A Brief History of World Travel (part 14) - Notes on Seattle, WA

(ed. note: this is the final installment in this summer series of travel essays. If you've missed any, you can find them all here.)

1. I’m aware that it’s a cliché for people to return from vacation and announce that they’d love to move to the city they’ve just visited, but when LauraBeth and I came home from Seattle, we both said we would be happy to move there. It’s the only place we’d ever visited that we agreed we could live in full-time. In a four-year period, we traveled to Seattle three times, for a number of different reasons. If it weren’t so expensive and so far away, we’d probably go back again this year. Even though I’ve lived in New jersey for the last ten years, nearly my entire adult life, I have always defined myself specifically as a Philly guy. A friend recently introduced me at a reading as “the most Philadelphia person I’ve ever met.” I wrote a memoir partly about shaping my whole life around this particular identity. Philadelphia is not like Seattle. The people are different, the weather is different, the air is different. The buildings are all newer, and the culture seems less pointlessly antagonistic than in Philly. But within two days of being there, I felt at home. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what I liked about that city, besides that when I was there, I felt better. In every city there is good food, and in every city there are nice people and scenic views. But there’s some intangible thing about a city where you feel comfortable right away, like you’ve finally arrived at your destination. Though there are serious logistical hurdles to moving, I’ve applied for teaching jobs in Seattle each of the past three years. Does this all mean I’ve evolved and become a Pacific Northwest person rather than an east coast Philly guy? Or does it mean that my whole life, I was never truly a Philly guy at all and I’ve been living in the wrong place? And why did I feel a sense of shame and embarrassment to even consider these questions? It would explain a lot of things if I’d just been born in the wrong city. Maybe everyone is born in the wrong place and they have to spend their life trying to locate their rightful home. Maybe most people never find it.

2. I assume actual Seattle residents hate the Pike Place Market in the same way Philly locals sneer at tourists who go to Pat’s and Geno’s for cheesesteaks. But we went there because that’s where you’re supposed to go. It’s overcrowded, but so is every tourist destination. The fish-throwing spectacle is a novelty, but only entertaining for about fifteen seconds. As I gathered notes for this essay, I asked LauraBeth what I should say about the market, and she said: “You should write that they sell amazing cookies that are bigger than your head.” Which is true. They do.  

3. We spent most days exploring the city on foot, trying to avoid the steepest hills. One afternoon, we headed toward Pioneer Square in search of an independent bookstore. About half the people we saw there were homeless. Passing a parking garage, we saw one homeless man drop his pants so another could inject him with heroin. LauraBeth will walk through places with me that she never would alone, because I walk with confidence in most places. It’s a fragile confidence, based on having grown up in a city and feeling like I know how to project a specific unapproachable energy, but whatever version of me could credibly pass as a city boy is long gone; I’m in my mid-thirties and softened from a decade as a college professor who lives in the suburbs. If someone demanded my wallet, what would I do, fight them? I haven’t been in a fight in twelve years, and that ended with me being body slammed through a bar room table like an extra in a Clint Eastwood movie. A middle-aged black man, clearly homeless, started shouting and jogging toward us. “Yo,” he yelled. “Yo, Temple!” I was wearing a Temple University t-shirt. He unzipped his jacket to show me his own Temple shirt. “I graduated from Temple!” He’d grown up in North Philly, graduated from college, and made it all the way across the country. I gave him five dollars and shook his hand. There were two decades worth of blanks that he didn’t fill in.

4. Easily the most decadent experience of my life occurred in Woodinville, a suburb of Seattle, where we enjoyed a dinner that cost more than my flight. This was the second time in a week we’d gone out to celebrate our anniversary, but it’s easy to rationalize extravagance on vacation. We ate a nine-course meal that took three hours and came with wine pairings for each course. I understand how obscene it is to spend that much money on a single meal. I have relatives and friends who sometimes need to borrow cash to pay the bridge toll to drive into Philly; the only reasons I can afford indulgences like this are because I lucked into a decent job at the right time, LauraBeth makes more money than me, and we have no kids. It’s not like I deserve any of it; I just stumbled into fortunate circumstances. But my guilt in moments like this is useless, because I don't do anything about it. I just get sad during the meal for a while and later write  some notes and then even later write some self-conscious sentences about my guilt so I can feel better. Around the fifth course and wine pairing, I started to get drunk and forget my guilt.

5. Did you know there is such a thing as a super pod of orcas? A super pod is when several pods of orcas all gather in close proximity. There are three pods of orcas considered full-time residents of the waters in the Pacific Northwest, and we saw all of them at the same time.  A super pod is when you are surrounded by dozens of orcas. It is when you are standing on a boat in the waters off of Washington’s San Juan Islands with your wife, the boat’s engine turned off so that the whales won’t be scared away, and you’re trying to decide whether to take hundreds of pictures or just look with your human eyes. It’s when no matter what direction you’re facing, you can see dorsal fins rising up like teeth from the ocean, and you can see a mother swimming alongside her calf, and whales are leaping and splashing everywhere. It’s when, after a decade of false starts and missed opportunities, you get to finally see whales in the wild and it exceeds all your expectations.

6. On the Seattle Underground tour, we walked through a network of passageways beneath the city streets, and learned about the massive fire of 1899 that burned down thirty-one city blocks. Every city seems to have a Great Fire in their history, but the fire itself is less interesting than the aftermath. In Seattle, rather than just rebuilding, they took the opportunity to dramatically alter the face of the city, essentially building a new city on top of the old one. Now you can tour the remnants of the old marketplaces that operated while the rebuild was ongoing. For a while, there were two Seattles, and now there’s one, and the original is just a memory. Two versions of the self can exist simultaneously, though one eventually has to go dormant. It’s natural to go through periods of razing and rebuild, and over time, it’s perfectly natural to look at yourself in the mirror and realize the face you’re seeing is totally different from the one you remember, different from the one you thought you were projecting. One version of you burns to the ground, and after a rocky transition period, the new version stands on the old one’s shoulders and sees everything from new heights.

7. On our anniversary in 2011, LauraBeth and I sat on the patio of a French restaurant in the Pike Place market and accidentally plotted out my next book. I’d published my memoir the year before and had spent three years struggling with an unpublishable 600-page novel about a pro wrestler who fakes his own death, and I felt stuck. And then in the middle of dinner, we came up with the story of a young man trying to overcome the grief about his wife’s sudden death. We talked about him carrying her ashes on a road trip across the country. I spent the next couple years working on that book and thinking about what I would do if she’d died, and I realized that the thing I feared more than anything in the world was losing her. All of my writing is about my fear, about articulating it and lashing out at it and trying to tame it, and as I worked on that book, I realized that everything I was writing, maybe everything I ever would write, would in some way be about LauraBeth and how lucky I feel to have found something so good, and how afraid I am of losing it all. 

A Brief History of World Travel (Part 1): Notes on Portland, ME

1. The first vacation my wife and I ever took together was to Portland, Maine. I was twenty and she was nineteen. I’d bought the tickets for her as a gift for our first anniversary. It was, I’d thought, a grand romantic gesture. I’d spent an afternoon at the mall trying to find an adequate gift, but the only gifts they want to sell to young men buying gifts for their girlfriends are baskets of shampoo and lotion, or bad jewelry, or candles that smell like s’mores. I passed a Border’s and saw a travel guide to Maine in one of the window displays. I vaguely remembered LauraBeth having said something about how she’d like to see the foliage in Maine. I called my dad from the mall and asked him if he thought it was crazy to just go and buy plane tickets to Portland without checking with LauraBeth first. I could tell that his answer was that he did think it was crazy, but he viewed me then as ambitionless, as smart but lacking direction, so any time I showed enthusiasm for anything, he encouraged it. “Sure,” he said. “If you think it’s the right thing to do, just go ahead and do it.”

2. She had to drive me to pick up the tickets. I’d ordered them online, but had them shipped to my parents’ house. At the time, I was living in an off-campus apartment in North Philly, in a place where we didn’t have a mailbox or a functioning door (it had been kicked off its hinges by angry fraternity guys, chasing a friend of mine who had stolen money from their doorman; at night, we leaned the door in the frame and pressed a kitchen table against it as a brace). My dad had somehow missed the delivery and the tickets had been returned to the FedEx warehouse. He had cancer, and was deep into chemo treatments; probably he’d been too weak to get to the door in time, if he’d even heard it in the first place. When he told me he’d missed the delivery, I tried to swallow my rage and I hung up. I thought terrible things about him. I called him lazy and I called him fat, and I thought: why can’t he just answer a fucking knock on the fucking door? I thought: you try to count on him for one fucking thing. I thought it hard enough that I hoped he felt it. A year later, he was dead. Most of the things that cause me the greatest shame are things nobody even knows about.

3. I didn’t know anything about Portland. I knew there was a place called Portland, and I knew it was in Maine. I knew there was foliage, somewhere. I booked a room in the Howard Johnson in South Portland, which turned out to be an entirely different city. In the mornings, we took a bus into Portland, then wandered around town, not knowing what to do with ourselves. We’d skimmed the guidebook, but had no idea how to plan a vacation. For lunch every day, we ate at the same Italian restaurant where they served enormous portions of a pasta dish with lobster and alfredo sauce. Most nights for dinner, we ate fried rice at the Chinese takeout place down the road from the HoJo.

4. At the time, LauraBeth was being tested for celiac disease. The doctors were pretty confident she had it—her mother had been diagnosed a few years earlier, and she had all the same symptoms—but they wanted her to eat regularly for three months as a trial. Every day was another opportunity for a last meal before being sentenced to a lifetime of gluten-free eating: the last brownie, the last lasagna, the last soft pretzel. In 2002, on a college budget, it was almost impossible to conceive of a gluten-free life. For a year, the only thing she would eat for lunch was rolled up ham and cheese slices. Some days, we would drive over an hour just to go to places that had a flourless chocolate cake on their dessert menu. We mail-ordered gluten-free cookies for unfathomably high prices. The trip to Portland was the only one we ever took where she could eat anything she wanted. For years, the primary consideration in all travel decisions was the availability of gluten-free food options. When we went to Disney World in 2004, the chef came to our table to ask her what she wanted, and when he brought her gluten-free spaghetti and meatballs, she nearly cried. Things are easier now. Her disease is trendy and there is a profit to be made. Back then, we never imagined her being able to walk into a restaurant and order normally off a menu.  

5. On the third day, we took a whale watching tour. I was still harboring my fantasy of switching my major from English and becoming a marine biologist. I’d never seen a whale in the wild before. I didn’t see any that day either, though we saw some seals and a dolphin and hundreds of birds. Ninety minutes in to the tour, a storm rolled over us. The boat rocked like it was trying to toss us all overboard. Half the passengers got sick. LauraBeth laid on a bench trying not to vomit. I wondered if a storm was a good thing, if maybe the weather would for some reason draw more whales to the surface. There was the possibility, I thought, of coming eye-to-eye with a breaching humpback. When I was a sad, lonely child, I thought often of the logistics of living inside a whale; if you could handle the smell, if you could ensure a steady food supply, it seemed like a tenable situation. You could be alone and always in motion and so deep inside an ancient animal that you could actually touch the blue whale’s soul. It seemed safer than life on land, and there was no possibility of rejection. Choosing to be alone seemed safer than trying not to be and failing. I live in a house now, where I have my own office and I have a basement with a wet bar. I like it here, and I can now see the downsides in living inside the stomach of a large mammal. You can’t really live inside a whale’s stomach. I understand this. But imagine the speed. Imagine the sound of the whale’s calls from the inside.

6. We didn’t have a lot of money then. We were lucky not to be accruing extra debt—I had scholarships and she paid no tuition because her dad worked at the school—but that wouldn’t become meaningful until years later, when we realized how many of our friends were crippled by loan payments. I was lucky to have had enough money to pay for the trip, but most days we couldn’t afford to do much besides walk along the coast and look at things. We climbed to the top of a lighthouse and looked over the land and said the sorts of things you’re supposed to say from the top of a lighthouse: look how high it is; you can see so far from here; imagine what it’s like to be out there by yourself on a boat; what should we do now? LauraBeth’s mom loved lighthouses for reasons I only vaguely understand. We went there partly so she could show her mom a picture of the lighthouse and say: see, we saw a lighthouse. Her mom had cancer then too. She was dead two years later.

7. Five years after that trip, we got married. My dad wasn’t there and her mom wasn’t there, and I hate to keep harping on it, but, look: that’s fundamental to who we are. They were dead and we wanted them to not be dead, and no matter what I set out to write, it bubbles to the surface in some way. We were alive and, on that first trip together, we felt like adults. We were still learning so much about who we were, what we wanted, how to go to another place and claim part of it as your own. I was much more impatient then than I am now; that’s why I’d bought the tickets in the first place. I wanted to accelerate everything and get older so quickly, to rush past the tentative, fearful stage of the relationship into the comfortable, reassuring love we have now, but I didn’t know how to do any of it. I wanted to open my mouth wide like a blue whale’s and swallow a decade worth of experiences. I wanted to swallow myself and live inside my own belly.

8. The storm intensified and the whale tour boat had to turn around. They gave us a lifetime voucher for a free return trip, and I was impressed by the confidence: they expected to outlive us, and they expected us to come back. I carried the voucher through seven years and five moves, but I lost it during our move to our new house. We’re going back to Portland this year, to celebrate fifteen years of dating. We’ll get on a different boat—voucherless—and we’ll look for different whales. We’ll climb the lighthouse again and we’ll look all around us. Everything will look more or less the same, but so much will have changed that there isn’t enough time to explain it all.