With Summer here on the calendar if not in spirit, a single evening from a past Summer remains salient an clear in my memory, reminding me why I love Seattle in the high season. That evening, immediately on leaving work, I biked to the International District - to Uwajimaya - to buy a backpack full of Japanese food.
I turned around and biked home across mostly empty downtown streets, watching the Olympics become silhouettes as the air went gold around them. It was ethereal. At home, from my window, I watched Mt. Rainier change form a ghostly white to a deep pink against an ever darker sky.
It was a full day of work followed by an evening of breathing in the summer air, and all that time spent churning the pedals. I felt like Lance Armstrong's ugly, bastard second cousin, with my overused calf muscles burning hot on my late return home. Resting on the sofa, it was a sort of masochistic, even-tempered ecstasy.
This is why I love life in our Seattle Shangri-la, tucked as it is into the frayed folds at the northwest corner of the map. The blackberries are in season in late summer, and as I bike home from work on the Burke-Gilman trail, I can stop momentarily and help myself to the ripest berries. Clusters of walkers and bikers are always scattered alongside the trail, evoking a pre-agricultural human society as they happily forage, truly forage, for berries - a public resource of pure, purple fructose available on my evening commute. The rest of the world gets only road rage on their varied commutes. And, as the rest of the country swelters, we exist in our own micro-climate, boxed against the coast by mountain ranges to the south and east, allowing only north Pacific currents to bring us our mild weather, like early morning deliveries of milk in glass bottles.
I don’t think I’ll ever leave. Even when Rainier rebels against our ever growing numbers, and spits molten rock and lava at us. I’ll stand and face southeast, calmly gnawing on blackberries, waiting for the pyroclastic flow to convert me to ash.
