This morning Brent and I found ourselves talking about the design merits and demerits of various West Coast cities. This is the kind of thing you find yourself talking about in the gloom of winter here-- daily dark clouds so low you could touch them if you stretched. We agreed on the basics: Portland: so vibrant! San Francisco: so romantic! L.A: sun drenched! Seattle.
Pause.
Seattle?
"The problem with Seattle, " Brent said, "Is that it has never established its own color palette."
Now there's a line worth immortalizing.
Without a thought, you know L.A's palette: the blue of Hockney, warmth of terra cotta, pink of stucco and fuchsia of bouganvillea. Or San Francisco's: white skyline, blue ocean, white fog, warm hills, dark cypress. But Seattle?
Only a designer would see the world this way.
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We drove straight to the Trattoria Mitchelli restaurant on Yesler in Pioneer Square where I had agreed to hook up with my new friends. We had all just met at the Second Yellow Bay Writer’s Conference on Flathead Lake and the Seattleites among us said why don’t you come and visit, stay for a few days if you’d like, and we did. After we popped out of the tunnel on I-90, we went straight to the Elliott Bay Bookstore and later to the Trattoria where we ordered our drinks and spent a few hours crazy talking about books and writing and about Tom McGuane who we had all gone there to see and have him read our stories. It was nighttime and raining, of course, and the windows were all dark, but the lights inside were glowing yellow and it was warm and we sat around a long trestle table with our beers and whiskeys and talked books, poetry, and writing, our black hiking boots against the golden fir floors, the earth colors of our Nepalese, Himalayan and South American hemp vests and shirts, the greens and browns, the bright turquoise Mexican shirts of the women. The lights were all reds and yellows the old Italian beer ad posters all primary colors, and we loved our smiling waitress with her purple blouse and a necklace of Mexican jasper bought that very day from a vendor at the Pike Place Market, which she couldn’t stop talking about because we’d admired the way it reflected the light and how blue it made her eyes, and she, her bobbed blonde hair clipped like a boy in back, happily chattered away and served us steins of beer and ale and shooters of Old Bushmill’s, knowing somehow that she was already a character in a half-dozen stories and poems being born right there on the spot.
Then years later after I moved to the island I came into town on the Bainbridge ferry early in the morning and the sun had just come up and its morning light was barely cresting the Cascades and brightening the city and the streets descending from First Hill still wet from overnight rain. It was just at that moment of the morning when the sky’s not quite black anymore but has a dusting of silver and hasn’t surrendered to the sun yet and the blue and yellow band against the horizon is widening as if the sun is prying open the nighttime sky the way a fishmonger springs a clamshell. The neon lights, the arc lights, the street lights, the lights in the offices of the skyscrapers were still burning against the rising sun and the gradually blueing sky and I suddenly knew why they called Seattle the Emerald City.
I defy anyone to take the ferry to Bainbridge in the October evening and after watching the sun go down behind the Olympics come and tell me with a straight face that it isn’t possible to fall in love with the light in Seattle.
Charybdis