At the start of the summer I took my son to the Pike Place Market so he could buy a dozen doughnuts from the same stall I remember from my own childhood. While he ate I stood reading posters for Hugo House, ZAPP, zine readings around town, punk rock yoga and baseball, Plane Crash Theatre, free bikery and herbal medicine clinics.
There were signs for countless shows, scavenger markets, queer stitch and bitch, a multi-media event at a house called Undersea Volcano of the Squid Overlord.
Through the window I could see Left Bank Books across Post Alley: the first store to buy my zine way back in, oh – 1984? Cafe Counter Intelligence is gone, but will forever be the cafe by which I compare all others – and now I know for sure the coffee was in fact world-class. I could smell Tenzing Momo, and hear the fishmongers hollering and throwing their wares.
As I was growing up the street in front of the market was mostly porn and pawn shops. Central Gun was the lone holdout for weapons, but it disappeared this year. The Lusty Lady is still holding on, but she is now in the shadow of a luxury condominium development.
In my lifetime Seattle has changed substantially, not just in terms of different stores, new buildings, the mutating face of an evolving city. The people who populate the place are different too – demographic trends could be plotted on a chart, but the larger point is, the place feels different.
I’m typing this while sitting on the floor of a furnished apartment with a view of the Space Needle ahead of me, Lake Union out the window to my left. The house I once owned is faraway on Beacon Hill and while I wish I could still live in it, I do not regret selling and moving on – I am simply thankful that I had those two years in that place, with a view of the mountains, as I wrote Lessons in Taxidermy.
J9 says that when she read the book she could smell and see the living room of that house, and I think that is the highest compliment anyone has ever offered.
The Kitsap Peninsula was my first home, and I can see those forests if I stand at the edge of Elliot Bay. I was hopelessly homesick when I moved away to college in Olympia, at the southern edge of the Puget Sound. When I abandoned my first career and fled further south I felt that Portland was a state of exile.
Brilliant, lovely exile – the place I made friends again after a long period of retreat, the place I learned to see, smell, sing, embrace people, ride a bicycle. Portland is puppet shows and chorus practice, long lazy days wandering from one house to the next, nights sitting on porches talking to loved ones and strangers.
My house there functioned as a community center, and it is an honor that Gabriel and Danielle live in it and maintain a high level of generosity and camaraderie; they’ve taken in my eldest child two summers running and I know that I can sleep there whenever I need to.
When I dropped my daughter off in Portland for her internship we drifted through downtown until she spied a cluster of typical scenesters standing on the corner next to Powell’s. She gasped and exclaimed People are real here!!
I blinked and inquired What do you mean?
She didn’t even think before replying They’re dirty! You know what I’m talking about!
In fact, I do – she means that this is the place were we fit best, where we understand what people are saying and also what they mean. Our friends here know us without knowing, an intimacy I rejected at the time but now appreciate.
The landscape of the Pacific Northwest is not just dear to me; it is part of who and what I am. Feeling crazy, sad, fragmented, alone? Just go sit on a dock, with your feet over the Sound, and all will be well. The only place I am completely, absolutely at home is within two hundred miles of the town where I was born. In fact, despite a childhood filled with trauma and horror, I love my hometown.
This is no exaggeration. Even if I choose to live faraway, in a beautiful and hostile city, my only connection with the new place is the work visa pasted in my passport.
One night at the Bus Stop with Susannah I was describing the differences between the various places I’ve lived and she asked if I was excited to go back to England.
I answered Not really.
She asked Are you sad to go?
No, I replied. I like the life I have in Portland, and the one I have in Seattle, and I like Cambridge equally well.
She nodded. So you’re happy wherever you are?
Yes, exactly – which is fortuitous, since I travel so much!
When I am away I do miss many things about the Pacific Northwest. The people, the places, the adventures, understanding what is happening around me; all beloved, but not lamented.
Cambridge is the most antithetical setting I could ever live in, yet I truly love the river, and my daily bike rides across the Fens. I’ve made countless new friends, some I would have met regardless, others I would never have encountered if I hadn’t moved there.
I’m thankful for it all, and would not change anything.
