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there's an exodus
afoot from seattle to less expensive
places,
among them kitsap
peninsula, where we now live. we
drove an
hour from tahuya to a part of
bremerton i'd never been before
for tim and
sandy's housewarming, tucked away on a
dead end
street with shore access at its
terminus, with a short steep
billygoat
path leading to a stony
beach on port
washington narrows, within
sight of this town's bread and
butter, the cold
grey steel of gunboats.
(in the usa, evidence of the
military industrial complex is never
far
away, and even in our sleepy neck of
the woods we are subjected
to occasional treetop overflights of
tactical aircraft, related perhaps
to the submarine
base further up the inlet.)
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exploring, i
found the
mouth of a creek,
followed its dry bed up a slot
between steep walls of a ravine
to this emerald glen, a
secret teenage Eden hidden from
prying eyes,
the kind of hideaway where
youngsters first dip their toes into the
wider world
outside the prescribed range imposed
by parents, a private place to probe and
unpack
potentials, party and philosophize,
make one's mark with a spraycan yawp,
daydream
futures and feel what it's like to
be let off the leash--part nature and part
ruin, mixing the
verdant promise of youth with
forebodings of inevitable collapse, of
both empire and the self.
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