If you live in the PNW, and particularly in Washington State, you’re intimately familiar with ferries. Squat and heavy with cars, their green, white, and black bodies slide through the dark Puget Sound waters carrying commuters and tourists and travelers between the Olympic Peninsula, Seattle, and the various small islands that fill our waterways. White-knuckled outsiders find them intimidating to board, hardly trusting the indifferent scruffy crews to guide cars onto the gently swaying decks. As for me, I favor riding the smaller ones. Kingston and Bainbridge are nice if you’re trying to get to downtown Seattle, but the ferry from Port Townsend is probably the best as far as real ferry experiences go. It’s small, and due to increased traffic volumes now requires a reservation if you want to have any hope of getting on. In stormier weather or rough windy seas, it’s not uncommon to see only grey rain-lashed sky out of the windows on one side, and nothing but a darker flinty sea on the other, alternating in a wild side-to-side rocking motion as it crosses the narrow waterway.
On this particular evening, I was returning from Burlington, where I’d been to gather my wedding dress, boxed up and never to be worn by me, from the dress shop. Hesitant unsure shop clerks hurried through the process of checking me out while another bride-to-be watched curiously as she stood for a fitting. It’s not every day you see a woman smiling about a wedding called off, but that was me. Months earlier, I’d been certain of the ribbons and the beads, the strapless gown cascading into a pool of beautiful silk that would stretch out lengthily behind me as I walked the aisle. The invitations were made, with stamps affixed. The venue, the Seattle Aquarium, toured and committed. Cake ordered. Catering arranged. Even a string quartet. Now, all was canceled with awkward phone calls made more so by the sureness in my very relieved voice.
My fiance was not a bad person. He was kind and gentle. Tall, good-looking, funny, sweet, and extremely loving. A former Alaskan fishing guide turned fisheries biologist, he had a passion for nature and the outdoors that matched mine nicely. And he was head over heels in love with me. The problem was that I was head over heels in like with him, and while he was thrilled to settle down and content himself with fishing the same stretches of the Clearwater River, eating at the same tiny pizza parlor on date nights in his chosen community of Orofino, Idaho, chatting up the same clerks at the little single grocery store in town, and trips downriver to the “big city” of Lewiston…I was not. I wanted to travel, to see the world, to explore, and live beyond the bounds of small-town life.
I began to feel suffocated and stifled in ways I wasn’t able to articulate well at the time. And several months after reeling in the ring he’d given me (yes, he proposed by attaching a ring to the end of my fly line), catch and release seemed like the best option. I gave the ring back to a stunned and speechless man on a Monday night and went to stay with friends to the north. The next day, I returned while he was at work, and moved out without saying goodbye. Never had I been so glad to own a pickup truck as on that day. We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment above our landlord, in a little brown house. She stood in her bathrobe, arms crossed, watching as I haphazardly crammed my belongings into the truckbed, wedging things in through the rusty canopy windows, and behind the front seats. “Do you think he’s going to be pissed when he gets home?” she asked. “I don’t know, but I won’t be here.” I replied. I wanted desperately to get out, get away. With hours of driving ahead of me, and an entire state to cross, I just wanted to be on the road, moving. I said my thank yous and goodbyes to her, and slipped out of town unseen with a sigh of relief.
I had to drive north to Pullman to collect a few things from a friend, and then I was westward bound with the windows down. I ignored my fiance’s repeated calls on my flip phone as I drove, turning the music up louder to drown out the rings. Arrriving at my parents house in the dark that night, only then did I release tears of relief. It was the right decision, but a hard decision. I didn’t know it then, but the night of handing back the ring would be the last time I spoke to him. We never talked again, and I never explained myself beyond that evening.
Things moved quickly after that. I talked to a Marine Corps enlisted recruiter despite my college degree. I talked with an old high school friend who was studying Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, as a Marine. And I signed on the dotted line to join the military shortly after. My mom cried, and my dad was mostly silent, unsure what words to say. My younger brother was on deployment in the Army at the time, in northern Iraq up in Kirkuk. His experiences were pretty harrowing, and I’m sure it weighed on both of my parents’ minds.
But that was far away, and deployment and even boot camp felt distant the night I sat parked at the Coupeville ferry terminal, waiting for the boat that would carry me over to Port Townsend and the rest of the drive home. The wedding dress lay hidden in its box, pearls and sparkles shut from view in the backseat. February in the Pacific Northwest is usually cold and rainy, but on that night the sky was clear. I got out to walk around a bit, to stretch my legs and to look up at the night sky. I felt the enormity of the darkness pressing down from above, stars crisp against the inky black. The feeling swallowed me up, making me feel small and yet bigger than I’d ever felt before.
Only the approaching ferry lights pulled me away from the cold tight grip of Cassiopeia and the night sky, slipping back to my truck’s warm interior.
pine sap & paper 