By StevenL, 7/14/10
You won’t find it in any phone book and the place doesn’t have a website. Heck, it even lacks a sign in front (who needs new customers anyway?). But in spite of these traits the tavern known as the “Head Loader” is famous among a certain circle of oldtime NW Thurston County residents.
When I was a child the auto ride to the coast from Oly was a long, winding and tortuous trip. The old Highway 410 followed the contour of the land and passed through the middle of every little burg – McCleary, White Star, Satsop, Brady, etc. When the streamlined State Route 9 (later renumbered 8) was completed, what was left of the old two-lane 410 was chopped up into little frontage roads and castoff strands of asphalt. It is on one of these anonymous side routes to nowhere, between Mud Bay and McCleary, you’ll find the Head Loader – a rare survivor from the days of the previous highway.
And you can’t mention the words “Head Loader” without including its most well-known denizen, another survivor, Woodrow “Woody” Knotts Barker.
Woody sits at the bend of the bar, hunkered over his 4th or 5th schooner and is talking out loud to no one. All the regulars give him wide berth.
Oh, did I neglect to mention we are here at 9:47, in the a.m.? It’s the morning rush.
This Head Loader fixture describes himself as having been a square in the ‘sixties, but now, given his expanding girth, he’s turning into a rectangle. The top of his cranium could be best described by what his former logging occupation would call “selective thinning”. His thick beard still has traces of red, but mostly it is a blend of the fall and winter colors of his late season in life, giving him a Falstaffian appearance.
Woody really looks like Lon Chaney Jr. when that actor was halfway through the cheapo stop-action transformation from human to wolfman. He’ll cheerfully tell you he’s a cranky old one-man bandwagon who has lived too long and has no business tromping around in Century 21.
He snaps a red suspender on his denim shirt, belches, lowers his chin, and begins the next oral editorial of the day. Woody is a dinosaur. He knows it. So do I. For the benefit of you readers, and history, I’ll attempt to transcribe his musings.
He starts in on coastal radar. Supposedly Washington State has the very worst coastal weather coverage of the lower 48. US Senator Cantwell has worked hard to secure the funding for a new Doppler warning system that will finally make our infamous unpredictable weather more predictable.
To this Woody says, “And where’s the romance in that? Where’s the sense of adventure? The pioneer spirit? The element of risk? We didn’t have any coastal radar during the Columbus Day Storm and we survived that OK.”
The Columbus Day he refers to took place in 1962. It was a virtual hurricane that swept through northern California clear to British Columbia. Easily the worst storm in this region in living memory, it killed 47 people. I was living near the corner of Eastside and Yew in Oly at the time. The storm was a landmark event for all of us who experienced it, particularly for us little Boomers. No storm around here since then has come close in sheer terror.
I told Woody my neighbor here in McCleary is a fisherman working out of Westport and he believes coastal radar will save many lives.
To this Woody snorts beer out of his nose, “Why don’t they just rename Grays Harbor County and call it Namby Pamby County? You just don’t get it, do you, kid?”
I was so startled at being called “kid”, it took me a minute to realize he was changing topics.
“Optometrists,” he blurted, waiting for me to focus. “They must have stock in all those little electronic do-dads you see people holding in their hands and squinting at the tiny little screens while they squint and poke at those tiny little keyboards.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as ironic,” the bartender slid another glass of amber essence to Woody, who continued without missing a beat, “that all these communication devices which were designed to bring people together are actually doing quite the opposite?”
I must’ve looked puzzled. He rolled his eyes and carried on.
“In most public places these days, people are not talking to each other face to face. They find it easier to converse at a distance via phone or keyboard than it is to take a big risk and actually – gasp! – talk to a person in person! Oh, the very thought! Get the defibrillator!”
At this moment he mockingly clutched his chest in fake heart attack mode, resulting in a very hammy performance.
“The ones who really make me laugh are the folks with those hands-free gizmos stuck in their ears. They appear to be yammering away, talking to the air like some kind of nut.”
The thought balloon hovering over my head carried the words, “kinda like you, talking to no one in this tavern all the time.” But I kept my mouth shut.
He continued, “Everyone seems so plugged into their machines, almost like… like…”
I volunteered, “…the Borg?”
He responded, “The what?”
Me: “You know, Star Trek?”
Him: “Whatever.”
Woody then changed gears and went into a long rant about bumper stickers. It really bugs him to see right-wing stickers on foreign cars and left-wing stickers on expensive vehicles. “People need to drive their talk,” he maintains.
But what really burns him is when campaign stickers remain on the bumpers long after the election is over.
“The season of electioneering is bad enough,” he shakes his head, “why prolong the agony?”
Truth to tell, I had to agree with him on that one.
The recent US Census tally was his next target. Apparently Woody has never, ever been counted since 1930, when he was still an infink at a logging camp near Summit Lake (which is where I found him on a microfilm copy of that census). He has been an advocate for being left the hell alone long before Internet killed the concept of privacy.
He has all kinds of tricks to avoid being counted by the Census workers, including donning disguises and pretending he is merely visiting. He pulls the drapes, lets his lawn grow tall, and erects a “for sale” sign. The fact that his obstructionism will screw up future genealogists brings him a perverse sense of pleasure.
“I’m not into this gynecology stuff,” he jeers.
It was at this point I decided it was time to leave, before Woody launched into another narrative. No matter. As I left he just kept pontificating to no one as if I had never been present. He was rambling on about something to do with “the chimes at midnight.”
In the course of my departure I noted the parking lot was populated by the usual bland steroid-packed well-polished pretend pickup trucks. But a 1965 red and white Chevy truck covered with a fine patina of mossy algae, plus most of the original wooden bed had rotted away, sat alone at the bend of the lot.
And that truck looked like it hadn’t moved in a long time.
Not unlike its owner.