#anyway meyer there you go: little's out of the bracket by now but I felt this still needed doing

[hacash]

Not part of the official Terror Bracket, but @meyerlansky was hoping for a Solward showdown and who am I to deny my mutuals? Not advocating for anyone here here, just letting the people decide who won the battle for true blorboship during That Faceoff.

[iamnotthedog]

THE HOH RAINFOREST: AUGUST 11-12, 2001

I walked up the road a ways, wondering what the hell I was doing. I felt like I could have just kept walking forever. Then, right up around the bend, I saw a sign. Leaning at a diagonal angle like an unmanned oar attached to the side of a boat was a sign that read “Dennis’s Friendly Salvage.”

I walked into the yard. By that time it was around six in the evening, so I wasn’t even sure there would be anybody there. But a big Native American fellow was behind a little shed, filling up a bucket with water from a spigot. He was wearing blue overalls with a plaid shirt, and had a braided grey and white ponytail that hung down to the small of his back. There were chickens bouncing around, clucking stupidly, and this tall, dilapidated aluminum fence was swaying and creaking in the breeze. There were car parts strewn all over the grass and the gravel lot.

I walked up to the guy and told the guy my dilemma. He introduced himself as Dennis, patted me on the back with a huge hand, then waved for me to follow him and started walking up the highway, back to the Olds. I followed him, watching his ponytail sway back and forth, and neither of us said a word. There was still smoke in the air around the car when we got to it, and it smelled like burning rubber. Dennis shook his head, lifted the hood, and checked out the engine, humming to himself in low tones.

He eventually told me the deal—said something about the radiator, and showed me a bracket that had broken in the engine, causing something—maybe the alternator—to drop, and causing the timing belt to hit the cooling fan. Something like that. I don’t really remember. But it looked bad. Surprisingly, though, he said it wasn’t a lost cause. He told me he’d tow it into the yard and fix it for three hundred bucks.

Despite the fact that it seemed as though Dennis was offering me a pretty good deal, I didn’t really feel like spending my last $300��literally all the money I had left to my name—and I didn’t feel like waiting around the salvage yard while he got the parts and fixed the Olds, anyway.

“How about if you give me $300, and I just let you keep the car?” I asked him.

Dennis put his hands on his hips and looked up at the sky, which had taken on all the colors of a sunset on the Pacific Ocean. Deep blues fading into reds, with oranges and yellows on the horizon, over the trees. Then he kicked at the dirt and clapped his big hands together and said “I’ll give you my truck for it.”

I smiled, and Dennis smiled back, knowing that he probably had me. And he did. Driving a junkyard truck with Washington plates back to Joe’s place would be worth it just for the absurdity of it all.

Dennis walked back behind the tall aluminum fence, and I heard a hood pop open and a loud engine roar to life, and then a door creaked open and slammed shut, an engine revved up, and the big Indian came cruising around the far side of the fence, out onto the highway, in a tiny blue pickup truck.

The thing was hilarious. It looked nice enough at first, but upon closer inspection it had really just been put together with spare parts from the yard. The exhaust pipe was the exhaust pipe from a car, not a truck, and poked up in the middle of the truck bed and spewed exhaust into the air, like the steam from a steam engine. And there was a sunroof in the cab, but it was just a hole cut out of the roof, and then a piece of fiberglass duct-taped over the hole. The steering wheel was huge, like it had come out of a big rig. And the upholstery on the seats looked like the kitchen rug from the house I grew up in.

“I don’t have any papers for it,” Dennis said, cutting the engine. So you’ll have to get those yourself. And here...” He leaned into the driver’s side door and grabbed a crowbar from the floorboard. “Let me show you how to start it.”

Dennis popped the hood, lifted it, and touched the pins on the starter together with the crowbar. The thing sputtered, and then started. “Pretty sweet, huh?” he said, smiling at me.

“What’s wrong with the ignition?” I asked. “There’s no key?”

“The key’s in there right now. It has to be in there for it to start. It just doesn’t turn over.”

I sat in the driver’s seat.

“Fuck,” I said.

“What?” Dennis asked.

“I don’t know how to drive stick.”

Dennis struck the same pose he had struck before: his hands on his wide hips, his face turned up to the sky. Then he walked around to the passenger side and hopped in.

“Well shit,” he said, pounding his fists on the dash. “Let’s go.”

Dennis and I drove west and south down Highway 101 through the town of Forks and inland to the Hoh Rainforest where I learned how to drive stick.1 We stuck to Highway 101 and Hoh Valley Road for the most part, but we occasionally turned off onto the narrow, fern-choked side roads to practice stopping and starting on hills, or doing three-point turnabouts in shadowy, pine-covered parking lots. Dennis was patient with me until it got dark, then he got a little salty and told me to take him home. I was still pretty jerky with the clutch, and I couldn’t get the damn thing going on steep inclines without rolling backwards quite a ways, which I saw as being a possible problem when I got back down to California and the Sierra Nevada. Sometimes rolling backwards in Yosemite will roll you right off a cliff.

“You’ll be fine,�� Dennis said, his big face and pointed cheekbones shining in the dashboard lights. He patted me on the leg, then got out of the truck and went into his house without even asking me where I was going, or if I had a place to stay.

I stopped by the Olds to say goodbye to it forever and grab my pack and my book, then drove for a couple of hours back west and south to a turn-out by Kalaloch Lodge, right there on the driftwood-strewn coast, where I slept in the cab of the truck.2 The following morning, I awoke to a dark gray sky and rain pattering on the windshield. I dug through my pack for my army green hooded jacket, threw it over my head, popped the hood, grabbed the crowbar from the floorboard, and got out of the cab to start the truck. Some tourists in a van that had pulled into the parking lot to snap pictures of the rugged Pacific coast looked at me curiously, as if I was hotwiring the truck to steal it or something. I smiled at them, and lifted the crowbar over my head.

“No ignition!” I yelled. Then I jumped back in the driver’s seat and headed due south on the 101, back to Olympia.

 Forks has always been a sleepy little tourist town, serving as a central lodging and dining destination for travelers planning daytime excursions to the Pacific beaches or the rainforests on the western edge of Olympic National Park. The city’s economy was fueled by the local timber industry until the efforts of various environmental groups and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—along with the Northern Spotted Owl’s categorization as an endangered species and President Bill Clinton’s subsequent Northwest Forest Plan—substantially reduced timber harvest in the area in the early ‘90s. The economy suffered following the local timber industry’s collapse, with most jobs being sourced by two nearby corrections centers until the success of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series brought tourists to the town in droves. If you can count yourselves among the few lucky ones who have never heard of Twilight, well then, allow me: Twilight is a series of four vampire-themed fantasy romance novels that concern themselves with the comings and goings of a clumsy and dim-witted girl with low self-esteem who a handsome and much more capable vampire falls in love with for some reason, anyway. The girl gets herself into all sorts of trouble and the vampire leaves because he feels like it’s his fault for some reason, and then the girl gets involved in a less steamy and more platonic relationship with another equally handsome vampire. But eventually the first vampire returns, and she sticks with him for some reason until they eventually get married and she has a half-vampire/half-human baby that I think is supposed to be a metaphor for Jesus Christ or something. I don’t know. I haven’t read any of the novels or seen the movies, I’ve only heard about them. What I’m getting at, though, is that the novels are set in Forks, and when the first movie based on the series came out in 2008, tourism rose from 10,000 annual visitors in that tiny town to 19,000. In 2010, the number was up to 73,000, and I’m sure it’s even more today, as the series’ fifth movie came out on November 16, 2012. ↩︎

 Olympic National Park is actually comprised of four separate regions: the drier forest on the east side of the park, the glaciated Olympic Mountains in the center of the park, the temperate rainforests on the western side of the park, and the sixty-mile-long, three-mile-wide stretch of coastline that runs from the Makah Indian Reservation in the north all the way down to the Quinault Indian Reservation to the south. The coastal strip of Olympic National Park is also home to two other Indian Reservations: the Hoh Indian Reservation lies at the mouth of the Hoh River, and the Quileute Indian Reservation lies at the mouth of the Quillayute River. Both reservations have been there since the Quinault Treaty of 1855, long before President Teddy Roosevelt created Mount Olympus National Monument in 1909, or before Congress voted to re-designate the monument as Olympic National Park in 1938. “Kalaloch” is a corruption of a Quinault word meaning “a good place to land,” which refers to the Pacific inlet in the community being one of the only safe places on the coastline in which to land a dugout canoe. ↩︎