Seattle, part one

A few weeks ago I flew to Seattle for my good friend Naomi's wedding. I was looking forward to being back in the United States, and in particular in the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Donna was unable to join me, so it was a nice opportunity to miss her, to have time to myself, hiking and gathering up my thoughts from the last eight months.

I've had some of my most memorable experiences in a state of jetlag. The eight hours difference between the western US and UK is enough to dislocate your mind from your body such that your rational control center falls into the abyss. At these times I respond much more intuitively than analytically to my surroundings. Years I came off a plane from Los Angeles and I went directly into central London to see a musical that my friends had created - Captain Jack and The Space Vixens. It was a pretty silly musical sci-fi sex-farce and I struggled to stay awake, yet I still remember almost all the songs years on. Another time under heavy jetlag I wandered into the National Portrait Gallery, to have a portrait of J.K. Rowling jump off the canvas at me, the faces on the walls fluid like Hogwarts portraits. I vaguely remember a seven a.m. run on a cold jetlagged Christmas Day along the Thames where not a creature was stirring.



So it was after a whole days travel from London I got off the plane in Seattle, hired a car, and caught a ferry across to the Olympic Peninsula, facing a drive of unknown distance before arriving at my destination for the night. Unknown because I had decided to rough it and camp out, and I wasn't sure where along the way I was going to pitch tent.



I stopped at a petrol station in Poulsbo for food for the night, feeling oddly at home in a characterless area of stripmalls and large parking spaces. The attendant and I exchanged a few words. "You sound just like the doctor! You know - Doctor Who!", she exclaimed. She said doctor as "douhctour", attempting an English accent. It had been a long time since I had been considered an Englishman in the USA, much less a Time Lord. I liked it.
"I need petrol for the tardis", I quipped.

Back on the road, I ran out of steam an hour or two later by Sequim Bay State Park, which I pulled into and there in the dark, by the glow of the car headlights and my little torch, I pitched my tent amongst the trees and collapsed. I could make out a few larger RVs but otherwise the place was empty and quiet. I had hoped for someone that I could talk to, maybe gathered by a campfire having dinner. I tried to ignore the voice at the back of my mind telling me that bears were lurking in the shadows, comforted by the hum of traffic on the 101 highway not far away. I woke up a couple hours later and with my reading light I chewed through a few more chapters of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, eventually dropping off.



Up early the next morning, I packed up my tent and hit the road again. This is one of the pleasures of camping - the sense of freedom to move as you please. I have a bit of a wilderness-loving mountain-man in me. I stopped for breakfast in the town of Sequim (pronounced 'Skwim', evoking something washed on the beach at low tide - "Erg Mummy I just stepped in some sequim!"). The town is famous for its lavender, announced by signs pointing to farms and decorations on various civic buildings. In the coffee shop they sold large bottles of 'Lavender Syrup'. "Is this local?", I asked the two girls behind the counter, one a teenager, the other older. They looked at me blankly. "Is this made with local lavender?", I elaborated. The older girl frowned, as if dealing with these pesky customers (all three of them in there at the time) was simply not part of the job she signed up for. I decided to attack this from another angle. "If I wanted to buy products with local lavender, is there a store like that here?". "No, I don't know", the girls replied. I sat down with my book and coffee by the window, and glanced across the main street. Purple Haze Lavender, said the store sign, and underneath it - Lavender products of Sequim. I felt like saying something to the girls, but I just smiled and left it at that.



Out on the street, the shops conveyed an impression of Sequim as kind of a far-away small-town outpost. There were almost no pedestrians, it was too early for businesses to be open. A well dressed older man approached me. "Can I give you some reading material?". I pointed to the already hefty Harry Potter tome under my arm. "I think I have enough to read right now", I said. "I can see that.", he turned away. I didn't expect this to defeat him so quickly, but it was a false feint, he turned back quickly. "Can I share a few Bible verses with you?". His demeanour was charming and casual, more kindly uncle than pushy believer. I thanked him and declined, heading back to my car.



I stopped at the Olympic National Park's visitor center, wanting to fit in a hike before going to the wedding site. A few miles up the road there was a ridge that afforded views of the central mountain range, so I made my way up there, slowly passing through the marine fog layer into the sunshine above. I stopped at a large turnout from the road, where a small stream flowed down a steep hillside and a couple were getting ready to go walking. I knew the ridge was a few more miles up the road, but if I could reach it walking, that sounded much nicer. I hadn't been hiking in months, and looking up the mountainside I hoped I wasn't biting off more than I could chew.



The trail zigzagged sharply up the mountain, quickly gaining altitude. I took it briskly, enjoying being out of breath, trying to work off my tiredness from the long journey the day before. A short way up the trail, a lone deer was eating her breakfast. I approached quietly, but she didn't stir. I wondered if she was deaf, as by now most deer would have leaped away. She noticed me, and moved off the trail a few feet, continuing to munch on the grass. I continued slowly, saying hello as I passed her. The trail was surrounded by large fields of grass and wildflowers, still in bloom. I wondered if they'd had as wet and cold a summer as we'd had in London, else I couldn't account for the continued abundance of flowers and green grass this late into summer. I halted my heavy climbing to follow a trail along the side of the Klahhane Ridge. Now my biggest fear was from slipping off the tiny dusty trail that cut a small line across the steep ridge.



Watching the hillside fall away from me into miles of rolling pine forests had my stomach flipping and wishing I had a toboggan that I could just ride to the bottom. The trail widened eventually as it followed the top of what was now Hurricane Ridge for a few miles. The snow-capped Olympic Mountains were on view now, and I kept stopping to take it all in. The big sky, the rough peaks, the glacial valleys carpeted with pine forests and the ridge either side of me falling into the foggy marine layer.



A day ago I had been in central London, on noisy Shaftesbury Avenue struggling through crowds of tourists and clueless theatre-goers, and now I was here. I kept wondering if London was a fever dream and I'd never left this country of big spaces, but no, I still had the smell of the bus fumes in my head. London was now my home, this was not. As many good things have happened in London, as much as I love being close to my family, I couldn't escape acknowledging how difficult of a road it has been. Writing about our move to London it's inevitable that it has come across as a list of highlights, which doesn't do justice to the daily grind.



The way your heart sinks when you see people queueing outside the Tube station, knowing what a crush it's going to be to get on a train; the way anger rises in your chest when you're struggling through a crowd of oblivious tourists when you want to get home; the difficulty of finding a shop open for necessities after 8pm; the sometimes infuriating quiet reserve of your workmates, where asking for a tea with two sugars seems almost like a subversive act; the feeling that you shouldn't be too aspirational, that you are where you are for a reason and it is probably where you should be, or at the very least, you shouldn't be seen to be too ambitious, the very opposite of America, where peoples' unlikely dreams are the fuel that drives the culture's engine and greases its cogs. To say nothing of the isolation of being far away from the places and people that you have spent years getting to know, who come unbidden to mind when you're feeling low and don't have them there to turn to. For Donna the isolation has been more acute, for me it's been the struggle to figure out how this place or my memories of it fit into everything else I've accumulated in the past decade. What has affected us both equally has been trying to find our places at work in the environment of mostly recent university graduates - after our collective years at ILM we were starting to feel that our experience was being both misunderstood and misused.



On bad days it was nice to think about packing it all in and returning to our lives in California. If you're going through hell, the expression goes, keep going. I am happy that we did keep going. With autumn arriving, England seemed more at ease, and us with it. We had started on a new film that we had found roles on that we were enjoying and learning from. We were truly enjoying the good stuff more, and coping better with the not-so-good bits.

Still it was nice to get away from it all, high up in the mountains a third of the way around the world. I was miles from anyone, and had a wedding to get to.



Part 2, coming soon!