We went to the Uptown fair yesterday in Port Townsend. The photograph above is mine, and it has most of what I want to tell you in it.
The sousaphone has a KPTZ sticker on the bell, and a pride flag, and an octopus. There is a clarinet, a trombone, and a man in a chili-pepper shirt and a sequinned cap playing cymbals (that is Gary). Aldrich’s is behind them. There is no stage, so the band stands in the road and they take their shoes off as if they were there to stay. Everybody stands around the band, and a girl in pink was dancing where the cars usually go.
They are called the Unexpected Brass Band. They show up unexpectedly at everything here, so by now everyone expects them, and nobody seems to mind.
We went on purpose this year. Three years ago we went by accident.
We had finished unpacking a few weeks before. We were riding our bikes to Chetzemoka park and stopped at the Uptown farmers market to pick up something to eat on the way. The market was bigger than usual that day, with crafts and more food stalls, and while we waited for our burgers somebody sent us over to the beer garden because there were seats. We had no idea any of it was happening.
A man sat down beside us and started talking. That was Peter.
He had come to Port Townsend in the seventies, when the hippies rediscovered it, and while our food took its time he told us what the town had been and what it had turned into. Then a parade came down the street right in front of us, dogs and local organizations and homemade costumes, and at the end of it the brass band. We sat there gaping. Peter thought that was very funny.
Then he invited us to his house for dinner that night. We asked whether he meant it. He wrote down the address.
There were about twenty people in his backyard. Somebody was making paella, somebody had brought good wine. Writers, a publisher, an architect, a poet. I spent half an hour talking with a translator of ancient Chinese poetry because the two of us had turned up in the same plaid shirt. Peter’s wife Monica looked a little less delighted about us than Peter did, and we understood why later.
Much of what we have in this town came out of that evening.
A year later, Peter was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer and was gone in a matter of weeks. I was in Colombia when the message came.
His memorial closed the street in front of their home. There were hundreds of people, tables set out in the road because the lawn ran out of room, and one speaker after another stood up and told a version of the same story. He had found them somewhere and brought them home, and Monica had opened the door to yet another person nobody had warned her about. We had thought we were picked out. We were part of a long tradition of strays.
People ask whether we miss the city.
I could answer with the calendar. Centrum, the Rhododendron Festival, the film festival, the kinetic sculpture race, the wooden boat festival, concerts down by the dock, theater, music from spring into October. Some weeks it is hard to keep track. Any town with money can put on a season of events, though, so that is not really the answer.
The answer is closer to what happened one Rhododendron Festival, when I ended up riding the Quinault canoe on a float down the middle of the street, and wrote about it afterward, and the Leader printed it. Nobody plans that. You move here and the place starts putting you in things.
It is small enough that an hour in a beer garden can hand you a life.
I have written this town twice. Where Two Waters Meet is about its beginning in 1851, the settlers and the people already here and what the founding cost. The Sinkhole is about its end, an earthquake that swallows the whole place and the people left figuring out how to go on. I wrote the first day and the last day, and I live in between.
And when I needed somewhere to put a novelist who is losing his memory, in Lucid Interval, I sat him down looking at this bay.
We went to the Uptown fair yesterday because of Peter. We did not say so to anyone. We stood in the road with everybody else while the band played.
A man beside me turned around without any prompting and told me he loves this town, that he had just moved in about a hundred yards that way, and that you do not see this kind of thing anywhere else. I smiled and agreed with him. I did not tell him that we had stood in this same street three years ago knowing nobody, or about the man who sat down next to us that day and invited us to dinner.
I did not invite him to dinner either. I decided I would write to all of you about it instead.
P.S. I sent this to Monica before publishing it, to make sure she was all right with it. She wrote back that she is fine, and that I should text her sometime and come look at her garden, which she is rather proud of. She said she misses her rogue husband.
Where Two Waters Meet · English → https://mybook.to/WhereTwoWatersMeet El Encuentro de las Aguas · Español → https://mybook.to/EncuentroDeLasAguas
The Sinkhole · English → https://mybook.to/TheSinkhole El Colapso · Español → https://mybook.to/ElColapso
The short film for Where Two Waters Meet:
And for The Sinkhole: