I woke up at 4 AM, by 4:25 the daylight and the robins singing made it clear I was done sleeping. I was a guest at somebody else's house and couldn't just fire up the coffee grinder at 4:30 and wake them all up. So by 4:40 I was out the door, empty mug in the dashboard.
At 4:50 I stopped to make sure the load on the pickup truck was secure. By 5:00 I was on the highway and by 5:02 it sounded like the muffler was fallen off the truck and the engine was failing. It was a false alarm - just the harmonics of the taut straps holding the kayak in place.
Around 5:15 I'd made it as far as Belfair. It was almost regular daylight. Enough to see and be depressed by the damned scourge known as scotchbroom dominating the margins of the highway.
I knew there was a Safeway in that town. I hoped they were open and had a restroom and coffee. They were open, and they had a restroom, which I used. The in-house coffee shop, Tully's was not yet open. Across the parking lot, there was a starbucks, still dark.
It is weird when it is fully daylight at 5:30 and yet the coffee houses are closed.
I drove on a couple blocks. Two trucks, a small shack.... looked like an espresso stand to me. It was open and coffee was being served. I had to do a U-turn and backtrack a couple blocks.
I pulled in, and then had my first premonition: The discrete fence shading the stand from the road; my second premonition, the bare arm handing a cup to the truck in front of me.
I realized I was in a drive up bikini coffee shop, something I've always avoided. (Do you even have those in your part of the country? It's a natural artifact of capitalistic competition here in western Washington, where espresso shacks are as common as, well, that damned scourge of scotchbroom.)
No such luck. My server (all respect to her) was not wearing a bikini, nor even pasties, just some black paint of some kind in the form of two hearts.
A bachelor gentleman does not need this at 5:35 in the morning when all he wants is a cup of coffee. (At music festivals, hippie dippie events and such, I appreciate the style a bit more.)
I found myself embarrassed, gazing anywhere but inside the espresso stand. I was polite but not falling into the trap of faux-flirtation.
For the experience and the coffee, I spent $3.50. That is to say, $3.50 was the price of the coffee. I felt no need (nor desire) to add a tip.
A block later, and a block after that, I discovered the second and then the third espresso stand, both open, neither hidden by discrete fences, servers fully-clothed; either of which would have been my preferred choice.
Is there a moral to this story? I don't know, but if there is it goes something like this: "when you're desperate for a drug, don't fall for the first dealer." Or perhaps, "When even coffee is sexualized, it's time to switch to tea."