Sluggish in Seattle

My girlfriend Anjali makes no secret of her desire to move with me to Seattle one day. This weekend we made a quick visit. While staying at her friend’s place in North Ballard I took an evening run down to Puget Sound, to see what I could glean about this place.

I plodded like a slug. My Uncle Ken and Aunt Nancy had put me up the night before at their house on Bainbridge Island, and all day I had been eating. At lunch they served a huge pot of clam chowder. Now I had all the pep of a shellfish, with pure cream in my veins. 

“The great thing about Seattle,” Ken had announced, as he launched into the fifth great thing about Seattle, “is you can do all the things you could possibly do in the Bay Area in a week, and do them in one day.”

I ran past gardens where rhododenrons and magnolias pulsed in pink and purple, down streets of mossy asphalt, and through a wood choked with ferns and broad-leaf plants. I passed a sign to the Nordic Heritage Museum and down the steep steps to Golden Gardens Park, a pebbly beach on Puget Sound.

Nothing golden at the Gardens that day. The sky was iron gray and the Olympic Mountains, which I knew to lie just across the Sound, were buried in rain. Here it was dry, however, and the park was full of merry people grilling and chatting around bonfires and playing volleyball in flannel shirts and long underwear. The sun may not have been out but they acted as if it was.

The next day the sun did come out and Seattle was transformed. We visited the Museum of Glass (pictured) and sunned ourselves on the beach at Point Defiance. We walked through Pike Place Market and admired the freshly-washed buildings of downtown, the shiny skyscrapers and the stately brick facades, and the bustling port in the middle of it all. When the sun is out, Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities anywhere.

But this day the gray would not lift, and I trudged on home. I took off my Montrail shoes, covered in the dark brown mud, mixed with rotted vegetation, that is the signature of the Northwest woods. It was nearly nighttime, and I wanted coffee.