it off if we ate beans or too many onions or eggs. He said the earth’s gas could blow almost anywhere along this enormous ass. Willie said the geologists from the University of Washington could call it “cone building” if they wanted, but the truth was that the lava that came oozing out was plain old shit.
The process of building mountains was simple: Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood were all great mounds of manure that had collected around the geologic orifices along the great ass-crack.
Willie said most of the animals felt the geologic gurgling, which human scientists measured as vibrations. They sensed the danger at hand, and there was a silent, spooky calm among the animal people on Mount St. Helens. Then they ran and flew and swam for their lives. Some made it but most didn’t.
He said the birds and most of the deer and coyotes at the base of the mountain made it out, but smaller animals and almost all those living at higher elevations on the flanks of the mountain had perished. The animal people were in mourning, he said.
“This was a sort of geological fart, then,” I said.
“It happens to the best of us, Chief,” he said. “Part of life. That was a real cheek flapper today. Here, take this one.” Willie leaned on one cheek, threatening to let me have it with a blast, but it was a bluff; his innards were empty.
I asked him which one of the animal people told him the fate of the animal people on Mount St. Helens, and he said it was Owl. Owl had told him.
*
I had a sandwich in Produce Row in Portland and headed north on I-5 in the early afternoon. It began to rain lightly as I turned off the freeway and sped along the narrow highway toward Calamity. There was a hotly fought contest being waged for sheriff of Skamania County, and both sides apparently had handsome budgets for roadside signs, because they were everywhere.
The incumbent, Bert T. Starkey, had commandeered a cool-and-responsible blue for his signs, leaving the challenger with a pay-attention-to-me-and-throw-that-asshole-out red. Starkey had apparently spent a bundle on billboards. It seemed like there was a BERT T. STARKEY FOR SHERIFF billboard around every curve, and they were all the same: the portly, genial-looking Starkey, hawking his “experience, honesty, and integrity.”
Sheriff Starkey was obviously a savvy politician; he wasn’t about to squander his billboard money on something cute but unproductive, and he did not make the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the voters of Skamania County. With such a witty and memorable slogan as “experience, honesty, and integrity,” he had to be a cinch for reelection.
I wondered: did experienced and honest old Bert T. himself lead the raid on the Harkenrider place? A fifty-plant pot bust on the eve of the election must have been cause for the popping of champagne corks in the Starkey household. Yes sir, the benign sheriff looking out at passersby from his many billboards had struck a blow against the evil drug barons.
I came at last to Calamity, which was located at a broad bend of the Lewis River where it was intersected by the south-flowing Lucky Buck Creek. Sixkiller was sixteen miles north on the Lucky Buck.
Judging by the tackle-and-bait shop next to the Texaco station and Mini-Mart, the RV park at Calamity — all hookups for six bucks a night — was a favorite for salmon and steelhead fishermen working the Lewis and the Lucky Buck and their feeders.
In cosmopolitan downtown Calamity there was no lacking in opportunity to have a hot time.
If you wanted a bowl of steaming chili with chopped onions and cheese on top, or a hamburger with an impressive slice of Walla Walla sweet shoved in there, you could go to Delbert’s Awful Onion drive-in, which had a ten-foot plastic onion on the roof.
If you had a hankering for a draft Rainier dry or a glass of blackberry wine, or wanted to listen to a country and western band on a Friday or Saturday night, you could go to the Hog Wild Saloon.
On your way home, if you wanted, you could continue a cheap bender with a quick stop at the Mini-Mart for a couple of quarts of Rainier’s Ale, known locally as the Green Death, owing both to its potency and to the color of its bottle.
If you wanted a breakfast with everything virtually steeped in butter, a real heart-stopper, that is, eggs cooked in