Bob S.
Yelp
weekend filled with ever-upbeat and hope-for-the-future moments as are weddings, most anyway, had very real need for a reprieve from this wholesome diet. not that i didn't want the best for my son, but there's no way to describe why i felt so alien being around the kind of normal people he and his bride are fortunate to surround themselves with. they're lucky, or more careful, certainly raised in time and place less likely to damage. not so where and when i came from. i won't go into what exactly shaped my own nature, except to say you might well have predicted something ultimately a bit diseased. lucky having finally had the moment to father two great kids. but kids are gone sooner than you think, and what replaces them is more of what you were in the process of getting away from in the first place, which is what i was doing now, after a few days in this wedding happening in suburban Seattle.
for an incurable melancholic like myself, nothing else grounds like being surrounded by kindred lost souls in a true dive bar, especially a new-found one happened upon while driving alone in twilight on some random road to nowhere in particular. given that i'm a stranger in the area, most any road off the mainroad qualifies. the outskirts is what i was looking for this evening and sure enough, deus ex machina, my trusty muse came through again.
for some time now i've believed, not in the kindness of strangers but that i do have one blessing in life. this is a kind of inner compass that guides me around places i've never been and won't be back again. this is helpful at the critical moment when you have to go right, or left. it's been reliable many places. it was a great find in southern bolivia, around a curve there appeared out of nowhere in the dense bushy landscape a mechanic's shed/parilla bar, this at a most opportune moment. or the impossibly odd hotel, this in name only, surrounded by ancient and sadly frozen-in-january apple orchards along the remote southern border of poland / ukraine. never know what's coming, but something tells me to turn off the gps if it still works, and trust a sense that it's just around the corner. on the other hand, realistically the fact is these finds are not necessarily of the 5* category as i have very low standards and no expectations when in this get away from mood. really anything a bit unusual qualifies, and in many cases unusual is all there is to be had in the area anyway. please, just let it be, whatever it is, something that can't help being whatever it is. that'd be me.
this place was the right place, except inside it did seem a bit stagey to me for a true dive. you can't decorate for that, in fact consciously doing so is a bit like trying to catch a fly in midair. the harder you go for it, the less likely you are to get it. this trip started by heading for a kind of riverroad at north bend, but the road turned inland and less interesting, then turned riverroad like again at snoqualmie which is a name seemingly misspelled, like they forgot the w. finally on hwy 202, i came to the bridge at fall city and at the end of the bridge there it was, the last frontier saloon, misnomered of course as this was located nowhere like a frontier. but assuming it is likely the last saloon on the road, "last chance saloon" would have been more accurate, but who's counting. you have to stop given the cozy look of the place, which is tucked in between a few roadside services. inside, the decor essentially screams to you "hey, come on in and look at all this funky shxt!" ok, and that's about all there was to do, at least this early evening so i downed a few cold ones and a burger, all of which were fine. the place probably gets more lively after the sun goes out, or on weekends. as for all the gee gaws littering the place with "character" it was a bit much. you perhaps saw some of it on your grandparents farm in your infancy, if your grandparents had a farm anyway. but the real draw were the nice folks inside, easy to talk with, not damaged or diseased, but not hopelessly upbeat either.
