Life and Good Times in Tenino

We were standing around a propane barbecue watching steaks cook and listening to Ted Griffin and the Ranch Boys singing “Y’all Come” on an old 78 when Joe suddenly said, “I miss the pastrami sandwiches.”

You could tell there was a lot of relief in the statement because Joe is a nice guy and was anxious to say something I’d probably like to hear.

We were in the yard of his home in Tenino, Wash., which is down a country road about 30 miles south of Tacoma, and were talking about what Joe missed about L.A.

He’d lived here almost all of his 53 years, until a few months ago when he and Pennie said to hell with the crime and the traffic and headed north.

They found tranquillity on three acres of trees and lawn and fields of gleaming yellow Scotch broom so bright you had to squint to look at it.

Pennie’s father and mother, Harold and Virginia, followed them up and live on the same spread. They were all there around the barbecue drinking beer when Joe found something nice to say about Los Angeles.

He did it to soften a statement by Virginia that Tacoma, their nearest big city, was becoming just like L.A., a dismissal common among those who think of us as urban hell. She didn’t say why, but it didn’t matter.

We hear that often. A few weeks earlier I was in San Jose, possibly one of the most ordinary cities in America, where they too were worried about becoming another L.A. I should think, however, that if San Jose became anything at all that would be a plus.

There’s a certain distinction in being a metaphor for despair. Hardly anyone ever says please, God, don’t let us become another Tucson, for instance, because no one really gives a damn about Tucson.

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Joe and Pennie used to live in Chatsworth, and Harold and Virginia in Pacoima. A retired factory worker, Harold was born in West Hollywood 65 years ago when it was called Sherman and was raised most of his life in the Valley. He liked it back then, but wouldn’t return now for anything.

Joe is a certified airplane mechanic who found the kind of job 20 minutes from home that he had to drive an hour to get to in L.A. He’s in Tenino forever.

We used to go to Joe’s place every Easter where the kids hunted for plastic eggs with goodies in them and the men cooked up huge batches of real eggs and meat on a camp stove.

I was kind of an intrusion in their blue-collar atmosphere, because I kept wanting to hear what the working class thought about current issues and then I’d write about them.

When they just wanted to talk about life at the factory or an old car Joe was trying to restore, I’d edge the conversation toward police brutality and capital punishment, and come away impressed by the knowledge and compassion that guys like Joe displayed.

So I stopped by their place in Tenino, a town named after a radio station’s place on the dial (10-9-0, get it?), and asked Joe and Harold if they were really happy up there where the air sparkles with the effervescence of champagne and a snowy Mt. Rainier dominates the distance like a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

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Joe and Harold both said they missed the pastrami sandwiches stacked high with more fatty meat than anyone ought to eat, and they missed a lot of the people still trapped in occupied L.A., but other than that . . .

Life at the end of the Oregon Trail, where you can walk at night and cash a check without an ID, is what they’d always dreamed about, a place where a guy can fish and yawn and grow old.

They have storms and floods and fires there too, God knows, and enough rain to rust heaven, but there are no drive-by shootings in Tenino, no sirens wailing pain into hillsides green with pine trees and towering Douglas firs.

I returned to L.A. just in time to catch television pictures of two cops using fire extinguishers to hose down a half-dead coyote, and to read about the Valley’s efforts to secede from the city because it also didn’t want to become another L.A.

Then I went shopping at a place where I had to show two different kinds of identification to write a check and where the guy in produce, who didn’t know a mushroom from an artichoke, was too busy talking to his girlfriend to help me. If I didn’t like it, I could shove it.

I could have ripped his head off, I suppose, but as my daughter used to say, “That’s just life in the big city.” Put another way, we may not be Tenino, but at least we’re not San Jose. Hallelujah to that.

Al Martinez can be reached via the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com