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Pina Colada

by Rafer Nelsen

We pulled into the Thrifty car rental agency two minutes ahead of schedule, a fact that much pleased my colleague and designated driver, who stands five four and never shaves and favors homemade shirts in blue patina, for he had feared that our quick detour to his wife's place of work, in order to give her a travel book on London and a twenty dollar bill, had set us back a good four minutes and was of bad augure for the trip in general. He insisted to the manager, a man he didn't recognize and damned if he didn't know everybody at Thrifty, that the car have cruise control and a sound stereo system, for Yakima was miles and miles away.

Once safely tucked into our Pontiac Squeeze, my esteemed driver pulled out his collection of early renaissance lute music and looked over at me with a lascivious gleam in his right eye. "Hot music for a hot day." And then kazoom, the car was filled with the rock and roll undercurrent of Paul Odette on the renaissance lute, picking like a troubadour, and even strumming on occasion, depending on what his impeccable sense for the songs told him, for lute music is never written out completely, leaving much to interpretation and even, dare I suggest it, improvisation. Soon we really started rocking with Odette's full on band, The King's Noyse, playing from their latest cd, "Le Jardin des Melodies", and featuring none other than some guy on violin and his wife singing soprano folk ditties about stringing people up in the town square.

Before we reached Yakima, I was well versed in early renaissance lute (from the Arabic, "el ud") musicology, the entire Venetian literature in particular, and feel rather acquainted with the baroque period, as well as the music of the lute's cousin, the vilheula de mano (close relative to the viola, if I am not mistaken), and the modern interpretations of the great Spanish music that streams forth from this instrument as practiced by the seamless Jose Miguel Moreno, whose wife constructs his vilhuela, and who later was to dazzle us with 17th century bawdy music from the courts of Mexico, of all places.

Cruise control is a fine thing on a straight highway through mountains and a high desert. It keeps the right leg from cramping. The one downside is that if you are in the company of a strange small man, who happens to be a lute aficionado and who is easily distracted by a rousing rendition of an early renaissance folk dance, you often fear that that you shall crash into the rear end of the logging truck straight ahead, and that there is very little room to maneuver sideways past the RV running a steady 70 in the lane to your left, which is precisely the trick your excitable chauffeur is about to pull once he has come back from his renaissance reverie and understood the seriousness of the situation. Of course he could just tap the brakes to disengage the cruise control, but that is not the kind of renaissance nor baroque behavior favored by your average fan of the lute.

Yakima is a special place. It has a fairgrounds like all great towns across our nation, and on that fairgrounds sits the ubiquitous dome. The Sun Dome. And there is nearby the Darigold cheese factory, or is it yogurt?, and wineries looking like boxes nestled among vines, most of which are of the native concord, native to the eastern half of this country that is, lambrusca family with a slip skin, and the very foundation of all that Welch's grape jelly we ate as kids, and fruit trees, and there is also Al's Auto Supply with the familiar jingle and vistas of a desert that looks as hydroponic as the wines taste, and how many lessons on geology and volcanism and uplifts and glaciers and huge lakes and Indians would I like to learn in Yakima. Yakima is also, from all appearances, a very good place to buy margarine.

Near the Sun Dome, in whose inner magnificence I indeed did wish to glory, I ate dinner. It was an exterior affair, filled with a breeze from the NW, straight down the valley, and white chicken in white sauce, broccoli and raisin salad, tiny asparagus (my favorite), beef wonderful beef stewed beef charred beef lovely beef in brown sauce, and cheesecake (second favorite). I ate and then drank coffee, a mistake I always relish.

Soon it was time to retire to my host's big dental house. The good Doctor had built his large house on a promontory overlooking the city and the far away ridge. He had planted vines down below and had hung a dead bear in the entryway. It is truly a grand house. Enough of this six bedroom four bath stuff, how about two sinks and two showers in every bath? Now that is living, Martha. And the good doctor was originally from Texas, so he knew how to live and he knew how to drink bourbon. And Scotch. And brandy. And who needs that wussy wine snuffola anyway? We concocted up a plan to distill his entire wine cellar, including his very own homemade wine, in the second shower of my guest bathroom, the one with the tub, not the stand-up affair.

When I was good and drunk on spirits, it was decided that I should go to bed for tomorrow we start judging wine at 8am. Sounded sane to me and besides I couldn't believe he just said 8am as I never get up before the crack of 9 and dammit if they didn't put that in the instructional kit, and by god they did, in the finer print that I decided not to read because hell I was just going to judge wine not sign up for life insurance. Then the coffee kicked in and for the next three hours I listened to my heart pound into the bed sheets in between repeated trips to the bathroom to piss, damn that asparagus.

The wines of Washington suck. They stink, they are no good. This is what four years of residency and a day of comprehensive tasting have taught me. They are soul-less place-less almost nameless constructed from the top down "crafted" lacking everything including acidity wine-like products. A mere commodity, put together by well-meaning people from Eastern WA with schlong haircuts like the one I had back in high school, the days when I could get it to straighten out some that is, who don't know shit from shinola and grew up drinking Coke and milk and the wines taste that way and beside it is a desert out there not fit for man nor beast much less the noble grape of the fine European family of vinifera.

In between rounds of wine at the Hospitality Center on the fairgrounds, spitting distance from the great Sun Dome, I listened to the other judges, fat men in shorts and beige shirts with various winery logos on them, talk about getting hammered on a fishing trip with their buddy Schooner, so drunk he could barely see the road, and wax on and on about cigars and golf, and the Kingsmen - "Louie Louie" - who will play a show down in the Tri-cities tonight and the last time they came to town a guy's daughter danced so much that she pulled her shoulder right out of its socket but being poor they tried to put it back in themselves for two hours until her screams finally roused the sympathies of an ambulance driver in attendance, then they tell Viagra jokes before taking a piss in the fairground urinals, which are set really high on the wall in Yakima, and you look down at your feet on tiptoes, just like in grade school when you couldn't reach the floor of the school bus with you feet either, trying to aim and control your piss so as not to release too many noxious fumes from the little blue bar of chemicals sitting on the red rubber straining mat in the urinal, and you notice that next to your right foot sits an old Dorito chip looking brand spanking new.