The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

As the nurse at my last doctor’s appointment so delicately put it, my vision is down the toilet.

I am, according to that infamous test with the rows of progressively smaller letters, 20/70 in my right eye and 20/40 in my left. Somehow, they manage to collaborate and produce overall vision of 20/30, which is still deep enough into the metaphorical plumbing to necessitate an appointment with an eye doctor and possibly a pair of glasses.

I just got back from a trip to Long Beach. During the seven-hour drive, I read countless signs along the road – but not very well.

For example, there are dozens of places to buy firewood along the Peninsula’s highways. One vendor advertised his wares with a sign that said “Firewood Stacks.”

I read “Fatherless Socks.”

True story.

I did a lot of word searches in Long Beach, some of them being the conventional type and others being tricky little buggers that didn’t tell you what words you were supposed to look for. Given the whole “Socks” incident, I am probably the world’s least-qualified word searcher, but that didn’t stop me.

I was doing a decent job on one of the tricky ones when I circled a word in the pattern that should have been correct, but didn’t sound familiar.

List.

Is list a word? I thought. I mean, listless is a word, so some fancy person might use it in the phrase list into slumber, and I guess that counts. Besides, they should expect these things if they make word searches without reference lists.

The next day, after a full night of sleep, I thought about that puzzle and slapped my forehead repeatedly.

True story.

Between my perpetually bleary eyes and the fact that I can’t see squat even when I’m wide awake, I did some fairly interesting reading and writing over the course of that trip. Even for simple street-name signs at intersections, I had to squint painfully hard to catch a glimpse, and once I got close enough to read them the car would practically be past the signpost.

Thankfully, my vision is perfectly fine when it comes to reading books, and I did quite a bit of that during the quiet hours of our stay. My eyes also cooperated when I deciphered price tags, which doubtless avoided me countless embarrassing decimal-point-related mix-ups at the checkout counter.

On the way home, I did pretty well. Sure, I still missed the names on half the street signs, but I could easily read the interstate directions and such. As we got closer to home, I was glad to see familiar streets, places whose names I knew by heart.

As we crossed the Touchet River, I glimpsed the sign at the end of the bridge – and shrieked. At first, I thought that my eyes had totally and completely failed me beyond all hope of help, but when my brother noticed the same thing, I laughed.

The “Touchet River” sign was upside-down.

True story.