Dear Mr. Sarcasm,
So you’ve moved to Seattle. Big deal.
— Heckler in Hattiesburg
Dear Heck:
Strictly speaking, that’s not a question, and as such, I am under no obligation to answer it. However, I have learned a fair amount about this city in the 10 months I’ve been here, and I would be criminally negligent in my role as a pseudo-journalist if I didn’t share at least some of these things with you. As such, I am pleased to present…
AAlgar’s Five Things You Maybe Didn’t Know About Seattle
1. Apparently, all railroad crossings are not required to be blocked off.
I learned this at the end of the worst day I’ve had since I got here — possibly a contender for one of the top ten worst days I’ve ever had.
It started at my temp job, when I discovered that the time sheet I had turned in an hour late resulted in my not being paid that week. Now, bear in mind I was making approximately a third of what I’d been used to making in Maryland. I had probably $20 in the bank to tide me over for another week. I tend to live paycheck to paycheck even if I am pulling in what the kids refer to as “mad ducats” (which, as I mentioned, I was not). So some serious budget prioritization was required.
I probably had enough food stuck away in the freezer (I tend to stockpile like Y2K is still a viable threat), and as much as I wish I could say comic books were a priority, they were going to have to wait till the following week. Which meant that this particular $20 was going to have to go into my gas tank, which even then was hovering juuuuust ahead of the point that I know really means “empty.” (About two centimeters past the “E,” pardon my Metric.)
So I made my way to the nearest gas station on my lunch break. This particular temp job was in the “grody industrial” section of town, and there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of retail businesses that I could actually reach within the time and fuel constraints I had available to me. In fact, as far as I knew, there was only one, which I managed to (eventually) spawn upstream through lunch-rush-hour traffic and coast into, surely on fumes. And that’s when I discovered that gas stations can also run out of gas. Did you know this? Because I didn’t.
So I had to get back into my car and head into uncharted territory to look for gas. I hadn’t eaten lunch, due to the aforementioned lack of funds, and I was starting to get kind of irritated. And that’s when I came to the fork in the road.
Mind you, I’m not talking about some kind of metaphorical fork — a turning point in which I am forced to make some kind of life-altering choice. Nor do I mean a place where the road branches off in a few different directions. I mean this as unfiguratively as I can mean it — I came to a fork in the road. Somebody (I have no idea whom, or how), dropped a pitchfork, pointy side-up, right in the middle of the road. Naturally, I only realized this after one of my front tires had passed over the thing, and it was too late to avoid my back tire doing the same.
So now, on top of the $800 brake work I’d just had done (on a salary that amounted to, approximately, $butt), it was highly possible I’d have to replace two tires that I’d only just put on prior to leaving the east coast a few months prior. This on top of the aforementioned other crap that had already happened. I was, as you might expect, a little shaken.
I continued on my way, praying to gods I don’t even believe in that my tires were still intact. I made a perfectly legal right turn at the next traffic light, and that’s when the train nearly hit me.
I had passed over this particular set of train tracks a dozen or so times in going back and forth to my temp job by this point, but I guess I assumed they weren’t in use. The absence of any kind of flashing lights and striped arm that prevents what had just happened sort of led me to what I thought was a logical conclusion. Clearly not though, because a speeding locomotive (okay, it was probably doing about 30MPH, but I bet my Ford Escape would have fared about as well as Doc Brown’s Delorean when confronted with an oncoming train) came within about 5 feet of my car as I passed over the tracks. The dude blew the train’s horn as I passed, as if that would have made a difference.
Upon returning to the temp job, I relayed my experience to my co-workers, who were a bit surprised that I didn’t know enough to look both ways as I crossed an unmarked railroad crossing. Needless to say, this insignificant piece of trivia (which I believe should have been conveyed to me via close-range megaphone when I was issued my Washington state driver’s license) shan’t be forgotten in the future.
2. It doesn’t actually rain as much as people say it does.
Seriously. According to many very viable sources, Seattle receives less average annual rainfall than, for example, New York City, and many other prominent cities around the country. Not that this seems to matter to my father, mind you. I could dig up Willard Scott himself (note: find out if Willard Scott is actually dead before posting this) to show off the various almanacs, weather maps and satellite photos and dad still would not cave.
Since I got here, he (dad, not Willard) has insisted to me that it does rain here all the time. (I should point out that he’s never actually been here himself.) Every time I’ve called the folks back in Maryland to check in, he informs me that the Weather Channel shows rain over Seattle. And every time, I’m looking at blue, nigh-cloudless skies when he does. It’s turned into some sort of strange macho precipitating contest. I have no idea what he’s trying to prove, exactly, but I refuse to let him prove it.
I have been led to understand that “it rains here a lot” is something we’re supposed to tell outsiders, to keep them away from our little paradise up in the corner here. And if this is truly the case, I apologize to my fellow Seattleites — but being right in an argument with my dad is much more important than any of your petty needs.
3. There doesn’t seem to be a greater abundance of coffee shops here than anywhere else I’ve been.
Sure, there’s a fair amount. But there were tons in DC, Baltimore, Philly, New York and all the places I passed through on the three thousand mile journey here. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a particularly larger per capita concentration of these places in and around Seattle.
What we do seem to have a lot more of, though, are coffee shops (Starbucks in particular) inside other businesses. I’m sure you have this wherever you live, too — a little Starbucks stand inside a grocery store, or possibly a book store. But here, it’s taken to incredible and bizarre new heights. There’s a Starbucks in the library. There’s a stand inside the DMV, and in doctor’s offices. And I would not be at all surprised to see the now-familiar green placard pop up in the back corner of a competing coffee shop.
The thing is, I like their coffee okay and I really don’t care. (Though I’ve come to prefer their local competitors, Tully’s.) The joke about Starbucks being everywhere was already old when it popped up in Austin Powers seven years ago. Let it go already.
4. The Space Needle is not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
I suppose I should not have been surprised by this, considering I got engaged atop the faux Needle in Vegas some years ago. But Vegas has a bit of faux everything, and I never really gave it much thought. But I’ve come to discover that many cities have their own structure similar to Seattle’s famous “future of the 50s” pointy thing, including Toronto and at least one city in Europe. To what sinister end a smattering of needle structures across the globe is meant to accomplish is unclear to me, but I have no doubt that it’s sinister. Any other explanation would simply be too boring.
5. We’re the “gateway to Alaska.”
I still can’t quite figure this one out, but I’ve seen enough publicity (billboards, yellow pages ads, bus posters,etc.) to convince me that this is not just the opinion of one or two geographically challenged individuals. One of the things that is meant to lure people here as tourists is our proximity to Alaska, apparently. Never mind that there’s, oh, an entire country roughly the size of our own between here and the great northern frontier. You wanna go to Alaska, despite the fact that there’s about 1100 miles between here and Ketchikan (which, to the best of my Mapquesting, is the nearest settlement in the southeastern corner of the state and would take approximately 25 hours to drive straight through), we’re your place. Who knew.
Apart from those things, our bizarre 8.612% sales tax (which results in us having to pay no state income tax) is pretty sweet. The chicks here are generally hot in that bookish way that I love, for some reason. But probably the best thing is the fact that the entire city is going wireless soon. So when these paltry temp agencies finally break me and I have to move into that cardboard box behind the Tully’s, my duct taped iBook will still be connected to various websites that I’ve sworn never to visit again.
Thanks for writing!
