On ‘Twin Peaks’ Day, Fans and Friends Try to Make Sense of a World Without David Lynch

In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, written by Mark Frost and David Lynch and directed by Lynch, we first meet agent Dale Cooper of the FBI (Kyle MacLachlan) as he’s driving into town. “Diane, 11:30 AM, February 24th,” he says into his tape recorder. “Entering the town of Twin Peaks, five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line. I’ve never seen so many trees in my life.”

In the 35 years since the series premiered, February 24 has come to be known as Twin Peaks Day, and it’s now the capstone of a three-day fan convocation known as the Real Twin Peaks. The festivities are centered in the towns of Snoqualmie and North Bend, Washington, where many key scenes were shot for the pilot, the feature film Fire Walk With Me, and the 2017 Showtime sequel series, Twin Peaks: The Return.

This year’s edition kicked off with a memorial to David Lynch, who died on January 16. It was held at the Sno-Valley Eagles club on Railroad Avenue in Snoqualmie, just down the road from the Salish Lodge & Spa at the top of Snoqualmie Falls—famous to fans as the Great Northern Hotel where Agent Cooper stayed during his visit.

Over the past three decades, the franchise’s fandom has ebbed and flowed. They first started coming here in 1992, when New Line hosted a Twin Peaks festival in the summertime to celebrate the release of Fire Walk With Me. Over time, the number of visitors trailed off, only to surge when Twin Peaks moved to Netflix, and again when Showtime premiered The Return. Along the way, some of the fans have become celebrities in their own right—none more so than Josh Eisenstadt, who hosts a notoriously difficult annual trivia game (“Currently at Peaks trivia and know no answers,” Harley Peyton, a writer on the show, texted me) and loves nothing more than to lead tour buses to check out landmarks like the Roadhouse, the Packard Mill, Big Ed’s Gas Farm, and the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Office, now occupied by the DirtFish Rally Driving School.

For fans of the show, it was a relief to be among people who shared the anguish they’d been feeling since Lynch’s death just a few weeks ago. The memorial service began with a 10-minute meditation led by Annie Skipper, the director of the Transcendental Meditation center in Bellevue, Washington, who had known Lynch for decades. All 200 or so attendees in the room sat or stood silently for the duration, setting a tone of contemplative calm.

A series of speakers then gave brief, heartfelt remarks. Karl Reinsch, who helped persuade the towns of Snoqualmie and North Bend to formally recognize Twin Peaks Day, read a passage from Frost’s book Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, in which the show’s famous Log Lady said: “In a dark time, hold the light within you.” The statement resonated on several levels, as the chaos in Washington, DC, lurked beyond the borders of the fictional town being brought to life here for a weekend.

The most moving speech came from Eisenstadt, who said he’d done the math and concluded that he met 90 percent of the people he knows through his passion for Twin Peaks. Eisenstadt first encountered the show around the age of 12 and went on to become friends with a large group of cast members. When he walked a tour group through the erstwhile sheriff’s office, he was able to get Kimmy Robertson, who plays the spacey receptionist Lucy Moran, on the phone to address them. “Hiii. You guys gonna get some work done there at the office?” she asked the delighted group. “I know it’s not as clean as it should be.”

In his speech at the memorial, Eisenstadt recalled meeting Lynch on the set of Mulholland Drive. When Lynch saw him, he started peppering him with trivia questions. Later, Eisenstadt shared the story with a cast member from The Return, who said, “‘You know why he did that? Because he saw you and he knew how much it would mean to you.’ And that was David in a nutshell,” Eisenstadt said. “He would see you, he would see who you were, and he would do something to make your day a little brighter, to make your life better, something he knew you would carry with you. Because that’s who he was. We’ve lost an amazing person and artist, but he lives on in all of us.”

The last person to take the stage was a surprise guest. When she removed her mask and began to sing “Llorando,” a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” the fans let out a gasp. It was Rebekah Del Rio, singing the song she made famous in Mulholland Drive. “I am so honored to be here with you this morning,” she said when she had finished. “Every word that was said this morning is exactly what I’ve been feeling.”

Del Rio wasn’t the only person from Lynch’s onscreen world who gathered with the fans. Ray Wise, who plays Laura Palmer’s father, gave a Q&A, signed autographs, and even turned up to sign “Mares Eat Oats” at a gathering on Friday night billed as “Leland’s Karaoke.” (His character, Leland Palmer, had a penchant for inappropriately breaking out into song, to the horror of his grieving wife.)

Up at the Salish, Wise teared up as he reflected on Lynch’s death. “For a couple of days, it was like I was walking around a little bit of a David Lynch fog. I felt a hole in my heart. I never expected that I would feel that way, but there it was,” he said. “But then, I took some solace in the fact that, for David, there’s never an ending. He didn’t fear death because he feels that it continues. We continue on in a cycle.”

On Sunday, during his tour of filming locations, Eisenstadt led a group of fans onto the iron bridge where Ronette Pulanski—who survived the ordeal that claimed Laura Palmer’s life—can be seen in the pilot staggering in a daze back toward town. It’s a haunting location already for fans steeped in the tragedy of Laura Palmer, and the visit was made more emotional by the discovery that earlier groups of Twin Peaks pilgrims had written tributes to Lynch on the railings in the weeks since his death: “Long Live Lynch,” “We Live Inside a Dream,” and, perhaps most poignantly given today’s political climate, “Fix Your Hearts or Die”—a reference to the ultimatum Lynch’s character in the show, FBI deputy director Gordon Cole, delivered to anyone in the bureau who refused to accept the trans agent played by David Duchovny.

Not for the first or last time that weekend, there were tears among the fans who’d spent so many years steeped in the worlds of Lynch’s creations. “I’ve got to get off this bridge,” said one. “I wasn’t expecting it to make me cry.”