1) It's on the way to Mt Rainier.
2) It's where they filmed Twin Peaks.
But are either of these facts true?
Well, as for fact number one, no. If you were in a hurry, say you were a cynical wise-cracking Seattle police detective rushing up into the mountains to defuse an environmental bomb planted deep inside your local National Park, you would not go anywhere near Snoqualmie. If you were on holiday and just trying to get there for lunch, you would not let the waterfall from that weird David Lynch show lure you into a substantial detour.
But we had all day to reach Paradise, so why not have everyone indulge me in a side trip to Lynchian Purgatory first?
It wasn't until we were packing to leave Seattle that I realised that the locations for Twin Peaks must be close by. I'm basically the only one in the family that had watched it and I'm certainly the only one that enjoyed it (Laura threw up her hands when the dwarf first showed up and never went back - fair enough). As a '90s teen the show was a bewildering and enthralling must-watch, and I had been entirely hooked. When the show returned in 2017 for another 18 episodes of obtuse auteurism, I lapped it up all over again.
A quick search told me that various Washington towns had been used for filming and that the closest, Snoqualmie, was home to both the hypnotic waterfall and the Great Northern Hotel perched alongside, which appear in the title sequence.
So, no Sherrif's office, no diner, or gas station, but still, easily reachable and almost, basically, sort of, on our way.
Picking up the car was easy and quick. We corkscrewed out of Seattle, and out through the suburbs to the interstate, back on the road, curling uphill away from the coast. Thick dark trees on either side whooshing past. Overtaking huge timber-laden trucks. New but familiar.
Then we got to Snoqualmie. It's not even remotely like Twin Peaks. I've never seen a town look so neat, so respectable. The buildings are well-maintained. The kerbs are freshly painted, the hydrants gleam. The grass on every verge, every median, looks like a putting green. There's a convenient, and free, car-park across the road from the hotel, and a smart wooden footbridge that takes you to an outlook over the falls. In August they boast a handsome but modest flow. They're charming, but nothing like the dangerous, elemental roar one sees on TV. The path was busy, but not crazily so. There were a couple of young families and two coach-loads of silver-haired mid-westerners on a tour. An interminable series of highly-detailed panels recounted the history of hydro-electric energy in Snoqualmie over the last century and a half. There was no mention at all of Twin Peaks.
It's entirely possible I was the only one there that had watched it. Or had I wandered into another reality altogether? One where the show had never existed, and this was just a completely respectable, clean-cut, Washington town with a picturesque waterfall. Nothing bad or mysterious could happen here, there were no dark secrets... How very Lynchian.
We bought a magnet in the gift shop, and discovered that they sold key fobs stamped 315 (Dale Cooper's room, of course, at the Great Northern Hotel), for $10. I was almost tempted, but perhaps it was enough just to have it confirmed that the show had indeed existed after all.
We went back the way we came, stopping at the Safeway to buy ourselves some lunch, and drove down the western side of the park through small towns and rolling farmland. Every so often the mountain would peep out from behind a tree, or appear around a bend, slightly larger each time: a massive great dollop of rock, rounded with ice and snow.
The towns petered out, the farms turned to trees, the road climbed. Once inside the park the mountains were around us, the distant slopes covered by a clinging moss of dark green forest. With every corner the road either swung slowly around a great shoulder of rock or snapped back immediately on itself, splashed by a cascade of water as it leapt down the mountainside.
At 5600 feet we stopped. We had reached the Paradise Inn.
We unloaded and checked in. There was Rainier, still above us. There was still time for a short walk before dinner, so we set off down a path towards a lookout offering a view of the Nisqually glacier, one of the many that drape the higher slopes of the mountain. The pine needles shone in the afternoon sun, the meadows blazed with bright alpine flowers. The chipmunks and the marmots skittered and blinked at us respectively. At the end of the path we stared up and there was the bottom of the glacier, just visible beneath a bank of thick cloud that had settled across the mountaintop: a stretch of ice dirty-white against the bare rose-brown rock, impossibly out of reach.
Seattle, WA to Paradise, WA, via Snoqualmie, WA and Twin Peaks, WTF
Miles: 137
States: 1
Licence Plates: 25 - a strong start.
Breakfast: Doughnuts foraged by Laura and Chris from General Porpoise and Top Pop, Seattle, WA.
Lunch: sandwiches on the road.
Dinner: Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA
Favourite place name: there's a smaller mountain inside the park called Mt. Wow.
No comments:
Post a Comment