Fiddle Tunes

I finally went back to the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes! I went way back in 2019, and then didn’t, obviously. This time I rented a car and drove myself, which guaranteed that I had a ride—a problem I had last time—but I didn’t properly account for traffic. Much like the Bay Area, a trip I’d counted 2.5 hours for wound up more like 4.5. Unlike the Bay Area, I really love the landscape.

Not that the Pacific Northwest is monolithic, even if you stay west of the Cascades and the moisture it traps there. Port Townsend lies in the Olympic Rain Shadow, a term surely coined by real estate agents, but despite that, actually true.

When I worked for Chef, I had a lot of trips to Seattle, and over the years I’ve heard two kinds of Seattle residents (past, present, or future):

1. "It is so gray and rainy, it drives me nuts, especially the long winter nights."
2. "The weather here is actually fine, but don’t tell anyone, because then they’ll move here."

I’ve been to Seattle at all times of year, essentially randomly scattered through the seasons, and I gotta say, it does indeed seem fine. It rains sometimes. It’s overcast sometimes. It’s sunny sometimes. It’s hot sometimes. And the coffee is truly outstanding.

Playing the violin is a very emotionally fraught thing for me, and my brain has not yet found a way to learn tunes and still remember them the next day. I think next year’s solution is to bring a guitar, an instrument I’ve played for 30 years, and if I’m not amazing at it, I also know I can sit in a group and I don’t have to think about where B-minor is.

(Yes, I have a travel guitar in mind, which I do not yet own. This is me we’re talking about: I love shopping for instruments so much, I love helping other people shop for instruments. Once I think "guitar that’s pleasant to play, takes up little space, and likely to survive being checked baggage," there’s only one answer.)

I made it be more of a vacation: I had a really nice Airbnb to hang out in, and I got to see Rachel and Darren for the first time since 2019. I slept a lot. I made a friend or two. It was a good week, just…weird, because things are weird. The world is weird. This was a sort of normal thing to do. Which was weird.

Fort Worden is an incredible place to be; I feel like if I lived in town I would be spending a certain amount of time there. It’s one of three Army bases built to protect the opening to Puget Sound, but then we and our enemies all invented military aircraft, and suddenly the fort’s intended function was irrelevant. Eventually it was shuttered and then taken up as an arts center.

And, hey, if you’ve got a spare hangar for observation balloons, you can turn it into a concert hall, and have the giant doors open one side of the stage to the outside.

And, finally, the tides are like nothing I’ve ever seen.

I have never even heard of that sort of mini-tide. It’s weird.

I will enjoy visiting again.