Upriver, things are different. In the flats, it’s all tulips and small towns and the largest concentration of street gangs outside of SoCal: red and blue and X3 tattoos. Upriver, past the rotting concrete factory, in the flood plains, where the houses are built on stilts or just sink slowly into the mud with every spring thaw, they come, drawn from all along the west coast, the burnouts, the methmakers, the traumatized veterans, the snipers. The social workers keep their desks turned toward the wall, backs to the open door; everyone who enters is a surprise, but any time things go sideways, there’s a desk between you and your client. Everyone’s got a story, but none of them quit. So it goes.

In the spring, the tulips bloom and tourists come from all over the state to wander through the fields. The town smears on stage makeup and apes a white Dutchness it never had. The windmills are for show, and the farmworkers wear masks to harvest the blossoms. In the language of flowers, tulips mean friendship, but you don’t want to breathe them in, don’t want their detritus to linger on your skin.

Buried against the side of the hill is a series of signs half-eaten with mildew, white on red: Around the corner/lickety-split/nice car/wasn’t it?

Not an intentionally grim space, but time and budget restrictions have made it so. The buzzing fluorescent lights, the unmoving air, the murky windows straining for what little light a Washington winter provides, the unsynchronized breathing of 30-odd social workers. The folding tables are old; the veener is peeling away to reveal the pressboard underneath, raw from twenty years of restless hands picking at every minor scar.

The presenter is talking about meth, the ways it works, the diminishing returns of the high, how quickly the body incorporates regular usage into its daily functioning. “Anhedonia,” she says: the loss of pleasure. Detoxing brains do not produce their own pleasure at even basic things like eating or drinking. Food doesn’t taste bad, it tastes like nothing at all. Forget the complex joys and pains of neurotic humanity, the simple animal satisfactions are gone; evaporated into yellow mist, a perfect ring of thwarted experience. “Relapse,” she says, “is not a pursuit of the initial high, but rather the simple desperation for any sensation.”

Later, during a break, they swap war stories, the clients that died, the ones that disappeared, the ones that clawed open a counselor’s face accidentally, trying to pick off some invisible, mobile mass only they could see. They talk pragmatically about putting the client’s seat on the far side of the room from the door, so that the desk is there to stop them long enough for the counselor to escape. They are not frightened, or angry: life deals a bad hand, sometimes, and all you can do is plan for the worst.

Duluth, I was never in Duluth, but among the poets in Washington this story:

Having grown tired of selling clothes to the idle poor, the poet bought a bike and struck out for the high plains. He taught himself to ride on the backs of the Rockies, a continent’s spine, a fat man blowing steam up a long road and empty between towns, taught himself to fear speed and love it on the ride down, squeezed perilously between the Charybdis of a rock wall and the Scylla of a passing 18 wheeler.

Well, he made it, somehow, or so they said, to Duluth, and moved into a vacant space above a storefront where he sold used clothes to much the same people as he had in Bellingham and wrote poetry much the same as before except for some 1500 miles of toil and separation. Life went on, until it didn’t.

He died there, in Duluth, not quite in exile, nor yet at home, his store and his poems the legacy left behind. The poets in Bellingham held a wake in his honor, and Robert, cynical Robert, he cried while telling the story. Duluth, I never knew Duluth, nor the poet who left, but I’ve never forgotten this story.