OT Redux: States Nos. 31 and 32 on the Mister Sketchee National Tour

Centralia, Washington, in its heyday

Some readers may have been perplexed by my previous post, coming as it did entirely without context. By way of explanation, I might add some additional notes from my weeklong excursion to the Pacific Northwest.

The main purpose of the trip was to visit various extended family, leaving little time for a more complete exploration of either state. Wherever I was able to find older bits of the cities, however, I kept thinking about a fixture of my youth -- Oregon Trail.

Now, granted the illustration I provided the other day was surely an additional source of confusion for some of you. The image was indeed the cover of a children's book and unrelated to the video game, but the fact that the book's artist is a person named Holly Barry and its title "Roughing it on the Oregon Trail," made it simply too strange an item to pass up.

The way I remember the game, your family was plagued at random by a specific set of unfortunate circumstances: starvation, disease, drowning, Indian attack, and so on. A player's ability to avoid these events depended solely on his decisions, which extended to such tasks as choosing provisions for the journey, navigating, fending off Indians and thieves, and, perhaps most important of all, hunting.

This last part, where virtually unlimited quantities of food could be obtained for the family, was by far most fun aspect of the game. The rest of it was grueling, arduous, and depressing, much like the original journey must have been. As I embarked on my own travels last week, I constantly heard familiar phrases in my head: "Ma has dysentery," "Jebedaiah has died," or "Your raft has capsized. You lose 50 lbs. hard tack." Ultimately, only losing one's supplies to a river or an attacking tribe was bad news; each time a family member was killed by some miscellaneous, invisible malice, the food began to last longer. By the time I completed the game, reaching Oregon safely, I was without a single relative. Instead, I had 800 lbs. of Buffalo meat all to myself.

Luckily, no significant accidents befell any of my relatives on my trip. Nor was I traveling by covered wagon across wild country. But for those of you who have not visited Washington or Oregon, the pioneer spirit is still palpable among the tall pines and crystalline harbors of the region. It is as though those first heady wagoneers came to the end of the continent and immediately began learning to cook fish and building a civilized settlement. One senses a collective impulse among the citizens to fend for one another and to commit themselves to improving upon the communities around them.

I found this to be the case principally in smaller towns, including those such as Ballard, Washington, (a fishing community now considered part of Seattle) and the Hawthorne district of Portland. The juxtaposition of history and modernity is perhaps more subtle in other areas, like Centralia, Washington, where no neighboring larger city has yet engulfed the town. The only hints of a tension between old and new in Centralia is found along its main street (Tower Ave.), where buildings of the early 20th-century main street are periodically interrupted by 1960s vinyl and aluminum siding and signage.

No such accident of history can be found in the town's foremost public house, the Olympic Club. The O.C. includes billiards hall, saloon, restaurant, hotel and cinema. Like most such establishments in the region, the beer is excellent and micro brewed (though, in this case, offsite). The menu also boasts a delicious marionberry pie -- an item that is especially difficult to find these days in the other Washington (D.C.)

I just arrived back in the BK this morning on the redeye from SeaTac. I fully intend to post reviews of each of the brew pubs I visited this past week: the Olympic Club (Centralia, WA), Pike Brewing Co. (Pike Place Market, Seattle, WA), Henry's (Portland, OR), Tangletown (Green Lake, Seattle), Big Time Brewery & Alehouse (University District, Seattle) and the Rogue Public House and Distillery (Pearl District, Portland).

These six should keep me busy for days -- you are well advised to keep abreast. Which beer was best (of the two dozen or so sampled), and which the best place to visit? You'll have to wait to find out. J. Halfz is doubly advised to stay tuned, especially should he wish to publish some of my findings on his site.