After snaking through the arbor tunnel, greeting waves with a tall, gray-haired man with some sort of tribal sword tattoo inked on the right side of his neck, talking on a cell phone, we circle a small welcome grove to come upon the den-home of Mandeja. I've never been to such an instantly awe-striking dwelling. After traipsing up the stone walkway to the front door, you're suddenly socked by a sun-room study with window-ledge reading/lounging bed, the whole ceiling a grid of windows and new, unpainted crossbeams, travel books erupting from a Vesuvius corner shelf, seashells and ships in bottles adorning the sills, string lights lining the doors and the smell of new wood.
It's nestled in the northwest portion of Puget sound, surrounded by woods of tall, naked-trunked trees, redwoods and firs, ferns, all manner of budding floral growth and something called a "Stinging Nettle," which I'm told to avoid for obvious reasons. Dragonflies have already taken an interest in my scent, and probably seethe with the intrusive plumes of cigarette smoke I exhale into the frigid, starlit dusk.
Up one small step through a door to the left of the entrance is situated the living quarters, which consists of another window-flanked day bed, a clotheslined row of matching gardening gloves hanging by clothespins from three branch support beams running vertically, and a dining table fashioned from a knotted plank of glossed wood in the corner.
There is no TV, no computer, no contemporary gadgets of any sort save for an antiquated CD player with a bold collection of salsa, calypso, blues, folk and Latin reggae albums to its left, the tones of which serve only the more to levitate this wooden jewel to loftier bravado. Like a magic pyre jutting from the ashes of a genocide, or a secret gingerbread home where Hansel and Gretel surely must have inhabited at some point - a Tolkeinian hallucination fathomed only in dreams and with total disregard for the whims of dirty white men living in the emerald castles across the Sound into Seattle.
The air hangs like muggy clouds in a terrarium haze to hide the sheets of sunlight, while wild hares sit idly in the fever-green meadow lawn, thinking of nothing, never blinking, never rooting around, just being in the no-nothingness of a twirling forest world.
The cottage Mandeja's built is almost too perfect. Nestled just north of the main house, its flanked by a garden with snapdragons, slug-tailed prehistoric foliage and salmonberry bushes. There's a quaint shaded staircase that leads to a cold porch with a table and two lonely chairs. The resident renting the abode is out, so I peak through the window-grid door to find an empty Bohemian living area; a mysterious tome at the spine rests on the coffee table in front of a trippy day bed davenport. Around the back, I can see the staircase to the loft bedroom, from which the thicket mesh of cloudy island fog and camouflage-fragrant woods kiss their reflections in the mirror.
Through the forest blockade to the rear of the cottage lay jungle trails, swampy, soupy paths more often matted by the hooves of deer than by size 13 Asics. John the woodworker whistles while he whittles away his day, giving refuge to veining, wooded routes, in some spots speckled with functional gypsy wagons; in some spots muddled by foot-long diameter fungi. The scent is like being born again.
By now I know already that the whisper-leave hush I hear is tempered resolution - the hominid vulnerability, tranquil untouched microbe husk in real-time dying woods, with gasps of cackling motor boats chugging from the capitalist cuneiformia to Asia and the Bering Strait as reminders to the necessity (disease) of distraction in the name of progress. Their foghorns honk, gasoline-spewing engines push the hulking steel through the salty waves, cutting fish in half, killing crucial oceans by insistence of the dollar, yet still we watch, in awe, and listens with paws cupped 'round our ears to the orchestra of powerful, catapulting evolution in the old Sound dissonance. It's a give and take, always. You take the sweet with the sour every day of your life.
Further west, where those old cargo vessels float toward but can't continue past, the apocalypse manifests with an invisible roar, genocides that are hidden to the States rage free and clean like the flows of an impenetrable lava, burning everything in sight, in path, with zero defense, therefore zero concern. The ancient wars explode into myths, then legends, then reality, and back again in a cylindrical assembly belt - blood as lubrication for the cogs, pride siphoned for power, death as the final stickered product. But if no one sees it - if it's marketed poorly or there's simply no capital with which to burst its hype, we're not buying. Darfur. Sudan. Israel. These wars are waged on principles that people who live in glass houses would never examine. Nest-egging shatter-proof walls seems safer. Everything boils down to love, anyway. Unfortunate are the myriad avenues to fail at it.
But back in Langley, the cold black streets creak with every footstep, tease the foundation floor off the coasts of Whidbey Island in the vast expanse Utopia off the western shores. You need a ferry ride to get there, and an open mind to stay. It's littered only with the misty stench of drooping sea, fragrant redwood Pitney trails and the loaded nostalgia of a seaport villa - like an Under Milk Woodian mirage just a quarter-turn globe spin away; Dylan Thomas' eyes closed forever before setting their thinning, bloodshot maculas on this treasure. When the tide is low, summoned by the stubbornness of the swiss cheese moon, you can wander 200 yards into the swampy water world of stinky seaweed and hermit crab castles, cordoned, of course, to a point by the waterfront real estate parallel posted to keep the tourists from the talent. It's a sad, romantic strip of road serving as the cultural epicenter of this mostly unnerving miasma, but as with almost any island community, its endearment is measured in its quaintness, rather than any contemporary elegance.
Seagulls perch and squeal atop any and all forms of precipice; earthy throwback activists with dreadlocks and rainbow-dyed T-shirts saunter and sip soy-based libations, and cradle organically crafted local wares as symbols of status in the dithering horizon shadows of the Space Needle skyline across the wavy sea. Garbage hides not in crooked corners or guttered walks waiting for street cleaners to sweep away the guilt, but in the proper waste receptacles; spendy vessels teeter by the docks, moored by a love of the shackle-free dominance of their resilience and a totalitarian bondage as useful lodging and transportation vehicles rather than gleaming trophies for insecure mainland putz exhibitionists; and the children skip and breathe fresh air, cradling soppy ice cream cones between their sticky fingers, laughing, bedazzled in the kind of wonderment of the world you'd be hard-pressed to duplicate in the clogging, smoggy fog of a major metropolis.
A thousand threatening redwoods couldn't break this enchanting post. A million bolts of lightning couldn't forge a dent in its mystique. A hundred days of rain would never drown the din of its silent, peaceful majesty. I don't think I've ever visited a more wonderful place in my life.
