Rust & Romance in the Emerald City

Imagine that each major American city is a family member and you’re having a family reunion. New York is your lean, gay cousin who spent way too much money on gifts for his nieces and nephews. Anaheim is your eccentric bi cousin with the ironically cool mullet who designs furniture. Uncle Denver is the playful, bearded coach with the athletic wife who’s politely pretending she thinks all the pot jokes are “hysterical!”, and Uncle Atlanta is the tatted cop whose wife actually did bring the weed.

Then there’s Seattle, sleekly dressed in head-to-toe black, her modern, sweeping sidebang resting above her perfect brows and intelligent eyes, skin moist from the dew that continually saturates her city. She’s politely taking a call in the corner, smiling at people who notice she’s made it to the reunion, and gesturing with a gloved hand that she’ll only be a moment. Seattle is your cousin who was adopted into the family and has always been kind of different … but in a good way. Seattle is — in essence — Lydia Deets, but grown and grounded with the morose stages of her teenhood behind her.

Everything is wet. Wooden homes, practically piling upon one another in the steep terrain of Beacon Hill, are swollen from the constant moisture of the Pacific Northwest, the architectural embodiment of the lumberjack and his work. The abundance of steel beams in sodden industrial yards give SoDo (south downtown) a rusted, skeletal look that’s grizzled and masculine. Raindrops from the window of the transit bus gather and amble sideways, a lazy feel that (along with the cloudiness and masses of walkers in puffy down jackets) soothes the soul and tells the body, “This is book-reading-on-the-couch weather, no?”

Everything is alive. The saturation of clean water means the city is green with life. For brief moments, the sun glances down at the umbrella tops of Seattle, decides things are still fine, and retires. In that flash, people are reminded why Seattle’s nickname is The Emerald City. It’s lush. There are parks everywhere — even, seemingly, where they weren’t even planned. Any crack in the sidewalk or unattended cistern is host to an uninvited, but welcome, diversity of plantlife. You cannot stop the impromptu botanical outbursts here. Not in these conditions. But why would you?

Everything is stylish. Off the train and into the street, the first thoughts are of San Fran, with its hilly roads that make luggage your travel beasts of burden. The air is cool, clean … a departure from the rarified (but arid) Denver variety. Taxi tires slice through silvery sheets of rainwater that suck at the soles of walkers’ shoes. Black clothing dominates the scene, scarves smartly providing a blossom of color making sure never to tip the greyscales of Seattle fashion into the colorwheel. Some say drab, others sleek.

Everything is evident. Seattle isn’t a city of secrets. It’s common knowledge that prostitutes attended to the needs of lonely prospectors with a 20:1 ratio (women to men) and that the staggering profits of what madames liked to call their “seamstresses” meant the women of the town enjoyed the power of the purse strings. In a time when women couldn’t vote, they simply bought their way into the system with campaign contributions to help pro-women politicians take seats behind the bench and fill the halls of Washington’s Congress. What was at first a city-planning embarrassment (“Why would people build on land that’s sinking?”) became a charming measure in the history of a city that, not unlike Chicago, is literally stacked above the saloons, wheat storages, and boardwalks that it used to be. The city has plenty of juicy details of debauchery — their clever prohibition curtailing being a favorite, eh Canada? — that it loves to regale visitors with.

Puget Sound is mostly still, even with the ferries that continually carve through carrying passengers and their vehicles alike to adjacent islands for shopping, eating, and — if one is lucky enough — returning home.

Not only is everything wet, but everyone is hydrated. It’s hard not to notice the skin of Seattle denizens. Walking through a constant mist — even when it’s so sheer it’s practically undetectable — is to walk through atomized youth, giving skin the very compound that forces glow, leaving it little choice but to fool age-guessers and spark the envy of those who didn’t grow up with the built-in fortune of effortless skin care.

Swiping her phone and dropping it into her bag, Seattle emerges from the darkness of the corner, green eyes ablaze once she steps into the light. She makes her way to the small crowd and puts a light hand on the back of Uncle Denver’s orange hoodie. He turns to her and activates that mile-high grin. “You should come visit me more often,” she requests, punching his burly arm with a dainty, gloved fist. “I’m not even a three-hour flight away!”