Hangout

A newspaperman explains how to steep the imagination — and your liver — in something a little healthier

What better place to meet Kirkland’s oddest press baron than the most esoteric shop in downtown Kirkland, Herban Wellness? While I await Eastside Sun publisher John Gilday, I sip a lymph-moving, liver-detoxifying licorice-and-dandelion tea and talk colonics with Bastyr-trained Katya Difani, the health emporium’s drop-dead-pretty proprietress. “John stops here occasionally and just — ‘Ahhhhh,’” says Difani, quoting Gilday’s response to her unexpectedly tasty body-cleansing teas.

“Ah,” says Gilday, walking in the door. He’s returning from coffee with a Kirkland councilman at St. James Espresso, which he found too noisy to talk in. He thinks Eastside noise is “eight on a scale of one to ten. God, that’s irritating!” And Herban Wellness is the quiet remedy.

Photo by Kyle Johnson

His column in the three-year-old monthly Eastside Sun is sometimes not so quiet. “People think of it as firebombing, that somehow I write like an IED [improvised explosive device],” says Gilday. “That’s not the case!”

Granted, he only started the Sun because the city made him furious. When a windstorm blew down trees outside the Kirkland office of Waterfund, Gilday’s company, which provided relief to poor folks in Mexico, New Orleans and Thailand, he says city officials told him he could cut the cottonwoods down. Then they fined him. “The City cost me $13,700! I thought, you can’t fight City Hall. Then I woke up one night and thought, why the hell not?”

So he started the Sun to run the rascals out of city council, and to champion other causes. The paper also has event listings compiled by Camron Malherbe, an old girlfriend of Gilday’s who “wanted someone a little different — young and in shape.” So she married a South African and now reports on the Eastside from Johannesburg.

Gilday demands to know why a town with 44,000 people has thirty-three parks, one per 1,100 citizens. He objects to the retirement home going up across the street from Herban Wellness, where deafening jackhammers are harshing our tea-induced mellow.

“Downtown Kirkland is to the Eastside what Belltown is to Seattle. Why would anybody even consider putting a retirement home there? As soon as Matlock ends at 8:30 they’re asleep. God bless ’em, they’ve earned their peace and quiet. Walk out your door and you’ve got Eminem as the soundtrack and the occasional college girl flashing. All good things, but they don’t mesh.”

Vengefully, he spurned Kirkland to buy a Renton business license. “They seem to do things fairly in Renton.” He divides his time between Kirkland, Waterfund’s main charity site near Puerto Vallarta, and his nine-acre estate near Issaquah. “I keep it as my own personal wildlife preserve. I make sure the deer are fed and there’s water in the pool.”

But don’t get Gilday wrong. “I adore Kirkland. Diana introduced me to Kirkland.” Diana is the motivator of Gilday’s life after fifty (he’s fifty-eight now). He used to be your basic entrepreneur. Then, about eight years ago, on April 20, Diana died. “She and I had dated on and off for ten years. I loved her, and a long line of men thought that she was the perfect woman.” They weren’t dating when she leaned against a hotel railing and fell seventeen stories. “The accident was a real sharp slap to the cerebellum. You just go, what are you doing with your life?”

At first, Gilday did the wrong thing. “I had a brief romance with Jim Beam, and that wasn’t good for my liver. So we had to break up. So I went on to building Waterfund.” He craved meaning and he had liked Latin America ever since he was an ’80s war correspondent in El Salvador.

“Diana’s accident was horrible, but it saved my life, and I thank her every day for the lessons she taught me.”

Lately, Gilday has a new life project. After a Waterfund documentary fell through, his Universal Studios contact wangled Gilday some option money for a screenplay/novel, Chuckles the Cop: A Comedy of Mental Illness and Death. “It’s fiction drawn from real life. There are four characters that have their own universe, and when they collide, a six-year-old girl dies.”

Gilday requires Herban Wellness to write. “When you’re walking down the street and a thought hits you — it hits me in an ADD kind of way. I’ll come in, rip open the laptop, and put the skeleton of the concept down. Because if I don’t do it, it’ll be gone.”

Over a soothing brew, Gilday muses, “The weird directions my life has taken!” Many directions, in fact. But he has the beatific calm of an excitable guy who’s found peace.

“It’s a good life.”

Herban Wellness

103 Lake Street S., Kirkland, WA 98033, 206.330.2171