Impractical. Loves to read. Chilly (but never cold) on the outside; exuberant and maybe a little odd on the inside. Has amazing taste in music. Perpetually wears a sweater and jeans. Isn't afraid to be a little dorky. Surrounded by water, and the mountains, and hundreds of tall pine trees.
Is it any wonder that I love Seattle?
At first, I'll admit, it was a physical thing. I'd missed the trees. Missed being in a place where there's just a bit of a nip to the air. And after spending the last few weeks being surrounded by chiseled, clean-cut California types, I found it somehow reassuring to run into dozens of roly-poly nerds on the streets of Seattle.
I'm also a sucker for stone and brick Art Deco architecture. I admire a city with the chutzpah to locate its art museum across the street from the "Lusty Lady." I've come to love listening to the radio in San Francisco, but Seattle stations put the Bay Area to shame. When I listen to the radio in San Francisco, I think, "This is the kind of stuff I played on my college radio station." When I listen to the radio here, I think, "This is the kind of stuff I'd be playing now if I remained a DJ after college, and spent my life exploring and learning about new music."
Did I mention that there are not one, but two widely-read broadsheet newspapers here? And the bookstores. Dear God, the bookstores. I thought I was spoiled in Boston, the "Athens of America," even though I'd lost Wordsworth and The Globe Bookshop and was reduced to hanging around a handful of Borders and Barnes & Noble. Here, there are bookstores everywhere. And they're huge, with books just spilling from the shelves, and they're packed with people, and there are readings every night. And some of them are attached to cafes: the Elliott Bay Book Company, for example, is upstairs from the coffee shop that served as the model for "Cafe Nervosa" on Frasier. It looks a lot more like the Fraiser cafe than Boston's Bull & Finch Pub looks like Cheers, and it isn't just a tourist destination: people go there to read, and drink coffee, and write, and argue about books. Paradise.
No, Seattle isn't Boston. In Boston (or more properly, in the small towns around Boston where I spent most of my time), there's a sense of history. People can't help it; they're surrounded by it. Guys in bars talk about what happened with the Red Sox in '75 and '86; women on public access cable TV argue over tax legislation and education reform bills that passed decades ago. My last apartment was older than most of Seattle. Maybe that's why people here talk about the 1990s as though it was ancient history. Granted, most of the people I've been talking to are in the hospitality industry, where people seem to change jobs every other week, but there seems to be a large transient population here. Only one person I've met in the last two days has lived in Seattle all their life. Everyone else had only been here a few months. They seemed to know little about the city's history, but they knew why they wanted to come here.
"I like that I don't have to wear a tie," said an older man I interviewed yesterday. He's the CEO of a hotel development company; in his spare time, he helps his neuroscientist friends market their inventions. "I'm from New England, and when you make a friend from New England, you've made a friend for life. Here, people are really friendly to you right away, but they've forgotten who you are a few minutes later. But I'd still rather be here. I like the casual atmosphere."
Yes, Seattle is casual; it makes San Francisco look buttoned-down. It's also bizarre. The city was founded on a tidal plain, making its first settlers subject to constant floods and problems with sewage that I'd prefer not to think about. After Seattle's first, wooden buildings burned down, the city government suggested raising the level of the streets in the downtown area (called Pioneer Square) to solve these problems. But the downtown merchants, who had been making a killing outfitting and cheating Gold Rush prospectors, refused to close their shops for any length of time. So the city went ahead and raised the level of the streets by ten feet, while leaving the stores and sidewalks in front of them at sea level.
This bizarre solution continued for a while, with people on the sidewalks constantly being struck and killed by things falling off the elevated streets. Then someone finally decided to cover over the sidewalks as well, so that the streets and sidewalks now reached the second story of most downtown buildings. People continued to use the underground sidewalks to reach the stores, creating the nation's first covered shopping mall. This worked out well for a while, until an outbreak of bubonic plague convinced people they were better off facing the Seattle weather than scurrying about underground with the rats. (Though I've seen Seattle rats, and for rats, they're not so bad).
The same cannot be said about the weather. It is not true that it is always raining in Seattle. It is probably true that it almost always looks like it is going to rain. I've been told that Mount Rainier is quite spectacular on the four or five days a year when it is possible to see it. I'm still waiting for the opportunity. However, it does not seem to snow very much in Seattle. They were predicting snow for Tuesday, and it seemed such an anomaly that the entire city was thrown into a panic. That's the kind of reaction I can appreciate.
Traffic in Seattle is also unpleasant. The city itself is eminently walkable, but since almost everyone works for either Boeing or Microsoft, and they're on the other side of a large body of water, traffic is snarled almost all of the time. I wondered why no one had bothered to build a subway, and was told that, in fact, the city had built some perfectly lovely tunnels, and then discovered that they were the wrong size for the trains they had purchased. Apparently they plan to revisit the idea in the near future.
The most disturbing thing about Seattle, however, is the sort of thing I saw today in Bellevue, which appears to have once been a pretty little suburb in the woods east of the city. Thanks to its proximity to Microsoft, and to Nintendo and Eddie Bauer and about half a dozen other corporate behemoths, however, Bellevue seems to be trying to turn itself into a giant strip mall, with Cheesecake Factories and Rock Bottom Breweries everywhere you look. (Oddly, although there are a heck of a lot of them, Starbucks doesn't bother me here as much as it does in other places, because it has a lot of competition — there seem to be more different kinds of coffee places here than there are fast food places in California).
Still, it's hard for me to get down on Seattle, even if there isn't a Dunkin' Donuts or Chicago-style pizza anywhere. In talking to Nam last night, I mentioned that there's a science fiction museum here next to the Space Needle.
"A science fiction museum?" she said. "So, would you be upset if I tried to talk you into moving to Seattle?"
"Not at all," I said. "Not one bit."
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