Bound In History, Bounded By History, Bounded And Bound By Mortality

Spent a loft of time in Westport and Grayland as a kid, and then as a young adult.  Lots of memories.  We can't escape the treacly memories of childhood, nor escape the limitations they often place around imagination where the emotional and experiential landscape of memory is only so malleable.

Beachcombing 2021
My horizons only expanded in my mind as a youth, but not in real life or real time.  Without looking out of my window, I went on Harrisonian travels. I had been to pre-Weimar Germany; taken the cure for TB in the Swiss Alps; visited England over and again with Shakespeare and Chaucer, or as a member of Robin's merry band, or through the eyes of Dr. Watson and Agatha Christie's protaganists. I had been all over the US with the likes of John D. Fitzgerald, Salinger, Twain, Poe, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, London, Kerouac, Hurston and Ginsberg, Angela Davis, Harper Lee and Capote.   I had seen the stars with Heinlein and Asimov, mystery worlds with Tolkein, Moorcock and Lewis; fictional dystopias with Orwell and Huxley; real dystopias by reading John Hershey, The Nation, Z Magazine, Chomsky, Baldwin. DuBois, bell hooks, Derrick Bell, Cornell West, Barbara Ehrenreich, Alex Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens, Gary Indiana and Wayne Barrett.

The furthest I was away from home, then, before I turned 19, was Westport on the coast, the Makah reservation on the peninsula, or maybe Stuart Island in the San Juans.  I hadn't seen much outside of the incredible beauty of this region and its peoples.  For some reason, Westport became a fond memory.  It was a ramshackle dirty place that had seen its better days even when I first visited at around 8 years old. Its aquarium was a horror show of algae covered walls and tortured sea lions frantically ringing a bell to gett the pieces of fish that tourists would throw into the tiny enclosure.  As I think about it, maybe I loved those sea lions so much, and was so fond pf Westport because they really reflected back at me the narrow horizons I saw as my future.


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