sw 2 nw by mw

The journey from Phoenix to Seattle now complete, the housing situation now settled, some of the sights now seen, I awake one morning and realize I start a new job the next day. Dang, you mean this doesn’t last forever? I’ve been enjoying it so – clearing out my head, getting out of the box for a little stretch. But it was after all a job that brought me here, so it must be done. And from what I hear it’s no slacker job either. Cutting edge web programming, a few notches above anything I’ve done before. Others had assured me I can handle it, it’s just going to make my head hurt for a while. It’s nice that other people have confidence in me, because I don’t always have it myself. I’ve always believed I’m smart enough to rise to any mental challenge, but I haven’t always sought them out. My ex-wife once accused of being mentally lazy, and I didn’t disagree. But if it came down to it, is there anything I couldn’t wrap my head around? I don’t know, I’ve known people much smarter, and a lot of them didn’t go to college. But I digress; the main challenge at this new job is an academic one, and that was always my strength.

So the first day was spent surfing the company’s website from a user standpoint. I did not have to sit down and prove my worth just yet. The rest of the week was more training, eventually with some glimpses at the code itself. The guy training me, Tim, is 25 years old with 10 years of web programming under his belt – about the same as me – but to a much deeper level and at a lot younger age. Like many web developers, he did not go to college. Until recently universities did not teach this stuff – you had to learn on the job like I did, or by trial and error on your home computer. There is a whole generation of young programmers creating the internet as we go. Marketing execs may tell us what to use the internet for, but the nerds make it happen. And then they invent the new stuff before the bosses even know it’s possible. They are plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers, electricians and architects all rolled into one. It continues to amaze me. Tim knows cold fusion, java, javascript, sql, .net, c++, EXT, as well as the usual supporting languages. I only know a fraction. I was intimidated by his technical superiority. But he was not trying to make me feel that way, he was very supportive and knows that this company is working at the highest levels and anyone coming aboard will have a lot of learning to do. On top of that, he has been the only programmer on his particular project for a while, so he’s desperate for someone to share the workload with. It’s very much in his interest that I succeed.

Life:

I have today, Friday, off to travel to Sacramento for my cousin’s wedding. I’m on the plane right now. We just passed right over the pit mouth of Mt. St. Helens. It’s fascinating from the air, frightening from the ground. I drove by it a week earlier, on the way to Portland. It’s a jagged smashed out shell of a volcano, like a sandcastle kicked by God. And I remember when it happened. Seeing it in person reminded me of a dream I had a couple years ago: the visual image of looking up at the night sky and seeing the moon with half of it missing, terribly torn out by a huge meteor or some engineered explosion. To see something so massive, so basic, that has been there your whole life, for everyone’s whole life, to change so suddenly and by such violence.

Anyway. The long summer days have allowed for continued exploration of this new city after work. When work ends at 5 the sun is still high in the west, about what 2 oclock looks like in Phoenix. I could fit in a full round of golf, and just might once I get back to town with my clubs. My mom brought them up from Phoenix on the plane to this wedding, along with 2 suitcases full of clothes. I somehow neglected to bring anything with long sleeves, and only a few collared shirts for work. People in Seattle don’t dress anything like Phoenix. They dress up more for work and for going out, and for casual attire most people in my neighborhood dress punk, goth, gay, or if nothing else a cultivated trashy look – anything but lazy and scrubbish like me. Girls do not wear makeup here, it’s weird. I’ve always liked the natural look, but here it makes for a lot of plain looking girls because the other thing people are not is as good looking as in Phoenix. Homely faces, soft unexercised bodies, pale vampire skin. I’m the tannest person wherever I go. Oh but the tattoos you’ll see. Every man and woman is covered, sleeved, and for no reason. Nobody has one tattoo, they have one hundred tattoos. I don’t have any. You see so many spider webs on elbows you’d think we were IN prison.

The downside of downtown:

After about 3 weeks here, some of the novelty of downtown living is wearing thin. Foremost, the constant strain of finding parking. In my neighborhood there is nowhere you can park all the time for free. Most street parking is free from 6pm – 8am every day, and all parking is free Sundays. But in some areas you always need a permit, like in front of my building. It’s taken a lot of circling the block and running downstairs to pump the meter at 2 hour intervals, but I’m getting the hang of it and have not gotten a single ticket yet. There’s actually a spot next to the building where no one seems to park because it looks like a bus stop. So that’s been my spot every night this week. To acquire an actual guaranteed spot in a parking lot a block or two away would cost $200 a month. I look at that as raising my rent $200, and that would make the rent unacceptably high. Fortunately I don’t have to worry about it cause there aren’t actually any of those spots available right now. So we live day to day.

Another growing annoyance is the traffic noise of I-5 about 100 yards out my window. At first I kept the windows open all the time and enjoyed the wall of sound. It was charming. Then it started waking me up at 430 in the morning, so I closed most of the windows. When they’re open I can’t talk on the phone.

Then there’s actually being in traffic. The freeways can get slow to and from work, but it’s not too bad because I don’t have very far to travel – 9 miles. But earlier this week I got a terrible taste of what they must mean by gridlock. I drove “Fred” home after work – he lives near me and got rid of his car over a year ago. I dropped him off right around 5pm the other day and started back to my place. It’s only a mile and a half, but it took more than half an hour. I literally could have walked there and back. I watched pedestrians pass me and keep going, eventually disappearing over the hill. It was so bad, it took 2 or 3 cycles of the traffic light to get through an intersection. Because you would get to the front of the line, and when it turned green you couldn’t go because the car at the back of the line in front of you was stuck with its back end still in the intersection. And then a couple cars would turn from the cross-street into the spot you wanted to take. So it became an endless, terrible, futile game. I turned onto some side street and drove a mile out of my way to get to my neighborhood from the back side. When I finally got home I just sat down with a beer and did nothing for a while to let it dissipate.

You can’t find a proper grocery store downtown. The closest place is a quik-e-mart where everything is overpriced and underquality. The best beer there is Redhook – and that ain’t very good. It’s passable, like Sierra Nevada, but nothing you want to live on. I did locate a specialty beer store in the neighborhood and learned that there are several other breweries in Seattle, and most of them do make an extra hoppy IPA, but they charge crazy for it. Some are $18 for a single 22 oz bomber. Cmon, it’s not GAS for christ’s sake. Finally though, I found a pretty decent sized grocery store a little further up the street, and they carry Butte Creek IPA from Chico, which is probably my favorite outside of Sonora’s. Yeah, I’ll say this now – I was really spoiled living a mile from the best brewery in the world. In all my travels of the west coast or anywhere else, I’ve never found a beer I like as well as theirs.

The final gripe is on behalf of Petunia. She’s used to a doggie door and a yard, and now she has to hold her bladder for 9 hours while I’m at work. And she’s cooped up all the time. I take her out of the apartment 3 times a day but sometimes it’s just for 10 minutes. But then there’s…

The upside of downtown:

Greenlake Park, which I wrote about previously, is heaven for Petunia. A long trail to walk, lots and lots of dogs and people to check out, and most of all a big lake to play fetch in. If I chuck the ball as far as I can it takes her at least a minute to retrieve it. And that water is cold, even in July. She gets a hell of a workout, and always wants more.

The closeness to everything. Pike Street fish market, a major icon of this city, is just a stroll away. You could flick a marble down the street and it would roll all the way there. Aside from watching the men throw fish around, you can eat in restaurants or better yet buy your groceries from the fresh-daily selection of every fruit and vegetable you can think of, and every flower too.

No air pollution. I have not seen that brown layer of smog since passing the Bay Area. The air here is clean – clean as can be. I don’t know why, there’s not a lot of wind, but the air must keep circulating. My skin has cleared up completely, after living with some acne for years in Phoenix. And they said it was stress. Yeah, the stress of living in a shitty environment.

Water everywhere. Puget Sound to the west, lakes to the north, south and east. I cross beautiful huge bodies of water dotted with boats every day. Whitecaps when it’s windy. When it’s clear you can see the Olympic mountains to the west and 14,000-foot Mt. Rainier to the southeast, covered in snow in July.

Out of town:

This weekend I’m in Sacramento. Next weekend I plan to camp in the mountains. Last weekend I camped along the Columbia River. The picture below isn’t a lake or an ocean, it’s a river. I’ve never seen one so wide, ever.

Imagine how much rain and snow the northwest gets. Well, it all drains into the Columbia, making it the largest American river after the Mississippi. In places it is over a mile wide, or several. It divides the land. There is no sense that this is a moving water that has carved a path through the land. This is simply a water, and land north of it and a land south of it. Three separate things. For most of it’s length there is no possibility of spanning it with bridges. The only bridges I know of are at Portland, and at Astoria about a hundred miles downstream at the mouth. Where the Columbia empties into the Pacific there is such turbulence and constantly moving sandbars that literally hundreds of ships of all sizes have gone down there in the past 150 years. They call it the Graveyard of the Pacific.

I drove highway 4 on the Washington side of the river, twin to another highway on the Oregon side. I got out late enough from Portland to know I wouldn’t have the time – much less the tent – to do traditional camping. So I drove until it was late and dark enough, and pulled into a wildlife preserve. The sign said it was protecting the Cascades Whitetail Deer. I wasn’t sure if car camping was allowed, but at that hour I wouldn’t be caught until morning, so I drove slowly down the road and pulled into a pullout that seemed designed for the purpose. My car is not large but it is a wagon and believe it or not if the rear seats are down I can fully stretch out in the back. Petunia slept in the front seat, and it was downright cozy. In the morning this was the view:

That’s now my desktop photo. I can’t claim any skill, it was just that beautiful a sight. We drove off quickly before any rangers came along, and continued toward the coast. The next picture is in a little town nearby in Wahkiakum county. Everything has native american names here. Like most places in America I guess.

Eventually you reach the coast at Long Beach. It’s a peninsula that stretches north from where the Columbia reaches the sea, and it claims to be the world’s longest beach. By the map it’s about 25 miles, so I guess I believe it. You can drive on it, so I did. With the fog that morning you could only see 150 yards in any direction. I could hear sea gulls crying before I could see them fly into view. It was eerie but beautiful. It’s the most pristine beach I’ve ever seen. There wasn’t a single cigarette butt, candy wrapper, or even a footprint except what Petunia and I made.

The only litter is the empty shells of dungeness crabs, red and brittle from the sun and wind. The wind blows hard from north to south, and makes tiny dunes in the sand that run perpendicular to the sea, which looks strange. This would be a wonderful beach to camp on, but by morning you could be driven insane from the wind. It was blowing constantly about 20-30 mph. Relentless, making everything difficult, even talking. But travel 200 yards inland and the sky is clear, fogless and calm. A strange and intriguing place I will go back to.

From Long Beach the road turns north and you pass through Wilapa Bay, oyster capital of the world. There are a lot of capitals of the world up here it seems. I figured I ought to try these oysters, so I bought a plastic pint tub of raw ones to take home and cook. They were called medium size, but each was as big as my tongue, and far slimier. Earlier in the day I had stopped to fish in a creek and landed what I guess is the largest trout I’ve ever caught. Now I had seafood for my first home-cooked dinner back in Seattle.

Further up the road is Aberdeen – obscurely famous as the place that produced Kurt Cobain. I loved Nirvana in their time. I have all their stuff. They were extremely influential on me musically, but Kurt was a real downer and a jerk. What exactly was he complaining about? He was a punching bag in a little redneck town and somehow became as big a rockstar as there is, and he had to kill himself? Don’t blame it on Aberdeen though, it looked like heaven to me – woods everywhere, water to fish, close to the coast. Try living in Phoenix.

On a more personal level, Aberdeen is also famous for being next door to the reservation where my very good friend Catie grew up. In fact she and Alex and their son Flynn were just there a few days before me, but our schedules didn’t jibe. I really really hope she can show me around there some day. She’s described it as the most beautiful place on earth, and I don’t doubt it. Aberdeen is a logging town, and the reservation is somewhat lawless, she says. A place of immense natural beauty but where children are afraid of the woods at night and sometimes bad things happen in them. But that’s mostly confined to the edges of the forest near Aberdeen. The reservation contains a couple wild rivers full of salmon, and several miles of unspoiled beach. It’s odd after hearing so much about it back in Phoenix where such a place can’t properly be imagined, so that it seems like a fictional place existing only in her memory, that I should come so near the actual place and still not get to see it.

From Aberdeen it’s a quick drive to Olympia, the state capital. That’s on I-5 and an hour or so later you’re into Tacoma, then eventually Seattle. Like most everywhere, the distances are shorter than in Arizona.