On the one hand, my trip to the Lewis County Courthouse this afternoon was a bit of a bust. After picking up an associate from doing some farmwork, I tried to finish a work project after doing a quick change while he unsuccessfully looked for a tie to go with his suit for a 2:30PM court appearance. As might be guessed when one is running a little bit late, conditions on the drive conspired to make the trip even later, including a traffic jam in Yelm of all places and a flag for tree work while it was raining along the way out of that town. As a result, when I dropped off my associate for him to make his way into court and I found a parking space and went inside to see the proceedings myself, everything of substance was already done and there was nothing but the theater of the courtroom left to see.

It must be admitted, though, that the theater was well worth seeing. Some of it, I could tell, was for the specific benefit of my associate. Although his lawyer had already come and gone from the courtroom (without sticking around long enough to see us, sadly), managing to avoid a bench warrant of $5000 for the summary arrest and jailing of someone who didn’t bother to show up for court as well as consolidating the hearing that was supposed to take place today (a show cause hearing on a supposed probation violation for a case from a year and a half ago or so) into the larger hearing that will be taking place next week that will (hopefully) provide some more details about what is really going on.

[I feel it necessary to give an aside here that it has been very difficult for me to figure out what is really going on with my associate. On the one hand, he has claimed to have paid some $10K over the course of decades in speeding tickets along US-12, the major highway that runs east from I-5 to the town of Morton, which one departs from on WA-7 to get to Eatonville, where my associate has an apartment that I have spent a fair amount of time working from over the past few weeks). On the other hand, though, he does not appear to see any legitimate reason why the judge, about whom I will have more to say shortly, is apparently not a fan of him at all. Given that my associate seems not to see any legitimacy in the case whatsoever, it has been remarkably difficult to square the obvious concern about not wishing to go to jail with a total lack of understanding about the nature of the case against him. Today, sadly, did not bring any clarity on that front.]

Even if the trip to the courthouse was not enlightening from the point of view of seeing something go on with the case that my associate is up against, it was nice that he was able to escape jail. In addition, the brief time I was sitting in courtroom #1 did provide the opportunity to see the theater of the courtroom in a moment of considerable drama for several individuals who were summarily dealt with over the course of that time. For one, nearly everyone I saw was (perhaps unsurprisingly) late. One person was given two weeks to clear his warrants to avoid jail time and the judge was a bit brusque with him about his efforts to explain himself (this seemed to be a bit of a recurring bit). Two people who did not show up at all were slapped with $5,0000 bench warrants and the high probability of some time behind bars in their near futures for not showing up to court. Another person from the Seattle area was, like us, a bit late and was told that the judge was irritated with people from King (Seattle), Pierce (Tacoma, and Eatonville for that matter), and Thurston (Olympia, the state capital) not respecting the court and its time enough, and threatened with a couple of weeks in jail before his next hearing, which as it turns out might not need to happen at all because he took two classes that the prosecutor and probation office of the county needed to look at, with the possibility that all of his charges would be dropped and he could drive once again in peace.

As for my associate, it appears that I have at least one more trip coming up to the Lewis County Courthouse, where we will give ourselves more time so as not to be late (again) and where hopefully there will be some sort of clarity about what is going on in a case that has threatened my associate with the possibility of writing books from a prison cell (which I cannot imagine to be a very pleasant task). Such a thing has definitely been done before but I am not sure my friend is up for a De Profundis or Consolation of Philosophy or Letters From a Birmingham Prison, to give a few examples of some truly excellent prison literature. Let us hope we do not need to find out.