Years ago, when the Society was founded in an apartment above a bar on Polk Street, leaving the city was not an option. The city was everything, what was not contained there I didn’t need. It was true, until it wasn’t, and everything I came to...
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Years ago, when the Society was founded in an apartment above a bar on Polk Street, leaving the city was not an option.
The city was everything, what was not contained there I didn’t need.

It was true, until it wasn’t, and everything I came to require was prone to rot and had a name I didn’t know. Where I needed Beaux-Arts cornices, now it is the wet smell of wood, mushrooms blooming fungal details no less architectural. I still defend cities against less loving neighbors who consider them dangerous and dirty, but my relationship with the city of Seattle compels me to leave it again and again.

What does this mean for reportage of the Tenderloin Geographic Society? The missives will perhaps be more sporadic. I have a few months to determine whether the site stays or goes, and in the meantime, I commit to memory the Latin names of wildflowers and work on spotting birds of prey by the complaints of crows.
That I knew I’d have to learn the language of place was never in doubt, but somehow I forgot the rule of acquiring a new tongue: nothing means what you think it will. 

The following is a response to a piece published by the Seattle Times. To say that you are shaped by weather is to say that you are rock worn down by rain and salt. To claim your right to a canopy of trees is to deny that this is where gravity loses...
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The following is a response to a piece published by the Seattle Times.

To say that you are shaped by weather is to say that you are rock worn down by rain and salt. To claim your right to a canopy of trees is to deny that this is where gravity loses its hold as Boeing projects us further, faster. To say that no one else has purchase on this place, taken from others, is equivalent to licking your finger and squawking “Mine, mine, mine!” as you ruin a plate of party cookies.

You, a native son whose sense of familial gravity was such that you never left, deny anyone could ever know what it is to be a native.

And so it is: in my native place, transplants, excited to have moved to the city of their dreams, marveled that such a mythical city could produce children.

“You are so lucky,” they declared, unflinching in their love of adopted place.

And I was happy for them, and still I left. Now on my third city, I find Seattle not unlike a third bowl of porridge: just right.

What you cannot know is the immense pleasure of being an outsider, of smelling the sweetness of this place for the first time, and how that lingering softness of forest floor and ozone from a first rain never leaves one’s blood. How, despite spending years in a far colder place, Seattle is moderate, with actual summers in lieu of chilling fog that sends the trees dripping fat drops. There is no forecast for such rain, and so when you leave the house on a sunny day you wear no fewer than three layers lest someone take you for a tourist who has overestimated the famous west coast sun.

This, your screed, does not take into account the asylum that Seattle has provided for refugees from around the world. Forgive my Cambodian friend who cannot make it out to scale Rainier, he works six days of the week and never quite took to the weather despite his 30 or so years here.

Speeches about character being built through labor are delivered by those who would have you believe that this is true simply because they say it is so: a sort of syllogistic abracadabra.

This founding myth, one that keeps about as well as salmon in hot weather, is one that I know well. My great-grandparents made Seattle their home at the turn of the last century, and I’ve long had run of the Pacific Northwest before settling here. And yet, I am not a native: happily so. I bring something entirely different, and as a city is its people, I am glad that I can bring a scorn for provincialism and a hope that those of us who have seen what went wrong in other cities can see it go right here.

So like a rock may you remain, and the weather of which you are so profoundly proud to have withstood will, in time, wear you down. A chip the size of an old-growth conifer on your shoulder, may you bear witness as your city is overrun by change.

And so I hope it never ends, because when our city stops changing, we meet our end.   

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Might be the best yard flair in Seattle, these carousel ponies. Not shown: giant coffee cups, elephants, horses made of engine parts, concrete hands and bunny-eared trees. Down the street, there’s still a Disneyana fiberglass deer, sun-faded and smiling with its eyes.
The yards of Seattle give lie to the perception of its populace as cold. What is mistaken for ice is reserve, caution. How serious can you be with a giant metal chicken in your garden?