Everybody in Seattle was just so nice. That niceness is only about this thick though. Underneath, like permafrost, lurks “The Seattle Chill”. Don’t get me wrong. I did meet a number of really, as in truly, nice people – including my friend who first pointed out the “Chill” – but once I knew to look for the “Seattle Chill” I saw it everywhere.    

To give you an idea about how chilly it is, imagine if you will an igloo covered in snow. Dust off the snow and you find a hard icy shell. Chip through the shell and, in Seattle, you find that somebody left the sink running and now the whole thing is now completely filled with ice. The Seattle nice-ness is just a thin veneer atop a very frosty exclusionary – “Oh, you just moved here?”  – and glacially exclusive – “Oh, you live in LowerQueen Anne!” – attitude. If you move to Seattle it basically takes about five years before anybody who got here before you did will consider you a “friend”. Five more to remove the quotes. But, unlike the hypothetical igloo, down deep inside these Seattleites there is a furnace burning hot and bright. Eventually the thing will get hot and thaw but you might just have to throw some wood on the fire. This may seem rather abrasive, particularly after just a few days in the city, but being from New York and all I am totally about harsh, inaccurate judgments. Besides, if I have to be fair – and I know I don’t, a New Yorker complaining about icy personalities is like an Eskimo climbing out of our suppositional ice-home and whining about the snow. 

It’s not so much that the Seattleites have a hard-to-get-through group personality but that they’re just so very nice about it. I mean drop that same metaphorical igloo into Central Park and we’d be at it with flamethrowers and would steal the damn furnace. Along with everything else. It wouldn’t be pretty and it definitely wouldn’t be nice.

While everybody’s being so darn nice they’re also busy saving the world. These are the people who set the gold standard for protests at the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” – the WTO conference riots. The whole place is separating their trash into “garbage” and “recyclables” – no surprise there – and also “compostable food waste”. Luckily most of the year it’s about the temperature of a refrigerator outside and indoors – don’t want to be wasting that energy for mere personal comfort – or it could get kind of stinky in Bin Number 3. Everything edible in sight is “organic”, “free-range”, and “sustainably managed”. I had to have my Twinkies FedEx’d in when the Jones got too bad. I dined at a restaurant, and I wish I could make this up, where the waiter was able to tell me on which farm and where the cow I was eating spent its idyllic grass-fed life. I’m sure if pressed he could have told me the yummy bovine’s name. As I had learned that the farm was on Orcas Island – ahhhh…. You say. – I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to hear it was named “April”.

Above all I was duly impressed with what the Puget Soundfolk have done with Public Transit. They have a bus system that is outstanding. It’s not 24 hour-a-day service but from before dawn to after midnight you can get from Point-A to Point-B quickly and efficiently. They have a great light-rail service on one main corridor. That could be expanded. There is a regional commuter train that runs north to Everett and south to Tacoma. Seattle’s got a streetcar line and even the monorail from the 1962 World’s Fair is still in operation. There is frequent and regular ferry service to the islands. All of this is accessed through a single multi-service card that you just wave in front of a reader and you’re gone. All this is wrapped in a pedestrian friendly city filled with nice people. This place is just perfect for somebody looking to give up their car and really do something meaningful towards protecting the environment.

Which explains why the traffic is so bad. I guess Seattleites – like the whole rest of the planet – has a limit when it comes to ensuring our progeny don’t need to develop gills. That limit has four wheels and a shiny clean windshield. So much for follow-through.

One of the non-intuitive things I learned about this tendency towards nice-ness is that every last one of these riotous, independent, innovative, free-thinking Seattleites follows the rules. All the rules. 

This, I found, can be fun.

In every major city on the planet the rule says “Cross on the green and not in between”. In practice it works like a mad dash between pedestrians and speeding cars which are trying to beat the yellow and jam up the intersection. People are used to playing toreador with bikes, buses, trucks and cars. And the vehicles are used to playing the bull. Everybody gets along and not too many people get hurt. They are acceptable losses anyway and help strengthen the gene-pool.

In Seattle I saw a crowd of people waiting for the little red hand to turn into the little white (diversity my ass) walking guy at street corner after street corner. Even if there wasn’t a car within a half-mile of the cross walk the crowd would wait patiently, the light would change, and everyone would scurry across the intersection en mass. At one point, frustrated by the slow pace of pedestrian traffic, I ascertained that there wasn’t a moving vehicle within sight and stepped through the crowd, against the light, into the street. Halfway across, I realized that the assembled multitude had followed me into the kill-zone and, against their ingrained conformity, were breaking a rule.

I turned this into a game. I’d push through the crowd, start walking – first making sure it was safe as I didn’t want any innocent blood on my hands – and take two or three steps against the light. The crowd would start to follow and then I’d retrace my steps back to the sidewalk. Now leaderless, the herd would panic and bolt back to the safety of high ground.

Like I said, this can be fun.

The downside of this well behaved population is that crime is virtually non-existent. Everybody is following the rules. I say “downside” because the police target the very obvious and, apparently, very lucrative to city finances, minor rule-breakers. People like me. Everybody warned me not to cross against the light because “you’ll get a ticket for jay-walking”. Eeeek! It seems, in the absence of real criminals or WTO rioters, police are forced to round up the heinous troublemakers that cross the street against the light or – god forbid – not at the corner. The cops even set up jay-walker traps – I kid you not – at popular night-spots to snag the unsuspecting party-goers lest they try to save a few steps on the way home. In the middle of the night. When nobody is out driving. The fine is $69.

I know about the fine not from personal experience but from my friends who had been apprehended in a sting back when they first moved to Seattle. Fortunately for them, they were still in possession of their South Carolina driver licenses and were able to get out of the charges by dint of being new in town and not knowing the rules. Even the Judges are nice.

All of this is stated in good fun though because, at the end of the day, when you scratch through the politeness and the rule-following and the effected cold-shoulder and the put-on exclusivity, you find a group of people that are really warm, welcoming and very interesting. They also have a collective sense of humor that is dry, subtle and inventive. Seattle is the only place I have ever seen the entrances to public bathrooms marked – in a nice tile mosaic – with our mammalian chromosomal configuration: XY for men, XX for women. The card you use on the bus is called an ORCA card. “Hey, sure ORCA is supposed to stand for ONE REGIONAL CARD for ALL but ORCFA doesn’t mean anything. Besides, we’ve got whales here.” The topper was the ad I came across in one of the holiday issues of a local newspaper. The photo showed a very well photographed stack of high-end, golden-gel soap bars resting in a pile of suds. The copy read: 

“Fancy soap. It’s pretty. It smells nice. It’s infused with lavender, citrus and honeydew melon. But it’s still soap. The gift of extruded animal fat that makes a dirty face look clean. How exciting. Want to give a real thrill? Give the small gift that could turn into something big. Give excitement. Give scratch.”

At this point I quickly scanned over the ads that shared column inches on the page – adult toy stores, bars, and strip clubs – and wondered what they could possibly mean by “turn into something big”, “excitement”, and – uh – “scratch”. There, at the bottom of the ad, very small, was the logo for the Washington State Lottery.

This could be very fun indeed.