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Totem House was one of Seattle’s Few non-Thai but inexpensive places to eat fish.  It is now being replaced by a branch of the Red Mill … one more burger joint?  The sign now says they re-open this month.

Albert Fikes stumbled into the offices of The Seattle Salmon, severely dehydrated and suffering from both frostbite and third-degree burns. In his hands, he clutched several reviews of local eateries that are sure to make you come back for seconds!

from Seattle Salmon

In the morning, mist comes up from the Ballard Locks, White and feathery, it obscures totem poles and other Northwestern art that have stood for 71 years. The memory of briny prairies and the dark courts of unseen leviathan shapes call to the fish-and-chips connoisseur.

But now, as chill winter rains soak the garb of poets, the mist carries no vision, no longer shall men live in the shadowed rumors of that ancient weird riddle, for the Totem House Seafood and Chowder closed before the turning of the year, a victim of the rotting economy.

“The recession overcame us,” whispered the owner whose name I dare not speak, saddled with the iconic restaurant in a dark bargain more than a decade hence, her birth a portent of the the ponderous thing. “Everything slowed down and slowed down.”

The Totem House was born the same year as she, a 1939 full of smoke and misremembered dreams. Rough stone was set by an unknown hand as a place to sell Native American artifacts. Then the war came, and with it the closure of the Locks amid whispered rumors of a lurker in the shallows that awoke to the violence of men. When the war ended in 1945, its doors opened again, but the spirit of the place had changed. Old sailors spoke of a great light that sprang from the sea and infested the very bones of the ruined husk.

Looking at the restaurant Friday through eyes steeped in the elder mysteries, the owner said she was saddened at its closure. “It’s going to be very sad for a lot of people, a lot of regulars.”

One customer who was painted in my eye as a blind spot, a mere blur in the void, came in every day for fourteen years and ordered a chocolate milkshake, the owner related. An unbreakable cycle stumbling forward to the unyielding beat of a cyclopean drum.

“We’re a big family. We’re all sad, the employees are sad,” she said again, and from her mouth issued the forgotten spirits of the deep, clutching fingers wrapped in seaweed and studded with coral.

The woman does not wish the souls of those in her employ to leave the pleasant hearths and gambrel-roofed cottages of Ballard, but they are not lashed to structure as she. Though she may owe her soul to the damned place, its true owners lie beyond the veil of dreams and one cannot know their purpose. They look to the lingering vapors of times past for echoes of what may have been.

“Every day we hear stories from people who used to come here with their parents and grandparents,” she murmurs with the voice of a dozen blind railwaymen. “We loved our customers.”

However, a darkness had been growing three years hence, a dank, fetid shadow that lived and walked like a man. She survived his harsh regard in 2009, but felt the cruel bite all the same in 2010 when the citizens of Ballard dare not leave their home for meals.

While the economy may be improving,the Elder Ones only may decide one’s fate, she said, as unseen hands carried out everything inside the restaurant to a dark place outside of space, outside of time, including framed reviews of its unknowable cuisine.

Then she too was gone, her body dissolved into the very wood of the doorway, save for a scrap of paper reading, “goodbye friends.”

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