The Deep South of the Pacific Northwest

Welcome to Aberdeen, Washington

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher died in the middle of class. It was some sort of congenital heart defect and his aorta gave out that day for no particular reason other than bad luck. At the end of silent reading time, he simply told everyone to “Line up for gy—” and fell facedown into the carpet. Dead right there.

I did not notice this for several minutes. I was reading. His death murmurs brought me to awareness of the situation something like fifteen minutes later as best I can recall. Air escapes your lungs when you die and you’re all bent up. Now that I’m older, my memory is that it sounded sort of like a moose.

“Muhhhooohhhh…”

In the interests of brevity and good taste, I’ll skip over several levels of detail.

A kid close to the door ran out and grabbed the neighboring teacher. Our teacher was a notorious prankster so in a stuttering voice, the other teacher told him to stop pretending because it was “scaring the children!” When our teacher gave no response except another “I’m definitely already dead” moose groan, the principal was quickly called over the intercom to assist.

At last, our teacher was flipped over by the principal to “give him some air,” which was unfortunate, as he’d been laying face down long enough without a heartbeat that all the blood had pooled in his face. It remains one of the most gruesome sights I have ever witnessed and I wish I had known to look away.

We were quickly led to the classroom of yet another teacher. Parents were called. Students picked up one by one. As typical, my parents were too caught up in their personal drama to arrive quickly. Still several years from an impending divorce, they both knew they were on the way to disaster and were powerless to put their own difficulties aside even to aid one of their children. When they did arrive, they made sure to see to my sister first. She was a girl and she’d had the same teacher the year previous. Her feelings were considered to be more delicate and in need of greater management.

But me? I was in fourth grade. Almost eleven years old. A grown man, more or less. I was the last student to be picked up that day.

“Do you think he’s going to be okay?” I asked my father, on the school steps. Lacking the experience of age, I had talked myself into believing he might have been revived somehow even though his eyelids had been over half an inch thick.

It was something like a full two hours after everyone else had gone home. Several hours after the incident itself. This was much better than after divorce, where it was not uncommon for people to simply forget that I existed altogether, let alone that I required transportation.¹

It had given me a lot of time to think.

“Nah, he’s dead,” my dad said.

I sobbed uncontrollably.

He had been a good man. To this day, I remember him fondly. There was always a laugh and a twinkle in his eye. One of those teachers that truly cared and put his life into his work. His wife knew all about us, all of our names, our struggles, and she made sure to be so kind at the funeral. She took time to speak to all of us personally. Stuff no one else could have told her from outside the classroom, meaning he had spoken to her about all of us and often enough that she remembered. And he was dead.

And so we arrive at the moment of meaning. The part where I reveal something that opens up the door to another world and way of thinking. Such tragedies happen everywhere but each response to such a tragic occasion is unique and tells you something about a place and its people. I am writing this piece as something like the biography of a town and culture. Here, in microcosm, is the first patterning crystal from which all others can take their shape to guide your experience. This moment recounted to set the style of all other moments hereafter reported.

My dad got down on one knee so that he could look me eye to eye, man to man. And I was a man in his eyes, which I did not appreciate until several years ago. Every action I am about to relay about my father, he performed in order to be respectful. He put his rough hand on my shoulder. And he said the most appropriate thing he knew to say to a weeping son.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t be a pussy.”

Not to be cruel! This is the part I don’t know if I can get you to understand. I didn’t understand it myself until I was almost thirty. The world can be unfair. My father knew that better than most and these words were so commonly spoken as to be a family motto. My father later reported that something like God Himself spoke these words to him at a low moment. Improbable as it might seem to you given your background, it was the most emotionally correct thing he knew how to say. He was trying to tell me that there are things in this world that are awful and the only way through them is to find strength inside yourself. I had seen something terrible, but I had not died. My tears were wasted in that sense.

We did stop at McDonald’s on the way home, so point for him. I think it rained on the way, and I managed to stop crying before we got there.

You may have noticed that I have a lot of stories. Like a whole bunch of them. An almost suspicious number of stories. One of the biggest reasons I have a lot of stories is because of where I grew up.²

The rain washes away everything in Aberdeen, Washington. That’s the first thing you’d notice if you visited my hometown for any appreciable amount of time. The endless, constant, almost impossible rain. When I was in second or third grade, I believe we set two records.³ The longest number of consecutive days without a break in cloud cover, which was something close to a hundred days. And the longest number of consecutive days of rainfall, which was over sixty days. To my understanding it’s the only place in the world outside of the tropics that qualifies as a rainforest and it’s probably the worst place in the world to start a car washing business. Some years, we get over a hundred inches. That’s about twice what Seattle gets if you need a gauge.

Let us dispense with some random apocrypha that bears mentioning before we continue. Yes, Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, spent a long portion of his childhood there. I used to walk over the same bridge he claimed to have slept under on my way to and from school. It’s all mud flats under there, so it might have been some artful remembering on his part. I knew his step-sister in grade school. My brother was his grandfather’s paperboy. Everyone has a Kurt Cobain story, like almost hiring Nirvana to play at their wedding, but passing over them because they didn’t play any country music even upon request. When Kurt died someone spray-painted “RIP Kurt Cobain” on a derelict building and for years no one could tear it down because people would argue it was a historic landmark. Some years later, Macklemore would go out of his way to write a diss song about the town which felt kind of like a dick move. Aberdeen was also home to one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, the aptly named Billy Gohl, who murdered wayward sailors in the union building then dropped them through a trapdoor into the Wishkah river.⁴ Surprisingly, it was also the hometown of Dr. Douglass Osheroff⁵ who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his work on the superfluidity of liquid helium. What else? The town is also considered a hotspot for Bigfoot activity, though I don’t know anyone who has ever claimed to see one. In my junior year, a kid tried to burn his school records in the administrative office and accidentally burned down the entire high school down along with them.

It is… a weird place. I have my theories as to why, which mostly come down to the rain.

One of the first things the rain washes away is normal people. By normal, I mean people who feel discomfort and move away from it without question or need for deliberation. People who don’t question the validity of how bad they feel under eternally steel gray skies, or weather so bad you live entirely indoors for all but a few months out of every year. People who want to feel good and will take action to feel good and prefer to stay happy once they are happy.

If you have to ask yourself, “Who would live in a place where it rains that much? Who could stand to go that long without daylight?” then the happy answer is, “Not you.”

I’ve never seen official statistics, but for a while people said we had the highest rates of alcoholism, depression, and suicide in the world. My senior year one of the teachers blew his brains out by some railroad tracks, for reasons that don’t bear repeating. One girl killed herself in a cemetery at midnight during a full moon because she thought she was a vampire. She used to wear a cloak to school every day. There were a handful of others but those had the most spectacle, apart from an attempted suicide where a student put a gun in his mouth outside his girlfriend’s house but mostly missed and just fucked up his face instead. Teen pregnancy might have been another one of those categories we “won” as we had a whole separate high school for teen parents about equal in size to the “normal” high school. In junior high, a kid I knew invited me to his birthday party which was also going to be his one year anniversary of sobriety. He figured he had to give up meth after becoming a father. I don’t necessarily disbelieve we were the top for a lot of these categories as it certainly felt that way, and we did tend to show up on lists of the worst places to live in America.⁶ Also at some point a producer from the Jenny Jones Show found out about us and kept trying to recruit kids for those “My Teen is Out of Control!” segments. We averaged the death of one teacher or student a year for the entire time I was in school, in a not very big town. That includes at least one murder, a boy stabbed to death outside of the bowling alley in a case of mistaken identity. But not all of that is attributable to the rain. Or rather, part of what makes it such a bad place to live is what the rain leaves behind.

What’s left after the normal people get washed away, is a lot of people who either started out being extremely dissociated from their own sense of discomfort or else people who have adapted to be in order to cope with the weather. Lots of people who are very good at spending most of their time up in their heads, among whose numbers I would count myself. One of the biggest complaints I receive about myself from those who love me is that I could be happy in prison because I spend so much time thinking about things other than my immediate surroundings. A fault which I acknowledge, and find I am somewhat powerless to change. The things we change about ourselves to survive in childhood have a way of setting like concrete.

Generally, the town has a lot of the sort of people who won’t replace the dying batteries in their smoke detectors, or show up to vote, or clean up their garbage even if it’s in the front lawn. Not because they don’t think those things are bad, but because they’d never even consciously notice whether something is good or bad. And frankly, that group contains a lot of people who are totally fucking nuts. Like “wow, that guy is fucking nuts!” levels of nuts.

In a town of seventeen thousand people, the homeless population at times can swell to almost two thousand. Imagine if San Francisco’s homeless population was ten-percent of all the people who live in San Francisco. Please enjoy this viral video in which a man who appears himself to be barely one level above being homeless interviews several of the town’s homeless. When I was young, there was a particularly entrepreneurial hobo called “The Knife Salesman” who would “show” you some really giant knife by pointing it at your chest, and then ask if you wanted to buy it for however much money you had in your wallet. He gave you the knife at the end, so you couldn’t quite call the police and say you were robbed.

I remember going over to a friends house in grade school to spend the night and he handed me a headlamp as soon as we got inside. It was the kind that joggers use for early morning runs. He had them because his parents were hoarders and I’d need it to navigate around all the clutter. I put it on and didn’t think anything of it other than that it was a cool flashlight. His parents seemed like nice enough people just… very not there. They didn’t even seem to notice the mounds of garbage all around their home. I don’t recollect this because I find it extraordinary. I say it because it’s a memory I find to be hardly worth mentioning. That’s just a normal household there.

My freshman year, my buddy Steve invited me over to his house to play a trivia board game. I was meant to be something of a ringer and help him crush his rivals. As soon as I stepped through the front door, his mother ran out of the kitchen waving a chef’s knife overhead. Before I could even register what was happening, Steve had grabbed her wrist, head butt her, hip-checked her onto the ground, and as I finally became aware of almost being stabbed, he was taking some handcuffs out of his back pocket to confine her around a heavy china cabinet. Once restrained, it was like a demon drained out of her and she chatted happily with me while Steve set up the game board. She might have been a regular mom making small-talk with one of her son’s friends, except the subject of conversation was when she used to be a drug smuggler, and her favorite place to hide a gun was in a giant firewood pile because there were so many places to look that sometimes the cops would get frustrated and give up.

Once, after we graduated, Steve was drunk and demanded that I drive him to visit his father’s grave. I was the designated driver, and a teetotaler at the time, so we set out to the cemetery. We couldn’t find the grave in the dark and in a rare vulnerable moment, Steve said he wished he’d had a brother to help share his burdens. He suggested that we pull over so that he could pee his pants, and then I could pee my pants, then exchange pants and pee each other’s pants, and that this would make us brothers. A sort of fraternal baptism by urination. I respectfully declined, which is something I now regret. Often, the love you show to people is best demonstrated by a willingness to do something outside of your normal character.

Everyone who comes from anywhere else always stands in awe of the trees. Big, strong Middle Earth caliber trees. Trees where you’re not sure if they are secretly Ents because they have some weird face-like features and moss beards. Magical forests like you see in movies except they’re right in your backyard. Another gift of the rain. And those trees bring the timber industry. You could argue it’s the only reason there’s anyone living there at all, apart from the ports and the fishing industry. Almost every dad in every family I knew growing up was off working in the woods somewhere or had done so at one point. Or worked in a mill, like my dad. Our cultural purpose was to supply the United States with lumber. We were great at it. We treated Arbor Day like an actual holiday.

It didn’t matter if you couldn’t read or had done badly in school. Hell, my dad is barely literate and to this day has only “read” something like four books in his life.⁷ Walking off into the woods and cutting down a tree wasn’t intellectually challenging work. But it did take courage even after you’d learned the trick of it. Once a tree starts to tip over you have to ask yourself, “How sure am I that I did all those simple things correctly? How much do I trust the people around me?” And you do that every day of your life for as long as you’re able.

The fact of the matter was that you could die at any time as a lumberjack. That sacrifice is why the community college made “Charlie Choker” its mascot and why there are statues of men with chainsaws all over. Do it long enough and you would know someone who had died doing it. Even people smarter and better than you. Every once in a while, some office-worker type would think he could walk out there and do it, talk his way onto a crew or get taken on for simple amusement, and his nerve would break and the story would be everywhere about how that poor SOB ran in his barely used work boots, got back into his nice clean truck, and cried. We ignored city people for the most part, but if a city person wanted to show you they were tough it was your job to shut that down immediately and make them cry. They had money. They had power. But tough was ours.

The people might be fucking crazy, but they make up for it by being tough. That was another part of the identity of living there. You had to be tough and sometimes tough and insane were close cousins. When challenged, my uncle Mike, a con artist, used to loudly ask “Well are we testing for brains or are we testing for balls?” And if someone said “balls” that was permission enough to do something really, really fucking stupid.

This may make you ask, how tough am I? When I was a young, I used to practice punching a cement wall every day. Lightly at first, then harder, and harder. I wanted to use hormesis to get tougher, until my bones were made from rocks. To this day, when I make a fist, all my knuckles crack, so thank God I made it into the laptop class or I’d be horribly crippled by now. Before I graduated, I broke three punching bags by hitting them too hard. One of the proudest days of my life was when my grandfather took me to a leather smith and explained that my canvas punching bag needed to be reinforced because I was hitting too hard for anything commercially available. Once, Steve held a microwave and asked me to punch through the tempered glass. I did so, hitting hard enough to shatter the glass, dent the inside of the microwave, knock the wind out of Steve, and another buddy had to catch him so he didn’t fall over. I never wore gloves and the skin on my knuckles was tough as old leather.⁸ I’ve been in no fist fights, by which I mean about half a dozen. That might sound contradictory, but you need to have at least six fist fights merely to get to zero if you live in that culture. It’s like how when a rich person tells you they have no money but what they mean by that is they only have their savings, retirement, inheritance, and trust fund. One time a transient kid tried to rob me on the way to school and pulled a knife on me. He seemed kind of scared about it, so I kicked him in the nuts and left him gasping. I am however, and I can’t stress this enough, the biggest pussy who has ever hailed from the area. I mean really caught up in all kinds of deeply homoerotic things like “initiation of force” and “this doesn’t seem worth it.” I was considered to be basically a highly peculiar, flamboyantly homosexual, French Lord. It was an enormous shock to me when I got to college and realized I was, compared to my classmates, indistinguishable from a Burt Reynolds character.

But consider the competition!

There’s a guy called “Bodie” who defected to Aberdeen from the neighboring town of Hoquiam, against which we were usually profoundly racist apart from his case. He’s so fucking scary that he’s the one person that other tough people won’t even pretend they can stand against, including my father. Best I can figure is people combined the words “body” and “die” to come up with his name and they pronounce it “Bow-Dee.” When Bodie got into bar-fights, you didn’t ask who he fought with. You asked “which bar?” because Bodie fighting a single person would be reckless homicide and he wasn’t that dumb. He needed at least a room full of combatants for it to be an equal match. The closest he ever came to single-combat was one night when a bunch of trucks parked on the side of the road pissed him off. He knocked on each door, one at a time, and knocked out every single driver. He won some kind of boxing competition in the army during Vietnam and my uncle Bruce talks about him the same way ancient Greeks talked about Achilles. He was almost sixty years old when I graduated from high school and still regularly bench-pressed over five-hundred pounds. His daughter smiled at me once after I won best talent at “Mr. Irresistible” by stripping and solving a velocity problem at the same time, and I considered moving to Mexico and changing my name just to be safe.⁹

My dad’s friend Dan took his city-slicker brother in law to go shooting out in the woods. The idiot panicked from the mere act of holding a shotgun and accidentally blew off the front half of Dan’s foot. Then, in a fugue of terror, he left Dan for dead. So Dan picked up the shotgun, turned it into a walking stick, and limped something like ten fucking miles back to the nearest house to call an ambulance on one and a half feet after applying a makeshift tourniquet. Go walk ten miles with both your feet and then imagine doing it in that circumstance.

A man at the mill named Charlie went off to war in Vietnam in the company of something like two-hundred soldiers. He made it back with two other men after a several day slaughter-run through the jungle. Looking into his eyes was like exchanging glances with a corpse and if anyone in management ever tried to chastise him for anything he would only respond “What are you going to do? Kill me?” And you would definitely feel like he was asking them to try. Dutch, my dad’s best friend, said one of the superintendents tried to discipline him once, so Charlie just stood up in the middle of the meeting, walked to the supply room, grabbed the most expensive part he could carry, and threw it into the river. Just fucking fearless, as Dutch put it.

When my father saw a man slap his wife in the parking lot of a grocery store, he didn’t care that the man was still inside his car. My dad reached right in through the driver’s side window, pulled him out, and punched him a couple times in the head. And then we all kept going grocery shopping! Similarly, when he saw five boys chasing another boy, who then pushed him to the ground and circled around him to take turns striking him, he turned his truck into traffic, parked on the sidewalk and someone’s lawn, and gorilla walked out to start knocking heads together. I wasn’t there, but he told my brother “All you’ve got to do is grab one of them by the fucking neck and the rest will run off.”

When my dad was barely twenty-one he walked into a bar owned by a guy named Dick “Slaughterhouse” Waterhouse. There’s something about my dad that pisses people off, and if you don’t think that’s true, well, you’ve never met him. But for the sake of the story, trust me that he pisses a lot of people off with nothing but his face. So another guy comes into the bar, sees my dad and gets pissed off, then demands the young buck buy him a drink. My dad obliges, because hey, he’s almost still a kid. Guy wants another one. My dad says no. So, the guy asks my dad if he wants to step outside.

Slaughterhouse Waterhouse, who is “old as fuck,” intercedes and tells the guy that if he doesn’t sit down, shut the fuck up, and stop chasing away customers then he’s going to kick the guy’s ass with his “two best friends.” The guy laughs at the old man and asks him what two best friends, because my dad is scrawny, the bar is otherwise empty, and he has no problem fighting them both.

Slaughterhouse Waterhouse, with a voice like murder, tells the guy that his best friends are his left hand and his right hand, and if the guys keeps talking then ol’ Slaughterhoues Waterhouse’s left hand will put him in the hospital and if he keeps talking after that his right hand will put him in the fucking cemetery. As my dad recalls the story, when I asked him why the guy got scared and left after that, “you could just tell that he could fucking do it.”

Afterward, when they were both well and properly drunk, Dick Waterhouse rolled up his pant leg and showed off a tattoo, then slapped a poster behind the bar showing a much younger man in boxing trunks on a fight promotional poster with the same tattoo.

For a brief while in my early twenties, living in Seattle and finding I didn’t quite fit in anywhere, I had a very popular blog where I made fun of all this stuff. Nothing but the negative. There’s a lot of negative, don’t get me wrong. I won’t look on any of that stuff and say equivocal things like “Maybe it’s good that something like half of all kids there are beaten severely by their parents?” Or “literally everyone there who works in social services has to swap out after a few years because they can’t take it, and that’s fine.”

But there are cracks of daylight in the darkness. Things I loved about it and still do. We live in a world without a sense of place and that’s something I got living there. I got to be from a place that had its own stories and characters because so much of modern life is interchangeable boxes with people who have bought into the lie that they are also interchangeable.

One of my favorites was Earl, the King of the Retards. I didn’t even know Earl was a French word for King until years later and I still don’t know if the person who gave him the moniker ever knew. But Earl held court every day the South Shore Mall with some like half a dozen other mentally handicapped adults. He was their fearless leader, sitting between the Orange Julius and the movie theater. Talking to every single person that came in and if he saw a boy and a girl together, he would not rest until they had answered the question “is that your girlfriend?!?” I never had to guess the ending of any movie, because Earl told me every single fucking time before I even had a chance to buy a ticket. He was the friendliest person in the world and all he wanted was for everyone to be happy. His friend Bryan, the Prince of the Retards, got a job working at the mall Dairy Queen when Earl befriended the manager but was later fired when they discovered he was licking mayonnaise off the spreading spatula.

Then there was the “Watchman” and the whole town made up stories about him that were all sorts of fantastical. A homeless man who looked at his watch every few seconds, no matter what else he was doing. So everyone communally made up a story that he had been a diver and that his oxygen got low, so he had to keep checking his watch to see how much he had left, and then the deprivation caused brain damage. Ever after, he kept checking his watch. Or something. There were other versions of the story where after that happened his wife dropped him off in Aberdeen and told him she would be back at a specific time, and now he keeps looking at his watch and waiting for her. He didn’t drink or do drugs, didn’t hassle anyone, so everyone gave him a few bucks and kept him fed. We liked him, even if he did do things like barge into the grocery store, get a giant can of peaches off the shelf, take off his shoes, and shave the tops of his feet right in the middle of everything. Hey, maybe he had to put swimming fins on to go scuba diving!

Think of the story-telling it took to weave that tale! That’s culture! That’s perspective!

I miss the stories a lot, even though I’m not as far away as I have been. Still, the mill’s gone and the stories are gone too. The force that kept the culture tuned to that pattern is slipping and taking a new shape. Still, I can remember when the funniest man in the world wasn’t a comedian I’d ever heard on television. It was a guy who used to be a machine operator at the mill named Robbie. Robbie was morbidly obese, smoked like a chimney, and would run out of breath while in the middle of telling you something. But over the years he’d learned to time the way he ran out of breath with the funniest parts of the story. So when he told me a story about how my dad started to pick a fight with a guy, only to realize the guy had Down’s syndrome, he knew to tell the funniest part while he was literally choking to get his next breath. I can still hear him describing that same man with Down’s syndrome throwing a shovel at my dad, while my dad was trying to deescalate the situation, and the shovel being thrown so hard it got stuck in some brick. “Boing! Boing!” Robbie would cry, purple-faced, and almost blacked out from the effort of speech. I can’t replicate the effect in text, but imagine the psychological feeling that someone is literally repeatedly getting close to killing themselves to tell you something funny.

Dutch, my dad’s best friend, was the only man who would tell you a story about getting to a fight and end it with an excruciating description of how he got his ass kicked. He’d grab himself by the front of the shirt and throw himself all over his own home, describing the time he’d been foolish enough to go toe to toe with a state wrestler. All to get a laugh out of a couple of kids, he balled up the front of his shirt with one first, shook his finger at himself with the other, and then threw himself back and forth over his own kitchen counter.

And yes, maybe people were extremely rough around the edges and there were a lot of people there you could best describe as a “total fucking piece of shit.” But you could see things you might not otherwise see in that kind of an environment. Sin is in all of us, but goodness is in us even deeper, always there even if we try to shy away from it.

When a man got hurt at the mill, everyone would pass around his hard hat and put cash in it like it was a collections plate at a church. My dad’s best friend Dutch, for years paid for the free lunch program at a small school and when people found out you would have thought he’d been accused of some degenerate crime because the point of doing good things was to not have anyone find out about them. Little odd jobs done for someone who was sick. Basketball shoes for a kid whose dad had died out in the woods. Real, practical charity. Not dumping money into a black box and hoping that some otherwise useless person would produce practical value at the other end.

And let’s not forget the racism! The weird, jarring, hilariously bespoke racism of a place were until recently almost everyone was white. I think it’s almost all gone now, but when I was young it was still alive. We had a hand-crafted, bucolic, seething hatred of each other. Well, I was home reading, but everyone else did! Aberdeen against Hoquiam! The Montagues and the Capulets! When the annual football game came around it was time for Johnny Hoquiam night. We’d build a straw man, well I mean, again, I was home reading, but everyone else would put together a straw man and dress it in a Hoquiam high school football uniform and then burn it in effigy. My junior year, two older football players did this and accidentally lit themselves on fire. I knew them both at the time this happened and spoke to several people who were there the next day, and this article makes what happened sound several levels closer to genius than the true events. Which were that John Jonson and Don Donson¹⁰ got into a gas fight and forgot that it also made them flammable when they started to light Johnny Hoquiam on fire. They fell into mud puddles which were thankfully ubiquitous and were hailed as hometown heroes when they got out of the hospital.

You may have grown up in a world where people were divided by race, but have “Pollacks” ever been among that number? We’re talking about some of the last forms of white-on-white racism in existence, and I feel about them the same way I feel about people in Japan who make samurai swords, or pottery, practicing an art form that would otherwise be lost to history. Yes, it’s terrible that he feels hatred at all, but since there aren’t that many people left who feel this way, can’t we for a moment appreciate that this might be the last person in America who genuinely loathes Italians?

Like I said, the pattern is slipping. The mill shutdown close to twenty years ago now. There’s still Sierra Pacific but that doesn’t have the kind of footprint or history the old mill did. No one there ever got molested by a ghost, I bet. The kids don’t seem so tough to me anymore, either, but maybe they never seemed that tough to older people. It was already fading by my time, my dad says. All the craziest men died or went off to jail.

“Fourth of July weekend, 1967,” my dad said, one day, when I was still in grade school and he had set me up to fail at driving a railroad spike into a big post he’d found using a small half pound hammer. “Hell’s angels figured they’d come through Aberdeen and make it their own territory. Well, we had something to say about that.”

I stood in awe as my dad recounted a story of brave lumberjacks and millworkers standing side by side against the invading force, meeting knives with chainsaws, motorcycles with logging trucks, until the entirely outmatched and outgunned Hell’s Angels had been forced to retreat.

And I looked up at him with a feeling you’ve probably had several times while reading this article and said, “Dad, weren’t you twelve years old in 1967?”

1. On the positive side, this did leave me with a love for long walks.

2. The other reasons, to my thinking, are that my mom and dad are kind of nuts, I myself learned a much different standard of “normal” that I have carried into adulthood, that I have a strangely higher IQ than both of them, and I naturally like to tell stories.

3. I wasn’t able to google them to replicate, but I remember this clearly being announced on the radio. If it sounds unbelievable, Seattle has something like 300 cloudy days a year and the weather in Aberdeen is much worse.

4. There’s a guy who disputes this now but it’s pretty undisputed in the town. There’s also a restaurant named after him called “Billy’s.” Because it’s a normal thing to have a restaurant named after a serial killer.

5. I won a scholarship in his name from the high school. This is less impressive than it sounds as the town is very small. Douglass Osheroff called me to congratulate me, but I had been out late the night before as a designated driver. My sister answered and as she was not scientifically inclined, thought he was someone from “Oshkosh B’gosh” and hung up on him. He already knows about this story now, so no need to bother him.

6. This reddit thread, taken at random, is a great example.

7. His friend Dutch read most of them to him. They are: the Autobiography of Joe Namath, A Perfect Storm, Some Book by Warren Buffet about Investing but all He Remembers is the Moral was “Stick with What You Know,” and I forget the last one. But I know it was four books.

8. Thanks God I use a keyboard now or this would be a real problem. I still have a soft tissue injury in my write from roofing.

9. I am generally reserved in real life until I think something is funny.

10. Fun fact, I didn’t know that Don Donson was a nickname until I read that article. I don’t even know if anyone else called them that beyond the teacher I was talking about who told me who had been in the accident.