I’m sure if you’re a political nutcase you think I’m talking about being a Republican. I’m not. As we all know, I am neither an elephant or a jackass in the classical sense, though there are several significant and insignificant others in my past lives who would say that I have indeed been a jackass at times over the last 54 years.
The elephant reference is all about coming home to die. And no, this event is not eminent. I can, however, assume that it will happen some day, as it seems that no one yet has achieved immortality. Not even Steve Jobs could figure that one out.
I used to think this was all too true, you know. I guess when you’re a kid you’ll believe any myth. Come to think of it, grown ups continue to believe in myths, such as the one that an elephant in the White House is going to somehow save us all from a world economy in a state of flux.
So why wouldn’t we believe that elephants go home to die. It’s a great concept.
I guess I never fact checked this issue over the intervening years. I heard it on some nature show when I was a kid – I now wonder if Marlin Perkins was full of sh** regarding all the things he told me – but I have just confirmed that it is indeed lore, nothing more.
Dang. And here I thought that’s why I came back to Seattle. I thought it was so poetic. I mean, I’m kind of big like an elephant, though it I were an elephant instead of a man I would be considered quite anorexic. I definitely have a memory like an elephant. I can still tell you things in great detail that happened 30 or even 40 years ago. A freak of nature, perhaps, but very elephantine.
Still, I wonder sometimes what called me back to Washington. Not that I don’t like it here. I love it. But it still seems a bit dreamlike to me. As I ride the bus, I marvel that I am looking at the Space Needle again or getting to go to the Pike Place Market today. It’s as if time simply stood still for eight years, even to the point of me living on a cul-de-sac again, complete with a maddeningly steep driveway that I know I will despise come winter, just as I despised the one in Port Orchard a few short years ago.
While I am certainly glad to be back here largely do to my cool job with the State of Washington, there’s a part of me that still waits for the other foot to drop. If there is a ying and a yang in this world and the ying is having a good paying job, living in a nice neighborhood, having people who love me and care for me and enjoying a relatively carefree existence, then the yang has be be a really, really big shoe that’s waiting to drop on me and ruin my day.
And what bigger shoe than coming back home to die. I know, I have an extremely active imagination and these things simply pop into my head. It’s not like I think about death or obsess about the inevitable possibilities. Well, strike that. I have written a lot about the many ways I would like to go out of this world, from being entombed at the lighthouse columbarium off Cannon Beach to wanting to use my casket as the ice chest at my wake, with me still in it, my favorite brewski propped in my cold, bluish tinged hand, bait for a funeral pool about which of my friends will be first to take it from me (I already have my money on Animal by the way).
Maybe it’s something about being from the Northwest. Maybe I am less elephant and more like a salmon. Each year, thousands of salmon overcome great odds and swim back from the ocean to Puget Sound. Somehow, they make their way through the fish ladder of the Ballard Locks, through the Cut, into Lake Washington and all the way to the mouth of the Cedar River. By now, these once beautiful salmon are very ugly. They are hook nosed and green and reddish, not silver. They are beaten up by the rocks and ladders they must climb to get here.
Yes, they have swam hundreds of miles to travel to Renton, Washington. There, they drop their little sacks of new salmon and then die. They die right then and there, stinking up the river with dead fish for quite some time.
That is what salmon do. While elephants don’t really go somewhere to die, salmon do. They all go together, too. During the spawning season, you’ll see them crammed into the fish ladder at the Ballard Locks. Hundreds of crazed salmon, beating their way to Renton to die. All because nature told them to do it.
Thankfully, I know it’s not my time yet. I rarely have a reason to go to Renton. I try to avoid it as much as possible, in fact. It’s not because Renton really sucks. It’s because I’m afraid that I may suddenly feel the natural urge to spawn.
No, I’m not going to drop a sack of new Robb’s into the river. There are laws against polluting our waters with rubbish. But I have had dreams of me flopping on the beach of Lake Washington Park (I know, it’s Coulon now), gasping for air, knowing that the seagulls circling overhead are just waiting to have their chance at me as I fade away.
But eternal rest won’t last long. Eventually, some little kid will come along and poke me with a stick. Such is the circle of life.
In the Emerald City, with that damned Hakuna Matata song stuck in my head,
– Robb