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COPYRIGHT 2004 Ehlert Publishing Group
What do foreigners see when they look at America? If they're headed east out of Vancouver on the TransCanada Highway around sunset, they see the shimmering dome of Mt. Baker, rising 10,777 feet above amber waves of grain. Awesome.
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Ah, to see America-that's one thing. To know it one really must visit Lynden, Washington, so Norman Rockwell perfect-as its citizens bicycle to and fro in the magic light-that I thought I'd slipped through the front cover of a Saturday Evening Post. But Lynden is real. Its pristine streets are walkable, but its buses are free, and so are its bicycles. You just register at the library. But alas there are no rooms for the night, and I'm tired. Maybe I did imagine it.
What I know of the Pacific Northwest is too little, having visited only once before, but I remember the Western Washington fair. It was in Puyallup, and I stumbled through its gates flat broke in 1979, riding a Ducati 750GT in sore need of repairs. I left the fair with a job no one else wanted-laboring in the scrap mill of Mr. Weyerhaeuser's forest-which kept me off the streets for five weeks until I had enough money to move on. Back then there was no Pearl Jam, no Microsoft, no Starbucks. Who'd heard of latte?
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But I remember Rainier Beer. rrrr (a little speck on the horizon) rrrAAAIeee (a dot growing visibly larger on the TV screen), nnnIEEEerrr (a quick, clean upshift to fourth) bEEE-errr. Was the bike in that commercial streaking toward the mountain or away from it? The image is foggy but the sound remains clear. Funny, that mountain...
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