A Car Show in the North Cascades

We see things to say that we saw them, like the Grand Canyon or KISS on one of their farewell tours. Maybe we write like Bob Dylan for a week after his double-header with Leon Russell, or take up finger painting because that original Picasso didn’t look that special. But other than checking it off the list, what did a massive crack in the earth really inspire you to do? Erode?

Incomparable wonders — like Dylan or the Moab desert — let us know we are mere blips on the Big Radar, flashes in the Big Pan. No matter how massive the creatures in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad seem, they’re all clay miniatures at the hand of Ray Harryhausen; we are miniatures at the hand of something else.

We’re driving along State Route 20, searching for Diablo Lake. Anyone who speaks a little Spanish or has tasted certain hell-themed hot sauces knows that “Diablo” translates to “Devil.” We’re heading to Devil Lake, although Lake of the Devil sounds far more metal.

My girlfriend, Rachel, likes to explore. I’m indifferent. I can squeeze something out of anything; taking a magnifying glass to an unkempt area rug is as fun as driving hundreds of miles to see some water. If she’s researching on a Thursday, I can always count on her to show me where we’re going this weekend.

When she mentioned Diablo Lake, my excitement about our next trip stemmed from the prospect of robed figures humming hymns for Satan. Sadly, the pictures depicted no lake of fire; in fact, the water was so blue that it resembled what you’d find in a Sandals brochure or an all-inclusive Wheel of Fortune prize package. Winter winds in the Cascades can freeze nipples enough to cut aged gouda, so Diablo Lake would not at all be like Sandals or the River Styx.

As much as Rachel and I travel, we are awful at it. Packing acceptable amounts of food is not our strong suit. We never have a can opener when we need one; although my ingenuity has been known to make good use of sharp rocks.

I’ve never prepared, even when I desperately need to. I once camped with a can of beans, an Army-surplus jacket, and no other things. I borrowed some toilet paper from the campground bathroom to wrap around my frost-bitten hands like mummified, one-ply mittens. Meanwhile, raccoons outside the tent fought over a midnight snack that I was tempted to get in on myself out of fear of starvation. Turns out beans and light jackets are not enough for late-fall camping.

Twenty minutes into this trip to the Cascades, I’m already munching on one of two granola bars that Rachel packed (that I forgot to), and, in an hour, I will have eaten a banana that Rachel picks up at a gas station that I’m not aware currently exists; out of sight, out of mind, this banana.

We stop in a tiny mountain town called Marblemount before entering the North Cascades National Park. A retired locomotive acts as a billboard of sorts, but I’m unable to read what it says because I’m busy processing the logistics of how they transferred the train engine to this particular plot of grass. All the storefronts seem to be closed, but I don’t get close enough to check; I’m funny about peering inside windows. Technically considered a census-designated place (very small), Marblemount has the aura of a ghost town: one that the Mystery Machine might break down in, except there are no tumbleweeds, and that saloon over there is actually a Toyota Corolla. Never have the words hustle or bustle been uttered here.

We park to traverse Marblemount’s suspension bridge: an item we can check off our itinerary. At the mouth of this bridge, a signpost reads “my dad built this” with a signature scrawled below the stubby quote. Nowhere does it mention the dad’s name — the man who actually erected the bridge — but the signpost lets us know who erected the signpost: the true hero’s son. I urinate under the bridge in solidarity with the dad who built it.

Venturing onto other vistas, Rachel takes photos and I take mental ones. My patience for natural wonders dwindles with every waterfall I see. I get it; water is falling and it’s going to keep doing that until it doesn’t.

My mindset on nature has changed since moving to Washington. When we lived in Ohio, I was numb to corn; I couldn’t drive ten miles in one direction without driving past stalks. Now that I can see Mount Baker from my apartment window, mountains are the new corn. I still appreciate what I’m looking at — just as I can appreciate a good ear of corn — but rarely am I surprised.

We’re trailing behind a line of kindred cars with owners compensating for something. They rev their engines to let us know that we are their subordinates. After some deep deliberating, we realize we’ve come across an event, possibly a mid-2000s-chic car show: something that could’ve taken place in a K-Mart parking lot.

These are the years for spoilers. The car in front of us is a Mini Cooper with “METAL UP YOUR ASS” tattooed on its rear bumper. Normally, there is nothing controversial about the Mini Cooper (aside from the fact that there’s no Regular Cooper), but this lower back tattoo conjures up the image of Ronnie James Dio and his sign of the horns. We have officially arrived at the Lake of the Devil.

Parking is my least favorite activity; thankfully it’s Rachel behind the wheel for this fiasco and not me, lest the veins in my head burst and spurt blood everywhere. There’s inherent competition in sliding your car into a primo spot, although the walking you’ll do inside the Walmart is hardly offset by the steps you saved to the front door. I avoid all parking confrontations by sticking to the back of the lot or to a distant side street: the boonies, as they’re affectionately called, though I try not to call them that because it’s a word that sounds racist and I’m still not sure that it isn’t.

We are in a tan 2005 Honda Accord; right era, wrong party. We blend in like Kevin Spacey at a Pay It Forward reunion. There’s a man with a Canon 5D in one hand and a NOS Energy Drink in the other. I deduce that he’s the event photographer and we are involuntarily in line for his red carpet photoshoot. He’s snapping every car but his camera conveniently malfunctions when he gets to us. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. With less than sixty-thousand miles and only a few dents on the one side, this puppy purrs.

Drones dart around — their handlers unseen — getting the ever-popular aerial views of car tops. One drone squares up with our windshield; I’m unsure what it wants from us. I cover my mouth in case it can read lips, but it flies away before he tells us how he really feels about our presence. We are strangers in a strange land, although everyone else seems to be much stranger.

We are driving amongst people wearing clothing I would never want to pull off. Earnest neon windbreakers, drooping beanies barely hanging on, oversized flannels torn in the back, and absolutely no one is equipped for winter. Even the cars look cold. Aesthetically, I can’t decide what convention we’ve stumbled into. But as more decals appear — with words like Speed Kitty and Time Attack — I realize that these are names for street racers.

Admittedly, I have watched The Fast & The Furious, and I might’ve accidentally caught Tokyo Drift at the drive-in; the only exposition required to watch any sequel is to know there was a big race in the last movie and there will be a big race in this one, too. What I’ve concluded is that the true audience for those movies, the characters from those movies, and the people who actually street race are virtually indistinguishable. Imagine if every Star Wars superfan looked like Harrison Ford. It’s impossible; we can’t all be that beautiful.

I find it interesting that we find no parking in the park. We exit the full lot and pull off onto the shoulder. We wander through a thick cloud of cannabis and body spray that forms a protective ozone layer above our heads. The hangnails on my fingers bleed at higher altitudes: a quandary that confounds me far more than the AMC Gremlin I see to my right. With complimentary contact highs, we reach our destination.

The water is as calm as a cookie sheet, as blue as the pictures, though the atmosphere is infernal: the expectant hymns are sputtering mufflers, and the robes are hand-stitched by Ed Hardy. Satan seems satisfied with these loathsome substitutions.

I pretend to read every educational sign I pass. The trick is to blur my eyes, maintain illusory attentiveness by tracing reading progress with a finger, and then feign astonishment with a sizable exhale out of my nose, punctuating it all with a wow. I do this with a sign for Pikas: squeaky, mountain-dwelling cousins of the rabbit who can store up to fifty pounds of sticks for winter. Wow. I listen for their presence, but the decibels emanating from a nearby Porsche overpower their squeaks.

In truth, it’s difficult for me to retain information. I’ve found that most things I hear are worthless, so I tend to remember nothing; I’m an equal-opportunity ignorer. I can look at a microwave on seven different occasions and still not process that the thing I was looking at was trying to tell me the time. As beautiful as Diablo Lake is, I will forget it on the drive back; it’s the people, the cars, and the contact high that I will fondly recall.

It’s easy to get what you want; you set forth with a goal and edge your way toward it. But there’s no way to expect a gaggle of street car enthusiasts lurking around in the North Cascades. We are in a mountain range, yet almost everyone is paying attention to the ugliest cars from the ugliest years, me included. I ride the attention wave wherever it takes me.

There is a topographic map by the fence that I pretend to be interested in for a few seconds. The locales Sourdough Ridge, Thunder Knob, and Debris Zone catch my eye but I find it hard to choose the funniest; although Debris Zone is a great nickname I’ll commandeer for my toilet. No one else finds these names hilarious.

I sit on a bench that’s perfectly sawed in half. What happened here? Why is no one talking about this bench? A woman scans the landscape with her phone but she catches me in her panorama. I’m immortalized, walking around with an imitation Moleskine notebook like I was writing up parking tickets. She says nothing. There’s a baby wearing a Gucci parka and no one is appalled but me. This must be how Roddy Piper felt inside the subliminal sunglasses.

A light rumble of the crowd — and that of their engines — tells me that these cars are moving on; they’ve had enough of Diablo Lake. Their ignitions erupt. Their vape cartridges act as postmodern fog machines. Their backfiring mufflers dizzy the wild as they speed back down the way they came. A spectacle leaves the mountain.

Before we head home, I hit the bathroom. My parents used to joke that every time I’d see a porta-john, I’d want to use it. I don’t think it’s anything to joke about; you never know the distance between here and your next shot at porcelain. I do prepare sometimes.

The words “mind your knobs” are permanently etched onto the stall wall. Is this a warning to direct my urine? A clue that there’s something magical to be found near Thunder Knob? If I stare at it long enough, will it tell me the time? I can read the writing but I don’t always know what it means.

When we get back on the road, a yellow Audi passes us and kicks up road detritus onto our windshield to let us know who’s boss. Shortly thereafter, an ancient Ford truck — aptly named Unlikable — passes us, too. I see cars as self-propelled, living things; not as the people inside the cabs. I can tell this truck is the elder statesman of the bunch; he’s only a part of the gang because he was one of the founders. Despite passing, we all end up at the same traffic light.

Rachel is speeding; she’s taking notes from the street racers. We stop to look at one last waterfall on our way home and to use the toilet again. You never know. A man pretends to hide the fact that he got to second base behind the bathroom while I was inside reading self-published works of the stall wall greats. I’m more perceptive than he perceives.

On the trail, a mother takes a photo of her daughter atop a big rock, raising her hand to the sky as if to say “look at me, world!” I’ve seen this picture thousands of times, yet the subjects always pose as if they were the first to come up with the idea. No one looks cool getting up or down a big rock. We head toward the waterfall.

“Well, would you look at that,” Rachel says. And I do. We stand there until we’ve had enough.

This waterfall was not on the list, nor will it be tallied as another waterfall I’ve seen. I’ve sworn off tallies ever since making it last year’s goal to read fifty books. I’m certain I read more than fifty, but I wouldn’t know because I didn’t end up counting. If you don’t get anything else out of it, the number is meaningless.

There’s an abandoned bag of dog turds underneath the bench behind us; this is the second one today: a number that means something to me. In their current state, these turds would be better unbagged; I’d rather see autonomous dog turds than misappropriated plastic. How can someone be proactive enough to barehand steaming logs, yet totally muff the throwing away part of the process? Why is no one else paying attention?

We may be small, but stumbling on a mid-aughts street car show in the snowy mountains of the North Cascades feels meteorically metaphoric. It was a serendipitous encounter. If we wanted that to happen, it probably wouldn’t have. Expect nothing and be surprised by everything — even corn. Earth is a Big Canvas and we are paint brushed on by the hand of something bigger than us, bigger than those dog turds I chose not to throw away.

Go for one thing, stay for another. If I hadn’t agreed to come on this trip, I wouldn’t have been able to say that I did.