That quality of being cheesy,
or, Suspicions confirmed.
Before I get into this, I feel the need to affirm that yes, what follows is, indeed, true—in every important particular.
We—me, and Jenn, and Chris Baldwin—were cruising the Gorge, looking at waterfalls. Our second stop of the day was the impossibly picturesque Vista House, perched rather cheekily at the very lip of Crown Point’s precipitous plunge into the Columbia River. (A small plane flew by; we looked down on it.) Now, I feel the need to point out that, while I was nattily dressed, we were doing an old-fashioned outing in the country—and really, a straw porkpie such as the one I was wearing is, perhaps, not quite the thing to wear with tweed. So it wasn’t like I was being a stickler or anything. (I want to make sure you grasp this: we were all wearing tweed.) —Still, I was the only one with a tie, and a vest; perhaps it was this that singled me out for their attention.
“Excuse me,” said one of four (or perhaps five?) scruffily clean-cut young men. “Could you—?” He was holding out a small digital camera.
“Of course,” I said. Instructions were given—peer here, yes, hold this until it clicks, simplicity itself. The four (I believe it was four, and not five) of them arranged themselves, arms about shoulders, jockeying a bit to sort themselves out. I didn’t have to suggest that the tallest of them ought to stand in back. They knew the drill. “Horizontal or vertical?” I asked, as a formality; we’re in the Gorge, for fuck’s sake. “Horizontal,” said the one who’d handed me the camera. —Landscape it was. I framed them nicely (if I do say so myself), lower rightish quadrant, with the arc of the river and the deep, deep ditch of the Gorge, thirty miles or more of it, over and out behind them.
I should perhaps relay at this point my uncertainty regarding their clothing. I seem to recall that one of them wore a sweatshirt with the logo of some gym or perhaps a sports team emblazoned on the front; I recall some stylish corduroys. A half-zip polarfleece pullover, perhaps, on one of them (though that might be the sweatshirt, reduplicating oddly in my memory). —But surely the hearty salmon chamois shirt I insist on draping around the shoulders of one of them is some odd cross-referencing error from my days writing copy for Norm Thompson. (It couldn’t have been that obvious.)
Poses struck, smiles plastered, camera set, I poised my finger over the shutter release. “Say something cheese-like,” I said. Ever the droll one.
“Something cheese-like,” cried three (or perhaps four), all of them quick and game.
“Smegma,” said the fourth, quickest by far and droller than I.
(I’m pretty sure there were just four, come to think of it.)
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