David Lynch Was Here
January 31, 2025 at 12:24AM
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Katherine Cusumano | Longreads | January 30, 2025 | 3,260 words (12 minutes)
SPECIAL AGENT DALE COOPER: I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.
I saw the neon sign first: Twede’s RR Cafe, spelled out in twinkling neon, set against the stone bluffs of Mount Si looming just beyond. We slid into a parking spot below the sign, rounded the corner to the diner’s entrance, and there it was: a small pile of offerings arranged carefully near the door. Five bouquets—four wrapped in brown paper and one tied up with raffia; a potted plant; several handwritten notes; and, presiding over it all, a black-and-white portrait of the director David Lynch. I let out an involuntary oh and turned back to my photojournalist friend Riley, calling him over.
The previous afternoon, Lynch’s family had announced that he had died, just days before his 79th birthday. I learned about his death in the strange inverted way that the news of celebrity deaths so often spreads: His name was trending on Bluesky. Surely not, I thought, a sickening emptiness growing in my core. Absolutely not. I don’t remember now at what point over the next couple of hours I spent scrolling through photos and quotes and other ephemera that I thought to drive to the site of the real Twin Peaks—that is, to the trio of towns in Washington that inspired the fictional place—but I do remember why. I felt this desperate, restless urge that took form as a handful of simple verbs: to do or go or make, or maybe all three.
The idea, once it occurred to me, burrowed deep. I sat on the cold tile floor of my bathroom and I tried to explain to my boyfriend, who was at that point literally taking a bath, why I needed to drive the six-hour round trip from Oregon to Washington to visit a place where an artist I loved had chosen to set a television series I’d started watching in high school. Tell me if this is crazy, I said. Yet already, I was also questioning my own instinct to go there. I feared making his death about me—nervous, too, about going to a place and scattering my own remote kind of grief all over it. I didn’t know what I’d find—or if I’d find anything at all. I imagined Twede’s, which features in the series as the Double R Diner, packed with droves of Twin Peaks fans. I imagined it totally empty.
In the evening, I texted Riley, who lives on the Oregon coast, to see if he’d be up for a road trip. We set out early the next morning, pulling into North Bend in time for lunch. As both a reporter and a fan, I was reaching for some kind of collective experience to help frame my own sense of loss. At the same time, though, I was looking to understand something greater: what any of us are looking for when we visit places we’ve only ever seen on screen, and how the desire to go to such a place might be sharpened in grief. I pushed open the door and stepped inside.
COOPER: What kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here? Big, majestic—
SHERIFF TRUMAN: Douglas firs.COOPER: Douglas firs. Okay, I need someone to get me a copy of the coroner’s report.
Not long before the Twin Peaks pilot got picked up by ABC in 1989, Lynch drew a map of his fictional town that—according to Kyle MacLachlan, who starred in the series—he intended to “create a sense of place for the show.” It’s threadbare as a map, but in its sharp charcoal angles, it evokes the mood, simultaneously quaint and ominous, of his show. “As far as I’m concerned, the only thing in the entire first two seasons that’s really Twin Peaks is the pilot,” Lynch wrote in his hybrid memoir-biography, Room to Dream. “That had everything to do with the fact that we were shooting on location. The place itself is so important.”
Place is perhaps not the primary thesis of his filmography as a whole, but it is certainly a guiding principle. From the Roadhouse to Snoqualmie Falls, the Great Northern Hotel, the iron bridge that Ronette stumbles across in the pilot and the massive log on the beach where Laura’s body is found, to, of course, the Double R—the fictional town of Twin Peaks is a richly realized composite of three adjacent towns in Washington’s Snoqualmie Valley: North Bend, Snoqualmie, and Fall City. (Additional shooting locations are spread across the region; after the pilot, most of the interiors were shot on a soundstage—one fictional place blended seamlessly with another.)
The town, as Lynch drew it, bleeds into mountains and forest. His father was a forestry researcher for the federal Department of Agriculture, and for most of his childhood, the Lynches moved between Montana, Washington, and Idaho. “I grew up loving trees,” he writes. “Because of where I grew up and what my father did, nature is a big part of Twin Peaks and the woods are really important. That’s a huge part of the thing.”
Place is perhaps not the primary thesis of his filmography as a whole, but it is certainly a guiding principle.
I live in Oregon, and so I know these trees: big, majestic. And I don’t know how else to say it because I don’t even believe in the occult, but those woods appear spectral. At the same time, Lynch also harbored an apparent fascination for manufacturing and production. You can see it in the desolate industrial landscape of Eraserhead. You can see it in Twin Peaks, a timber town whose sawmill figures into one of the series’ central intrigues. (“I like man and nature together. That’s why I love old factories,” he writes.) The decline of the Packard Sawmill reflects the reality of many small towns in the rural Northwest, including the real towns where Twin Peaks was set. When Twin Peaks aired, the industry was in a precipitous decline. A tradition of work was slipping away. (At the same time, Lynch took some liberties: Twin Peaks is supposed to be flush against the Canadian border in the northeast corner of Washington. If you live in the region, the distinction between east and west matters.)
Even more than the series’ specificity of place, though, Twin Peaks is especially attuned to hauntings. Put differently, it’s interested in how physical places can hold onto the things that have happened there. Lynch holds your gaze on objects and spaces, whether the ceiling fan in Laura Palmer’s house, whose rotations grow more foreboding with each cycle, or the ripple of a red curtain (“I love curtains. Are you kidding me?”). He seems to propose that just beyond sight, there are supernatural forces at work; our familiar world and something more fantastic layer over each other like transparencies. At the same time, he refuses to prescribe meaning, instead surrendering sense-making to his audience. (Lynch was famously skeptical of written words because they lacked the ambiguity of his visual art.) In a David Lynch world is a sense of possibility.
Maybe this meld of real and unreal is also part of the strange enduring power of the places where Lynch filmed Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks offers the sense that places could be portals. “People, when they’re grieving, reach out for something tangible,” said Mary Reber, who owns the Laura Palmer House in Everett, an hour north. Their promise, then, was a connection to the intangible.
COOPER: This must be where pies go when they die.
What I sought was a benevolent haunting. We slid into a booth and ordered a pair of coffees, black. I flipped over the laminated menu. In the series, Cooper, the FBI agent played by Kyle MacLachlan, harbors twin obsessions with black coffee and cherry pie. I watched as white dishes bearing slice after slice of pie spun out of the kitchen and alighted on tables. Production stills, photos of the cast and crew, and fan magazine covers zigzagged against the crimson wall of the back hallway. After a brief deliberation, Riley and I decided to split a slice.
The diner—known previously as the Mar-T, before it was rechristened Twede’s in 1997—has been a local institution since the ’40s. The series treats it the same: Peggy Lipton, who plays Double R owner Norma Jennings, describes it as “our roots and our anchor” in Room to Dream. (In 2000, a fire destroyed the interior of the diner. Fifteen years later, when Lynch returned to the area to film Twin Peaks: The Return, the production commissioned a complete remodeling to make it look like the original Double R and filmed the third season on location.) The previous night, mapping out my itinerary, I’d decided it should be our first stop—not only because of its central role in the series, but also because it’s more animate than many of the filming locations. Instead of merely looking at or in, you were invited to enter and interact. You pushed open the door, and all at once you were implicated in its narrative.
Rachel Bennett, who has owned Twede’s for five years, took a seat across from me. She’d learned of Lynch’s death the previous day through the “very tight-knit” online Twin Peaks community, she said. “I have my own, like, personal feelings that I was holding,” she said, “but I wanted to share what other people were saying.”
“What was your own personal feeling?” I asked.
“I don’t want to cry,” she said, eyes gone glassy. I admitted, not for the last time that day, that I’d already cried. The day before, I’d been taken aback by my own visceral reaction, but at Twede’s, observing other people’s reactions to the death of a person they’d scarcely known, I began to think that communal grieving could only happen through the accumulation of individual emotional responses.
At the same time, though, I was looking to understand something greater: what any of us are looking for when we visit places we’ve only ever seen on screen, and how the desire to go to such a place might be sharpened in grief.
“I wouldn’t own this place if it wasn’t for him,” Bennett went on. “He is instrumental to the life that I am living right now.” She’s lived in the area for most of her life, but for a long time, she resisted the connection to Twin Peaks. “The world that he created is also the world that I grew up in,” she said. “It was, like—I don’t know—maybe a little too close to home.” Years later, something shifted. “Saying I was obsessed isn’t quite the feeling,” she said, “but it was a little manic.” Just more than five years ago, she was looking for a food service job. Twede’s was hiring. “One, I needed the money,” she said. “Two, it was just to be kind of in this world that I had become so enraptured by.” She was only working one night per week, and she’d never run a restaurant before, but when the previous owner told her he wanted to sell the place, she was seized by the same manic energy that had gripped her watching the show.
As she spoke, I saw the letters tattooed on the insides of her fingers, spelling out damn fine. (“This is—excuse me—a damn fine cup of coffee,” Cooper says after taking his first sip in the restaurant at the Great Northern Hotel.) We accepted coffee refills eagerly. I looked up to see that a lively crowd had grown near the door as Bennett excused herself to take names for the waitlist.
A pair of locals sitting at the table next to ours hadn’t seen Twin Peaks themselves, but they decided to stop in anyway, in honor of Lynch. Another couple, still in their bibs, had come from a morning of skiing: “We were passing through.” A man with an analog camera, just knocking off work: “I think I just wanted to be in that physical space as well as mental.” A woman who had recently started introducing her partner to the show: “I wanted some ceremony.” It was a thing to do, and it was a rite of remembrance.
TRUMAN: There’s a sort of evil out there . . . something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want: a darkness, a presence. It takes many forms, but it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember and we’ve always been here to fight it.
Jeffrey Davis had been profoundly rattled by the news of Lynch’s death. A longtime Twin Peaks fan, he’d come out from Seattle with Lynn Keller and Sarah Johnson. I took an empty chair at the trio’s table. “It felt like I lost a compass direction,” Davis said. “And then it becomes a matter of, okay, how do I find north again?” (Davis compared this sensation to a screenshot from Twin Peaks of MacLachlan, as Cooper, sitting in a chair in the Red Room, subtitled [intense ethereal whooshing].) I wondered if the instinct to go to a place that a beloved artist touched was a way of restoring a trajectory. Situating yourself literally inside an artist’s work could be read as another way of metabolizing influence.
“Being here, it not only fosters a sense of community, but it also fosters a sense of remembrance and memorial,” Davis said. “Like, I’ve seen this place,” Keller added. “Now, I’m here, and I could touch it and turn it over in my hands.” It was surreal, Keller said—or maybe, instead, it was hyperreal. Entering the diner forced a perspective shift. It was as if they were just out of step with reality, which is itself a central Lynch motif—his interest in the parallel worlds lurking behind this one, depicted through elliptical echoes and dreamscapes. His strangenesses.
I wondered if the instinct to go to a place that a beloved artist touched was a way of restoring a trajectory. Situating yourself literally inside an artist’s work could be read as another way of metabolizing influence.
When Twin Peaks premiered 30 years ago, not everyone in town was thrilled by the association, even in light of the business it brought to the area. A dismissive Los Angeles Times article described how one local gift shop owner took to charging $4.95 for “Log Lady logs”—firewood she’d cut in her backyard, sometimes with a bit of moss glued to the side. “Some people looked at it, saw the goofy story, and got the impression we are a bunch of damn weirdos,” said the owner of a local hardware store.
But what if you could read Lynch’s interest in weirdness as reverence? After all, he wrote himself into the world he created, playing Cooper’s supervisor, the FBI bureau chief Gordon Cole. Lynch’s embrace of artifice, and his interest in the intersection of the natural and unnatural, are precisely the qualities in his art that I love. Still, I’d taken for granted how strange his work is—in the defiantly non-naturalistic performances he elicits from his actors and the surreal sheen of his stories and characters—until I started trying to explain the plot of Twin Peaks to Riley on our drive to Washington. Weirdness ended up being a recurring motif in my conversations, at Twede’s and elsewhere around the valley. “It’s a part of this town,” said Brittni Larson, the manager of the North Bend Theatre. “We always joke about this being a vortex,” said Kristin Tetuán, the manager of the gift shop at the Salish Lodge and Spa—which appears in the series as the Great Northern. “There’s just a weirdness here.”
Earlier in the day, Johnson, Davis, and Keller had hiked down Snoqualmie Falls, which cascade 268 feet over a cliff behind the Salish Lodge. Since 2019, the lodge has been owned by the Snoqualmie Tribe, for whom the falls were a sacred site; they’re now listed as a Traditional Cultural Property on the National Register of Historic Places. Visiting the falls, Johnson was struck by a parallel: “We have artistic ancestry in the same way that we have land ancestry,” she said.
We visited the falls later that afternoon. We made our way down the paved path to a viewing platform that looked out over the river basin. The waterfall poured down in a torrent of white mist. And it was beautiful. But I was wary of simply gazing at and projecting some meaning onto it. Instead, I felt a sharp absence. I already missed the conversations I’d had earlier, wherever they led. The sense of collective response brought me closer—not necessarily to Lynch as an artist, but to some sort of shared understanding of what we were lacking now. I looked for a moment longer, and then I turned back toward the lodge.
THE LOG LADY: There are many stories in Twin Peaks. Some of them are sad, some funny. Some are stories of madness, of violence. Some are ordinary.
THE LOG LADY: All that we see in this world is based on someone’s ideas. Some ideas are destructive, some are constructive. Some ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. I can say it again: Some ideas arrive in the form of a dream.
THE LOG LADY: The answer, of course, is yes. One day the sadness will end.
Earlier, outside Twede’s, a woman stooped to deposit a box of chocolate donut holes amid the flowers and letters. She was Joy Nash, an actor who appeared in an episode of The Return. FOCUS ON the DONUT NOT ON THE HOLE!! was written on the inside of the lid—a catchphrase Lynch apparently loved. “We wanted to pay tribute,” she told me. “We wanted to eat some cherry pie.” And to leave an offering.
I was reminded of something Mary Reber told me, that visitors to the Palmer House often want to leave objects in the alcove in Laura’s bedroom. “They’re leaving things of themselves in that place where those things happen because it makes them feel like it’s partly theirs, too,” she said. (A few days later, clicking through images of the diner, I came across a photo that had been posted after our visit. The small pile of offerings had expanded the whole length of the diner’s front face.) The people who wanted to leave objects inside the Palmer House or outside Twede’s or Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, California, or any of the other places that have become shrines to Lynch and his work were participating in acts of reciprocity—offering something back into the world Lynch created. Maybe it was true that any thing could hold meaning, not because the objects and places themselves were intrinsically significant, but because we are constantly imbuing them with stories: meaning constructed in the interplay between artist and audience and the light and sound that passes like a current between them.
Nash spent two days on set with Lynch shooting The Return. She wondered, briefly, how he became David Lynch, or if he simply emerged into the world fully formed. “What a gift, man,” she said.
The sun had started to sink behind the mountains as we pulled out of town. Driving home in the dark, I saw the lights from an office tower next to the highway reflecting off the fog that had lowered into the valley. It filled the sky overhead with a strange electric-blue light.
COOPER: Albert, I hope you can hear this. I’ve only been in Twin Peaks a short time. But in that time, I have seen decency, honor, and dignity. I have seen grief to break your heart. Murder is not a faceless event here. It’s not a statistic to be tallied up at the end of every day. Laura Palmer’s death has affected each and every man, woman, and child. Because life has meaning here. Every life. And that’s a way of living I thought had vanished from this earth. It hasn’t, Albert. It’s right here in Twin Peaks.
ALBERT ROSENFIELD: Sounds like you’ve been snacking on some of the local mushrooms.
Katherine Cusumano is a reporter and essayist. Her writing about the intersections of pop culture and the outdoors has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, and others. A recipient of the Oregon Literary Fellowship, she holds an MFA from Oregon State University and lives, writes, and teaches in Portland.
Riley Yuan is a writer, photographer, and Murrow News Fellow. He covers an environmental beat for The Chinook Observer, and has current and forthcoming bylines in High Country News, The Washington Post, and others. Prior to becoming a reporter, he earned an MFA from Oregon State University and worked as a wildland firefighter for the US Forest Service.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/30/real-twin-peaks-david-lynch/
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