Seattle : Industrial Musculature

There are plenty of people who call Seattle a beautiful city. I think they're mistaken if they are considering it as itself, especially if it's being measured against San Francisco or Chicago, cities where architects actually made an effort at intentional structural beauty. As for Seattle, all the really good architecture is outside of it. The Olympic mountains, the volcanic cascades, the islands of Puget Sound, Mount Baker fleeing fugitively behind the downtown as you draw north.That's the best stuff.

The next best stuff is the shipping yards. This is the element that San Fran pushed across the bay to Oakland, that New York forced upon Jersey. But in Seattle, if you're approaching from any route but the north, you see the rows of containers, a corridor of hydraulic cranes lined up like heiroglyphs at attention on either side of canals, the freight yards which cuts deeply and visibly into the city. This is the part that I love, the musculative of cable and steel tressles lifted for tug-boats belching diesel fumes up the Duwamish waterway and the cap of Rainier 60 miles away but still present as moonrise behind it all. It puts me in mind of Hiroshige's woodblock prints of Edo.

Then for the city itself, all the best views are from overpasses - the West Seattle Bridge, Alaska Way viaduct, the 45th street overpass of the I-5 - with a few good ones from former industrial areas turned public parks - Gasworks. But it's still not a particularly inspiring view. Sights of colorless buildings rising as though cut from blocks of obsidian and galena. Shiny, but indistinguishable from the mass of North American structural achievement. Nothing that when traced in outline would suggest to an outsider anything of the city of Seattle.  Well, there is the Space Needle, I suppose, though that doesn't mean very much. It's a show-trophy, a vanity piece, ballhoo. It's hard to form a city-identity off an elevated restaurant, unless you're Paris. The body of Seattle is all simple grey boxes with a few greyer boxes which are a tad pointier than the others.

I'm still trying to convince myself I want there to be more color in my life, and every so often will put on a bright shirt, or buy a pretty candy at a service station to admire it, but the fact is I'm a drab bird, and I like my nest to be feathered in my own muted palate of various shades of charcoal and soft blue. So I like Seattle, and cities like it. Northern ones of rust and grit and soot. Anthracite metropoles that seem pressed between a slate grey sky and slate blue water that parallel one another so far into the distance so they merge into one. Coming back feels each time like coming home.

Sometimes, having moved, and so frequently moved back, wherever I left off in the narrative of my own life is exactly the place where I pick back up, so that I come to feel that I have led multiple lives. As though there were volumes I opened and replaced for all the towns, who keep separate titles but still leak parts of themselves to each other, like authors across ages. It feels like time travel, that I'm coming and going and crossing paths with myself, and I come to wonder if I really ever left anywhere, if I am living someplace else simultaneously, and do I fall in love each time from scratch, or is it always with the same person and only the face which changes.