Tyee MegaStore Reopens!!!
Haul out the champagne and shoot off some leftover fireworks!!! Tyee Store reopened!!! They got lotto, they got white bread, they got cheap beer. The world, according to this South Ender, has tilted back into proper orbit. Oh, I know, the fly-by of Pluto was a pretty big deal and maybe more cause for celebration for some, but unless they sell cigarettes and catfood on the mini-planet, let’s try to keep one foot on terra firma.
Tyee Store is back and so what if NASA didn’t send an unmanned satellite to record the event? I sent myself, sickle in hand, through the salmonberry thickets and the nettle jungle and the blackberry barricades that had, for the last few storeless years, grown monstrously wild. I felt like when Lewis and Clark hit the Oregon and Washington coast and the Chinooks paddled up to them in the miserable little cove they’d taken shelter in from a wild storm. Gale force winds didn’t stop the natives from rolling in for some serious bartering and a mile of menacing overgrowth wasn’t going to stop me either. Tyee Store was open again and so was my trail to it. The explorers who made it to the North and South Pole, trust me, they didn’t leave a trail for the next folks.
I know, some of you maybe think, so what? A little mom and pop grocery has reopened after a couple of years, gonna sell some popsickles and camp supplies, some Pall Malls and Bud Lite, big whoop! But for us refugees down here at the end of the island, Tyee Store is the Real Deal. It’s our crackerbarrel, our gossip central, our cultural center and our trading post combined. We’ve gone a long time hauling supplies down from the North. The sled dogs are tired, the transit bus won’t come clear down here, the isolation is wearing on all us pioneers. You think cabin fever is bad, try it when the jerky is gone and the last can of Spam is being held for the next Christmas dinner. Tyee Store is a godsend, let me tell you.
I know, some of you northerners and off-islanders will never set foot on the South End, much less in Tyee Store. Big bunch of nothing down here for you suburbanites and city dwellers. But someday, mark my words, the Tyee Store will be a museum and a visitor center for a time when the Costco’s and the Walmarts hadn’t sent their ubiquitous tentacles into the hinterlands yet, where you couldn’t always get what you wanted, but you got what you needed. And when you did, when you walked into that far-flung outpost of experimental retailing, when you saved yourself that hellish trip to the Plaza or Elger Bay Store, when you walked across the island through a tunnel of brambles, sure, it cost a little more. It maybe cost a lot more, but this was our store, all of us down here, and we’re ecstatic to have it back.
Course, in a week we’ll be belly-aching about the prices and the selections. But … we always did and we always will. It is, after all, the South End.
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