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All About Red-Headed Logging Trucks and Tall Trees

Almost fifteen years ago, while returning  to Washington State for my first foray into High School class reunions, which, so far as I know, was the last time our class ever reunited:  it is quite possible that all of us have died and gone to . . . heaven, I suppose.  That seems to have been a curious but common supposition.  (But I am losing my way, here.)

A logging truck, piled high with Douglas fir, suddenly appeared somewhere in Oregon.  The sight of it surprised me, although once it had been as common as rain or rocky soil.  I had been years away from such logs and trucks.

This time, after flying--almost incongruously on Alaska Airlines from Tucson to Seattle; something like seeing an umiak in the desert--I was struck by what had once been a common sight:  long paved roads at the bottom of a fir canyon; almost always second- or third-growth fir trees just learning how to stand tall.  (But I am losing my way, here, getting farther and farther in to the woods.)

In Olympia, Washington--one of those State capitols that seem to be trying to hide from public view, as if the people who put the capitol there knew that it might be best not to let too many people see how legislative sausage is made--I noticed that what seemed to me to be a curiously out-of-proportion number of women who had dyed their hair red.  Very often, only a part of the hair had been dyed red, as if the Irish or Norwegian ancestry was only a partial truth.  A good number of the women had cleverly dyed their original hair gray.  Sometimes the red hair was just enough to make a pigtail or two.

Mari will tell you that I am not the most observant of coif trends.  She usually has to ask me whether I noticed that she had been to the hair dresser, and I usually say, "Oh, yes!".  (Yes, I do that.)    And then I usually add a devious comment or two about . . . about whatever I can make up on the spur of the moment.  So when I report that the number of part-time redheads in Olympia seemed to me to be just a bit high, and not particularly well-done, I am willing to concede that there may be nothing significant to my observation.  Even so, I decided to press on.

I wondered whether it was just a local phenomenon.  After all, Olympia, Washington, while a delightful south-end-of-Puget-Sound-and-capitol-of-the-State town with some nice waterside restaurants and a finely-shaped dome, was a bit local, itself.  At one of the "bayside" restaurants, I decided to ask our server about it.  She was not a redhead.  She was a true blond with just a touch of brunette, here and there, deep down toward the scalp.

"Oh, really!", she said in answer to my question.  "I had not noticed that."  No, she did not think that there was anything like an Olympia-specific character-fault resulting in a lot of redheads, nor even that there were a lot of redheads.

"I don't know," she said.  "I do know that when I dye my hair red I feel like a different person."

So there you are!  It demonstrated that I am not very observant about hair, or hair-styles, or women in general, if you must know the truth.  I decided to confine my curiosity to tall trees and logging trucks, but even they surprised me.


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