Eyeing Seattle

Seattle is a funky place.

For nearly two hundred years Seattle has cast aspersions on Tacoma as a weird, undesirable place to even travel through. I don't begrudge this lack of vision, but I don't share it either. From my wonderful, friendly home here in Tacoma I can look at Seattle and say with almost no smirk that it is one of the 10 best places on earth... maybe 20.

The road system is as confusing in Seattle as it can possibly get. This is not their fault. The city is built on a swamp, closed in on every side by great cliffs. There are, of course, breaks in the cliffs like at Lake Washington. That's where the expensive expensive housing is. The normal expensive housing is crammed in next to the impossible freeway stacked on top of itself and partly buried.

Hmmm. Buried. That brings up another delightful aspect of Seattle. The city has a "history" (cue the spooky music). Early settlers--having no more brains than your average stone--decided that the great big swamp in front of those bloody tall cliffs was the perfect place to settle. They had a really good reason: they were lazy. They figured if they built below the tree filled cliffs, when they cut the trees down--for both housing and profit--they could just let gravity do the hard part. It worked pretty good, too.

So they installed the "seamstresses" on the south side of town; the lumber mills on the cliff side of town; the port in the only deep end of town; and the bars everywhere else. Life was pretty sweet.

Of course there were little niggly problems, but nothing a robust man couldn't handle. The indians were more or less friendly. (The indians were more or less convinced the white man was crazy. They knew where the best places to build were and Seattle had got it wrong. ...So had an earlier group but that's another story.) The trees, once the cliffs had been stripped bare, took a bit of slucing to get to mill, but the land thereabouts had tons of water. What self respecting camp didn't have it's log skid for tree transport and it's skid road for derelicts?

There was also the plague of rats; the child or two drowning in the "mud puddles"; and the creative little problem caused by the gravity feed toilet. I'll talk about those next time.