David Scherer Water
By David Scherer Water
An ink drawing of a west side raccoon by Arrington de Dionyso.
Arrington de Dionyso
Even by local standards, Olympia’s Westside is a balinaged jantricized place — a bipolar mix of easy-breezy folk life, blended with terrifying conspiracy-rich hippie paranoia.
Cheerful vegans run hungry for meat. Wolf anarchists blossom with unexpected warmth. Red-blooded Greeners dial 911 for a flower. Behind every smile: seething leftist rage, ready to ignite by the slightest slight. Behind every atomic glare: a grim grimace stilting over goo.
Love the Westside. Don’t try to understand it. This is where the "Twilight" franchise meets "The Twilight Zone"—500 acres riddled with contradiction.
The area has a storied history of interspecies warfare. Keep an eye on your pets and bare legs. Raccoon gangs hunt cats. Irate possums strike without warning.
Feeling overwhelmed? Escape to a quiet alley. You'll find bucolic backyard farmlets and the tiniest tiny homes—guarded by miniature chickens with Napoleonic complexes.
The Westside is mostly ruled by a Phish-and-chips mafia, but there are rebel holdouts—alternatives to the alternative alternatives worth alternating to. For example, the guilty pleasure zone: the forbidden Capital Mall. Its defining feature? That it’s entirely unremarkable. This is where Olympia’s mainstream masses take refuge from eccentricity.
At Westside Lanes, six decades of secondhand smoke and ventilation neglect create a nicotine time machine. From your first breath to your last, you’ll be brought back to a grittier, smokier era.
The aisles of the Westside Grocery Outlet are gravid with candied rage and smashing shopping carts: bulging biceps, unrestricted mothers, miniature monkeys clamped like barrettes to their purse straps, and burlesque ex-boyfriends lurching with frozen food frozen to their manes. And somehow, amid the chaos—generosity and true love.
At 2419 Harrison Ave., Capital Cho has quietly served as Olympia’s unofficial Asian cultural center for nearly 40 years. Owner Kim Chi explained that “cho” is the Vietnamese word for “market.”
Fittingly, kimchi is one of the shop’s top sellers. The store carries Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese goods, plus Japanese, Filipino and Korean items. The walk-in freezer holds a trove of deep-sea mysteries. Look for jackfruit, durian, Thai spinach, and an amazing tool for slicing it lengthwise. For the daring: popsicles made with hornet honey and kidney beans, sold individually.
Approach the Westside like an anthropologist. Keep your feet rooted (and maybe rotted) in reality, and you’ll leave with stories to shock and delight your grandchildren.
An ink drawing representing The Co-Op by Arrington de Dionyso.
Arrington de Dionyso
The Food Co-op
At the heart of the Westside is a cult disguised as a health food store: the Olympia Food Co-op. It opened in 1977 at around 8 a.m., and by noon, its companion shop opened, the Free Store.
Today, the Free Store continues to outpace the volume of its not-free sponsor. As the name suggests, the price of any item at The Free Store is the effort of removal.
This is the largest free resource exchange in Western Washington where shoppers flock like fake snow. In this college town rich with rich short-term young adults, at the tail end of each academic quarter, the Free Store enjoys an influx of dorm resources, toasters, microwaves and food processors. Some claim the Free Store allows a life free from money. This kind of eco-boasting is common—but dubious.
Still, don’t get so caught up in your haul of broken toasters that you forget to visit the co-op. Here, quasi-paid volunteers earn store credit through a system that involves a 24% discount on 112 nontaxable dollars of every 7.25% hour worked multiplied by the amassed daily sales coefficient adjusted by a variable task aggregate. Obviously.
Customers can buy bruised fruit for 35 cents a pound from the compost coffin under the produce shelf. There’s a local snake oil section offering unguents made from fuzz, dust and chaff.
The co-op does Costco-sized business out of a closet-sized space. Off-peak hours feel crowded. Busy times feel like a post-disaster food riot. They sell everything from toilet paper to broccoli milk—but no Coke, and definitely no Palestinian ice cream cones. Due to a ban on Chinese-made goods, they don’t have anything from China at all, including electronics. Hence the twig abacus in place of cash register.
For a less romantic shopping experience, try the newer east side location where the food buffet and its proximity to Lacey has a gently desexualizing effect.
An ink drawing representing The Far Westside by Arrington de Dionyso.
Arrington de Dionyso
The Far Westside
A gradual drift draws many toward an elusive frontier known only as the Far Westside. Its boundary is hazy, a graying of overcast opinions where suburbia fades into forest—somewhere between Evergreen and Shelton. This liminal zone is steadily enriched with changes.
Many arrive. Fewer return. Some drift even farther— beyond the trees, past the sea, into the mist.
The Far Westside is home to those who dwell beneath tarpaulins and jungle canopy, beside rusting buses. They eat ferns. They drink mountain milk. They are the future — or the past. Or possibly raccoons.
David Scherer Water explores absurdity in local culture through the lens of comedic nonfiction. He is the author of a history book and this column. Both have the same title. Discover more of his work here.
fyancey
Thoroughly enjoyable read. Thank you….
Thursday, April 17 Report this
Ceschrieve
Brilliant and honest and full of words I’d never heard before! What a fun essay!
Thursday, April 17 Report this
Olywelcomesall
Most excellent. Love the mix of accuracy and absurdity converging into one.
Saturday, April 19 Report this
citizenken
The writing is just short of incomprehensible. It strikes this boomer as narcissistic nonsense masquerading as deep thought humor. Occasional insights interspersed with literati drivel. Silly stuff, have I missed something? Is that what was intended?
Saturday, April 19 Report this