Waqas Ahmed
JEN SAYS
We’re going to live in Port Townsend Someday

About 20 years ago in a little town in the pines 100 miles south of here Kurt Cobain told us where bad folks go when they die. Bad folks “go to a lake of fire and fry, and we don't see them again until the Fourth of July.” Last night we made our own quiet campfire between huckleberry trees right where Juan de Fuca’s Strait meets Puget’s Sound and listened to the rockets and crackers hiss and scream all around us, like devils set free to writhe and wail in their senseless fire. Echoing from Mount Baker to Mount Rainier a succession of loud farts were loosed to roam the woods, suck up the air, and scare the deer.

Jennifer thinks we crawled out of the water right at Discovery Bay in Port Townsend. She thinks the seaweed looks like salad, the driftwood looks like fruit-shaped rocks. We sat on the rocks and collected cobwebs and read fantastic poetry while drinking at Better Life Through (BLT) Coffee – admiring the Amish cheese they advertise on their menu, the perfectly bruised fruit at the Co-op Grocery.

So far we don’t feel like we’re from the Northwest, but we do see lots of things we like and dislike. There are plenty of reasons to produce rage like Kurt Cobain’s: bad folks with no jobs, deep cold like you feel no where else, listlessness, Navy bases, boredom, rusting killing machines, senseless noise at campgrounds, lethargy, tyrannical landlords, dirtbikes, dirty boots, and the list goes on. But we’ve been here long enough to watch the snow melt on the Olympics and apply for memberships at the Seattle Art Museum. We’ve walked the old growth forests in the mist and rode our bikes along bluffs high over the Sound. Its wild country for our tastes and that suits us just fine.