Anniversary Issue

Today is a dual anniversary.  First, I've been back in Seattle one year.  In that year, I've become reacquainted with everything I dig about this town: the watery light off the North Pacific, the madrona trees shading the long steps that cascade down Queen Anne Hill, the sunny, dry days that make you feel like you're walking through a Joni Mitchell song, the cold, wet days where you stay inside and drink coffee in your bathrobe.  I've rediscovered the joys of pho on dripping winter evenings, of gin-fueled dance parties in creaking Victorians, of noise shows in dingy bars, of arguing the difference between various Costa Rican coffees, of the hand-painted signs in Ethiopian script on East Cherry Street.

But, in addition to having spent one year back here, that's also one year I haven't been anywhere else.  I have not left Seattle city limits in 365 days, not even to go to a suburb.  I think, sometimes, about hopping on a bus to Shoreline or Tukwila just for the hell of it.  But this seems even more dismal.  My one time leaving the city would be to wind up in some chilly, windswept strip mall on a desolate strip of the Pacific Highway, before turning back.

I pride myself on being a peripatetic bastard.  On having rejected my home and gone to wander the Earth.  I'm slightly worn out and prone to reminisce about Cambodian mountaintops, about the long mosses that hang in the cold weather rainforests, about the steps of Sacré-Coeur on a July evening when Paris looks like an antique stereopticon.

So I have to wonder why it is I've stuck it out here.  I bitch about it a lot.  Everyone does.  Seattleites love to bitch about the rain, about the bad attitude it engenders, about that weird and pathetic desire that Seattle has to be a world city, to be a New York-in-the-Northwest, a Paris-on-the-Puget.

The virtual city threatens to overwhelm the old real.  The digital age has transformed the old town of salmon canneries and creaking viaducts into a shiny chrome post-metropolis.  What I hate about Seattle is exactly this, its icy, venal character.

And what I love most about it is its remnants, the ruins of the old America that poke out through the pacified city.  The half-erased Chinese signs and signs in a vaguely Chinese font-- COLD BEER, CHOW MEIN-- painted in alleys, the red gantry cranes that sway over the harbor, the filthy river that carries the name of a near-extinct tribe in the city named for its chief, the sudden flights of seagulls that swoop down through cobblestone streets filled with fallen sakura blossoms.

To a certain extent, what keeps people in one place is inertia.  Obviously, there are personal connections as well, to work, to family, to friends.  But I think a lot of what keeps people in one place is that they don't know why they would move when there's no suggestion that where they move would be any better for them.  We will be in one place tomorrow because it's where we are today.

Other cities and countries beckon me, and sometimes I imagine my future self there: walking through the streets of Brooklyn on an early fall evening, biking along the seaside in L.A., high atop a Maoist apartment block in Shanghai, staring down the entangled cityscapes of Berlin or San Francisco or Saigon or Seoul.

But Seattle and I have reached something of an understanding.  It's the spot on Earth that I've chosen, at least for now.  And when I walk home late at night, or when I see the sun rising from behind the Cascades, it reveals itself to me, and it's like receiving a valentine.