A post from a couple of months ago on for.theloveofbooks.com takes off from an NPR story about the effect of Stephenie Meyer’s publishing juggernaut, the Twilight series, on the real small town in which the series is apparently set. The blogger, brendan, remembers his time waiting tables in Denver when an earlier wave of vampire frenzy hit.
I had a chance to see two towns in the aftermath of their own fads when I did the Surprise Me With Beauty book tour in early 2002. Either heading to Seattle from Eugene, OR (no, not yet being a bookseller, I didn’t make the sacred trek to Powell’s Books in Portland, though it was the one place in the town that I made sure to visit when I interviewed at Informix in 1995), or on the way home from Seattle to New Jersey, I stopped into a pair of places that I had been eager to see.
The first was Snoqualmie, Washington, the site of many locations for my favorite TV show until then, Twin Peaks. As with many visitors, I was eager to see the Great Northern Hotel, Snoqualmie Falls, and the Double R Diner.
Everybody in the town just seemed tired. Whenever another tourist or I would ask a Twin Peaks related question, they would squint, roll their eyes, or sigh (sometimes all three at once, which isn’t easy). They dutifully pointed to the sites where stuff in the show happened, explained as if by rote various facts about things, then quickly got away.
I was determined to hunt down the show’s Double R Diner, once called the Mar-T Cafe, by then Twede’s Cafe. The place had been mobbed over the years by Twin Peaks fans, and had been renovated a few years earlier after a fire. (And I see that the diner’s address is not in Snoqualmie proper, but in North Bend.)
I don’t recall most of what I ate there. The food was passable, the service acceptable, perhaps because I had caught enough of the zeitgeist to avoid mentioning Twin Peaks when talking to the waitress.
But I couldn’t entirely resist my inner geekiness: for dessert, I ordered a cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie. The waitress visibly deflated when I said this. A thought balloon above her head might have echoed Agent Cooper’s line about “damn fine cherry pie,” but would have swapped out “fine” for something less printable.
It was the worst cherry pie I have ever had.
Looking at the pictures on the cafe’s Web site now, I see that they have re-embraced the source of their fame, whether by surrendering to their visitors or through a wave of enthusiasm from a new wave of Peaksters. The site features luscious, almost erotic close-ups of cherry pies oozing filling with carefully sculpted whipped cream.And they’ve painted in large letters near the top of the front wall. “TWIN PEAKS Cherry Pie.”
The event was so disheartening that, rather than staying overnight in Snoqualmie, as I had intended, I plowed on to Roslyn. (And I do mean plowed; by that time it was snowing pretty fiercely.) I spent the night in an inexpensive motel of some sort there, and in the morning went for breakfast to the point of my journey to Roslyn: the Roslyn Cafe, home of Northern Exposure.
I got out of my car and gaped at the famous mural on the wall. (Looking at an image of the mural, I see that I had misremembered it: I had thought that it showed a moose, but it shows a camel. I think my mind had turned the iconic moment from the show’s opening credits, in which a moose walks past the mural, into a false memory of the mural itself.)
Someone came out of the cafe and smiled. “Yup, it’s real,” he said. “You’re in the right place.”
I was a bit embarrassed, and more than a bit surprised: after the surliness in Snoqualmie, I had thought that I might try to be a bit more discreet in my fanboyhood. (And I wonder why my blog editor window tags “Snoqualmie” as a probable misspelling, but has no problem with “fanboyhood” or, come to think of it, with my earlier typo “erotiv.”)
I smiled back and came in. A waiter showed me to a table and handed me a menu. It had an immediately visible bunch iof information about the show, the cafe, and their history together.
“You’re not tired of the fans coming through?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “They’re good folks. I know other places like this get fans from other shows and things that can be downright creepy. But here?” He shrugged. “It’s a nice show. This is a nice place. We get nice people.”
And breakfast was excellent. (Not the best of the tour–the best pancakes I have ever had were on either the day before or the day after at Patti’s Eggnest in Seattle.) I hung around for a little while, then had to drive on.
Thinking back, I realize how much my sense of each town came from a single waitperson at a single eatery. If I get up there again (perhaps of a probably unfeasible 19th Nervous Breakdown book tour?), I’ll look forward to visiting Roslyn again. But I’ll give Snoqualmie a pass.
Print this post
Post a Comment