Shirley. Betty and her late husband Leonard were good friends of my parents in the ‘50s and early ‘60s; Len was Dad’s best man, in fact, and an old fraternity brother from UCLA. Anne is an excellent pianist, she performs professionally, in fact, and was in the midst of giving a piano lesson when I arrived in Yakima. Shirley and her family drove out east from the coast to join us all. (Betty now lives in Yakima.) Anne, too, amazed me with her well-organized scrapbooks and photo albums. She read from a diary she kept on a treasured trip back to Arabia in 1974. She and I played piano duets at my parents’ house that summer. Anne has a bit of a schizophrenic lifestyle, teaching Beethoven to her students, on the one hand, and helping out her husband Monte on their central Washington farm (actually, on land his family bought from the Yakima Indian tribe decades ago).

After watching Anne play an impromptu concert at the new concert hall downtown, I took off west through the Cascades, passing between Mt. Ranier to the north (a giant of a snow-capped mountain with its head hidden in the clouds) and Mt. Saint Helens to the south. My goal was to visit the Visitors’ Center at Mt. Saint Helens. I arrived after they closed at 4:00 (sunset was still hours away), so I continued on towards the spent volcano, about 30 miles in, following excellent roads built after the 1980 eruption. It was hard to really imagine the devastation; Weyerhauser and the US Dept. of Interior have had 25 years now to reforest the area. The valley floor, however, is now built on 150 feet of volcanic dust! The road was amazing; up and up towards the snow-capped mountain (there are others nearby), 3000 feet above the valley floor, with the sun peaking through the rain clouds every once and a while, shining a spotlight on random parts of the scenery. I was almost the only car on the road.

Pushing my luck, I decided to try to reach Lewis and Clark’s final fort, Ft. Clatsup, where the Pacific meets the Columbia River that same evening. The nearest town is Astoria, Oregon. I pulled into town about 8:30 that evening, figuring it would be easy to fit in the fort the next morning before heading to Portland Airport Thursday.

Appropriately, the next morning was gray and rainy, just as Lewis and Clark described (day after day in their diaries). But it was still thrilling to see the newly constructed fort (the old reconstruction burned a couple of years back and they’re almost done with the new one). But I had to really gun the gas pedal to get to the airport by noon!