The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (18 page)

Watson, who grew up listening to baseball games from distant ballparks, always thought he would move away to a real city. But he never left town. After baseball, he stumbled into the even cushier job of sports-writing, which led him to the better gossip tables in town and an expanded column format. He knew the bohemians and socialists, the Woody Guthrie crowd who sang until dawn at Lake Union houseboat parties; he followed Mark Tobey as he made a career painting the moods of the Pike Place Market; and when Ernest Hemingway passed his last day in Ketchum, Idaho, it was Watson who found out the death was a suicide and broke the news to the world. He helped the crusaders of the early 1960s as they campaigned to clean up Lake Washington, expand the region’s park system and launch a world’s fair that would leave the city with a landmark, the Space Needle, and a performing-arts complex.

Seattle was a place where a few citizens, not necessarily powerful but with access to a voice or a money source or a Senator, could change things. People moved here from the East or Midwest determined to do good, and in five years’ time they were part of the power structure (and five years later some of them were part of the problem). Long before there was an Environmental Protection Agency or a Clean Water Act, a
young bond lawyer shamed the city into paying for a massive cleanup of Lake Washington. Freeways which threatened parks or the quiet of settled neighborhoods were stopped in midair construction (they became known as the ramps to nowhere). A forested park was created on a lid covering Interstate 5, and an aging industrial plant was transformed into a public playground and kite-flying mound. Unlike Los Angeles, a city set in a Mediterranean paradise which long ago lost its resiliency, Seattle tried to practice some self-restraint.

But then things started to change. National magazines, beginning with
Harper’
s in the mid-1970s, declared Seattle the most livable city in America. In the 1980s, Rand McNally rated the city the number-one vacation destination in the country, and
Savvy
magazine said it was the best place for women to live.
Sports Illustrated
pronounced Seattle a haven for the urban outdoorsman. The television news magazine 60
Minutes
said Seattle was the best place in the country to have a heart attack because the emergency medical response was so good. Trade periodicals wrote that the average Seattle resident read more books, attended more movies and purchased more sunglasses (lost between solar appearances) than people in other cities.
Esquire
weighed in with a story on the Seattle lifestyle—“a major subculture of lawyers-turned-carpenters” and “some significant going home at four-thirty,” and “on a famous ferry going into famous Seattle, dusk on a November night, the sky, the water, the mountains are all the same color: lead in a closet. Suicide weather. The only thing wrong with this picture is that you feel so happy.”

All of this was acid in the face of Lesser Seattle. With each accolade came strangers who wanted a piece of Seattle and wanted it now, with some alteration. It was a curse, this Most Livable City tag, the revenge of Chief Sealth, coming at a time when the Northwest, like the rest of North America, was giving up its farms and becoming a continent of urbanites. Two-thirds of Oregonians now live within a hundred miles of Portland; seventy percent of Washington’s population lives in the Puget Sound basin, and half of British Columbia’s residents crowd the area around Vancouver. In Seattle, growth begat gridlock, drug wars and office buildings that broke through the ceiling of the cloud cover but greeted pedestrians like a basement wall. The Scandinavian business tradition which helped Nordstrom go from a single shoe store on Pike Street to the largest clothing retailer in the nation gave way to bigger money from the outside and bottom-line executives who couldn’t give a damn about the water purity of Lake Washington or how some season-ticket holder felt about “his” Seahawks. To the old motivation of greed was
added a new reason for the changing cityscape: ego. Martin Selig, a diminutive developer who owns a third of all the office space in the city, remade the skyline faster than a troop of volunteers had done just after the Great Fire of 1889. He reached the zoning code zenith with the seventy-six-story Columbia Center, the tallest building on the West Coast when completed in 1981. Paul Schell, who came to Seattle from Iowa, took a look at the Columbia Center and said, “If Martin Selig had been six-foot-five instead of five-foot-six, that building would be only half as big.”

In the midst of Seattle’s growing pains, Watson went to Switzerland to visit Mark Tobey during the painter’s final years. Long after he left the country, Tobey continued to draw upon Seattle as the source of his inspiration: the sky could make four different faces in an hour; the wind jumped off the water and tumbled through the streets; anywhere you looked, from a hilltop neighborhood to a waterfront dock, at any time, the curtains might open and a mountain range would appear. If those peaks had been in hiding for a few weeks of winter, they looked new. Tobey was crushed by the march of the megalopolis toward the Cascades and the wave of generic skyscrapers downtown. Overnight, cities were shaking off their past and repackaging themselves in a single uniform. Seattle in the late twentieth century, once again ignoring the natural blueprint of its setting, was going the same way. “Landmarks with human dimensions are being torn down to be replaced by structures that appear never to have been touched by human hands,” said Tobey.

Tobey’s disgust became fighting words. The Downtown Seattle Association wanted to tear down the century-old Pike Place Market, heart and soul of the city and Tobey’s favorite hangout, and replace it with a ritzy mall. They had their eyes on Doc Maynard’s old plat, the century-old stone buildings of Pioneer Square, as bulldozer fodder. Both were saved by a vote of the citizens.

Land is finite and fragile; once it’s capped by pavement or smothered with buildings, it will not answer to the laws of nature. The no-growth movement gained strength with people who said there was nothing wrong with big trees and steep hills and small buildings. They challenged the long-held assumption that the West was a blank slate that would only reach a semblance of civilization when it started to resemble the East, or Europe. Sure, more people brought more sophistication, but, for all the fine talk, it made for less room. The most audacious statement in the early days was made by Oregon Governor Tom McCall. “Come and visit
us again and again,” said McCall. “But for God’s sake don’t come here to live.”

Watson’s approach was along the same lines, with humor as the main weapon. The only National Basketball Association game ever to be called on account of rain (a leaky Seattle Coliseum roof) was touted as cause for a civic holiday. Presidential visits were rated by order of disaster: William Howard Taft was stung on the neck by a bee; Warren G. Harding caught a cold in the damp Puget Sound weather and died soon after his brief visit; Franklin Roosevelt was drenched when his open car was hit by a sudden squall; and candidate George Bush’s motorcade at rush hour so backed up traffic that it helped to shift sentiment in favor of his Democratic opponent.

Still, all the Lesser Seattle talk only made those coveting a piece of the new city think the citizens were hiding some secret. And when they came and settled into their four-bedroom homes on a ridge bordering Mount Si near the site of the old Watson family pea farm, they joined Lesser Seattle. The city was caught in a paradox: As long as Seattle was seen as fresh and malleable, it would not be left alone. So, in the 1980s, the metropolitan area’s population grew at twice the national average, and the central business core took on more office towers than downtown Los Angeles. Frustration mounted, pooled into those intersections wherever two or more waits to pass through a traffic light were frequent. In response, a group of citizens, most of them recent arrivals, put together an initiative to cut new skyscraper construction by two-thirds. And so the question of whether the premier city of the Pacific Northwest answers to the rhythms of the land or the demands of the marketplace has been reduced to a vote on how big and how fast new buildings can go up in the old haunt of Doc Maynard.

The obsessive need for growth is seen, in the Lesser Seattle view, as insecurity, a hangover from the resource-colony days. A city that has no confidence in its own ability to prosper is doomed to control by outsiders. While the vote nears, the debate is over who runs Seattle, what its true destiny may be. As when three owners of the same house try to decide how to remodel, there is no unifying vision. Some say Seattle should aspire to be the Paris of Puget Sound, accepting growth with grand European style and direction, a meeting of the ideal with the inevitable. This recalls New York–Alki, a city groping for greatness by trying to be like something else, instead of creating itself from the elements of its natural setting. Others want to seal the city entirely, drawing a line at
the forested edge and putting up the Keep Out signs. The arguments rage for months, and then on a spring day when the Cascades hang in the grip of alpenglow till 9
P.M
., a hundred years after the city burned to the ground, the verdict is in: by a nearly two-to-one margin, citizens of Seattle vote to curb future development drastically. What’s important about Seattle, they say, is not glass and steel and money—those are the elements of Texas—but air and light and water.

At the Pike Place Market, where Emmett Watson lives and works and has decided to hang his birthday gift, a neon Lesser Seattle sign, I order a shot of espresso, buy a cigar from the woman at the Athenian Cafe who always calls me “Honey,” and then walk out into the Marrakesh of the Northwest. The small-market concept has caught on in other cities of North America and in the suburbs as well. But Pike Place Market is little changed over the last century; Disney could never come up with this strip of commercial chaos on the bluff above Elliott Bay. The city that surrounds this market is all new. Yet Mark Tobey could sit here on his stool today and see truck farmers and crab-vendors and anarchists shouting to nobody; then as now, the market was the soul of the city.

Just below the market is the site of the old Longshoreman’s Hall, where I used to go when I skipped college classes in search of a day’s work. They’d call my number most times, and then I’d be sent to unload boxes from one of the big container ships tied up in Elliott Bay. The old guys would always talk about how their union could shut down the whole West Coast, and the young guys talked about getting laid and getting stoned. For one day’s work, I’d make $75, about as much as I paid for my share of the monthly rent at our college house on Corliss Street. Then I’d walk up here to buy oysters and a piece of baklava and a bottle of good wine. After a plate of raw Quilcene oysters, I’d go home feeling as though I’d just had my blood changed, and not caring whether I ever made any money or finished school.

The Longshoreman’s Hall is a condo now, peach-colored, I think. I meet Watson, and we talk about the recent vote and sports and a bunch of new writers he’s discovered and how all the new construction has disemboweled the city. He shuffles and puffs on unfiltered cigarettes. We look out at the bay where I’d kayaked. Some of the towns on Puget Sound stink of sulfur and have poisoned their harbors by kowtowing to the mills. Seattle, having finally passed through its phase as a Resource Town, is healing, free at last of the forest-industry smokestacks. Perhaps, with the
recent vote, it is also free of the need to pump itself up like an insecure body-builder. The last big sawmill within the sprawl of the city, a Weyerhaeuser plant near Snoqualmie Falls, has closed down. There is something in that news nugget for historians and prophet-checkers: built on the lumber trade, Seattle no longer has a sawmill, but has become a more active theater town than any other place outside of New York. Its two chief export products are now Boeing jet planes and Microsoft computer software.

Today is one of those days when Seattle can’t hide: the sun makes everything appear fresh-painted and makes everybody walk as if fresh-charged. From the hillside market, we see the island where Vancouver parked his ship, the grave of Chief Sealth, the passageway of Winthrop. Cities are transient, reflecting the tastes of the time; but the spirit of a place is much harder to recast. Try as they did, humans have not been entirely able to shake Seattle from its inclination to be wild: blackberry brambles spring from cracks in the cement covering the sawed-off hills, and a few eagles still nest in the snags of Seward Park, a shank of old-growth trees ten minutes from the skyscrapers of downtown.

As we walk down the crowded market aisles, everyone says Hi to Watson. When livability replaced progress as the chief concern of many citizens here, he became one of the city’s best-known celebrities. They give him slaps on the back and talk up the recent rain storms and the vote to cap the skyscrapers—that’ll keep the bastards out, huh, Emmett? The Pope of Lesser Seattle puffs on his Pall Malls and moves on. He knows better than to encourage them.

Chapter 6
N
ATIVES

The dead are not powerless. Dead, I say?

There is no death. Only a change of worlds
.

CHIEF SEALTH, January 22, 1855