I ride my bike to work just after sunrise.  About a mile from home, past the fairgrounds and the cemetery, the street becomes a road and plunges into the rolling Palouse, skirting the Moscow city limits.  Quail and pheasants spray from the ditches.  Wooded hills rise to the north, south and east.  Beyond them are mountains and rivers and countless strange hamlets where greasy breakfasts and undistinguished lagers await the intrepid traveler.             

Unlike its more vaunted brethren - Sandpoint, Whitefish and McCall, say - Moscow has no ski hill, no pristine lake or blue-ribbon river.  But there's a nice downtown with restaurants, coffee shops, bars, a record store and a bookseller.  There's a tavern called the Slurp & Burp.  There's open space and beckoning adventure.  That's about all I need.

I can't say exactly why I moved here from Tacoma in February, just as I can't say exactly why I moved to Tacoma from Bellingham three years ago.  I guess I'm just drawn to new places - especially the weird, unheralded ones, where becoming a local is a kind of anthropology.  Bellingham was once weird and unheralded.  But after a few too many mentions in Sunset magazine, it became a Destination.  The rock 'n' roll bars shut down and tapas bars moved in.  Soap and candle stores spread like a cancer.  Old-school locals became quaint specimens.  Eventually the famously stinky paper mill quit operating; the town didn't even smell the same.

So the Tacoma aroma was a breath of fresh air. I liked that Bellingham friends spoke of T-town as if it were Baghdad.  I liked the bass-ackward politics, the complete lack of really good Cuban fusion cuisine, the lumpy mix of artsy fartsy and nitty gritty.  But most of all I liked the people.  It was as though, unburdened by the pressure of holding a cool town pose, Tacomans could just relax and be their goofy selves.  I liked the crazies on the buses, the guys who for some reason always gave me free stuff at It's Greek to Me, and the cranks on the blogs.  I especially liked the artists, musicians and culturati making something out of nothing, or failing valiantly in the effort.

Failing valiantly is my M.O.

For the past year or so I've been trying, and often failing, to capture the Tacoma I love in the pages of this valiant rag.  The experience has been one of the most rewarding of my "professional" life.  Rewarding because Editor Matt Driscoll and Publisher Ron Swarner allowed me to fail as often and spectacularly as I wished.  Rewarding because I got to meet and describe many of those strident souls I admired. 

It was also frustrating.  Frustrating because I never captured my subjects quite as well as I wanted.  Frustrating because it sometimes seemed we published two headlines at the Volcano: "Sisyphus Pushes Rock Uphill" and "Rock Tumbles Down, Sisyphus Undaunted."

I'm thinking of the Helm Gallery.  I'm thinking of Tac 25 Collective.  I'm thinking of all the bands, artists, owners and promoters seeking and rarely finding the intersection of hard work and success on a seriously fucked-up line graph. 

Most of all, I'm thinking about the Warehouse.  As Volcano readers no doubt know, the longtime underground venue recently met its demise concurrent with, if not as a direct result of, an article I wrote for City Arts magazine.  My feeling after speaking with Warehouse manager Adam Ydstie is that the article just precipitated the inevitable: valiant failure.  I suppose I can live with that. 

I always have.

This weekend, Ydstie - who, like a lot of folks I've written about, has become a good friend - will be crashing at my place along with a bunch of other 253 stowaways during the upstart Birds on a Wire folk festival.  (The lineup is unreal.  You should come too.)  My friend Larson Hicks of Stereopathic Music is putting it on.  Stereopathic is a kind of above ground underground, staging first-rate all-ages shows at improvised legal venues throughout the Palouse.  In the land of the Slurp & Burp, it's a godsend.  From the sounds of it, Ydstie and Co. are toying with the idea of trying a similar model in Tacoma.  It's worth a shot, I'd say. 

Like Tacoma itself, it just might work, even if it doesn't.  

Birds on a Wire takes place March 26-27 in Pullman, Washington.  Performers include Justin Townes Earle, Damien Jurado, Joe Pug, Rocky Votolato and Tacoma's own Goldfinch, plus many, many more.   For complete details, visit birdsonawirefest.com.