One year ago yesterday I was sitting at 36,000 feet winging my way westward tucked into the comfortable fuselage of a, now-bankrupt American Airlines, 737. I was on my way to Seattle.
For the first time.
Upon my arrival, everything was new to me. The other word for this condition is “lost”. I got off the train and waited an hour for a bus I learned I should have been waiting for going the other way. The city, the neighborhoods, the people, their quaint customs and mores – it was like visiting a different planet except that they spoke American-English, used green money, and were very fond of big-box retail establishments. I tried, in the blog postings of that long-ago time, to convey some of this before I got used to or, what actually happened, cynical about, the whole place.
A month later, I started living here.
At which point, I decided, in the interest of having at least a modicum of a social life, to lay low and avoid writing anything further that anyone residing in my new home town might find offensive. Or insulting. Or worse. Other than one minor incident involving Asian cuisine and a large quantity of shaving cream – which was not reported here on the advice of counsel – I seemed to have succeeded. But this disinclination to offend my hosts has taken some of the variety out of my subject matter and left me with only micro-farming and Rants to write about.
Oh, yeah, and Carl and Lupe.
Carl and Lupe, you might remember, are the allegorical love-birds, I created back in June when I wanted to talk about some relationship shit. You will also remember that they were based upon Real People which led to some confusion from a number of the rest of you who thought that you might really be Carl and/or Lupe and that I was making fun. So, let me say this right now, unless you are one specific reader you are neither Carl nor Lupe – regardless of how much you want to be either and/or both – and that reader is okay with what I’m writing about. I am laying out this fact for a couple of reasons. First, I want to avoid a repeat of the stir-fry/shaving cream incident and, second, it is all their fault.
If you remember back a year or so and recall everything I wrote about where I was going to move and what I was looking for and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah; you’ll remember that I was particularly enticed by the allure of The Big City as a place to make my home on the land. Well, I had to settle for Seattle but it was still more urban than what I was used to and looked like it would do nicely. Starting about six months after moving here the dateline for these postings – if they had one – would show Bainbridge Island showing up as the origin with ever-increasing frequency until now, when they basically come from nowhere else. Well, there was California a few weeks ago, but that just sort of snuck in. Anyway, the reason for me abandoning my Seattle plans and traveling across the big water to Bainbridge Island can be traced back to an invitation I received from Carl and Lupe back in late spring.
“Hey,” she said. “A friend of a friend of a friend.” (Yes, it was one of those deals.) “Is coming into town and we’re going to go do some unspecified activity. Would you like to come along?”
“On a blind-date?” I replied. “Are you fucking nuts?” (I’ve known Lupe for a while so I could say stuff like that.)
“Come on, Carl will be there.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“How about if it’s just dinner?”
“Nope.”
“I’m buying.”
“Oh. . . okay.” What? You’re blaming me?.
Long story short, friend of a friend of a friend progressed to friend of a friend and onto friend with a micro-farm, et cetera.
That’s just the way these things happen.
So now I find myself a Bainbridge Islander, or ite, or ian, or whatever suffix they use to distinguish themselves from everybody else. But you will have noticed, those of you paying attention anyway, that I have not really weighed in on the phenomenon that is Bainbridge Island. I have not picked on nor otherwise made fun of her inhabitants. I have not disparaged the local ethic nor cynically commented on the faux-Green sheen that covers the landscape. I have, in short, neglected to come through on a number of fronts all of which poor Seattle had to endure after just a two-week visit a year ago.
I must make amends.
First off, “Bainbridge Island”, at sixteen letters is pretty cumbersome to type so I will adopt the local custom of abbreviating it “BI”. I am sure that most long-time residents immediately translate “BI” to its more heavily-lettered alternative without thinking, as if by magic. I, being new here still see “BI” and translate it into its more widespread meaning of “Bi-”. You can imagine my initial confusion when reading headlines in the Bainbridge Islander, the weekly local newspaper, along the lines of “BI Policewoman to Sue City” or “BI Cheerleaders Steal Judges’ Hearts”. This was nothing compared to my reaction when I saw the street side signs looking for recruits for the “BI Co-Ed Touch Football League”. I mean, isn’t that implied.
But I’ve been here for a little while and find myself slowly adopting the local mindset. When I’m out on Capitol Hill in Seattle, center of the local LGBTQIAFRPZW population, and I see a sign offering “Bi-Couture: Dressing Up for Your Better Half”, I get completely confused.
BI is also confused, as are most places, about what kind of place it really is. The buzz among the residents – and the view promulgated by the Chamber of Commerce – is that BI is a ruralish kind of place imbued with small scale agricultural, artistic enterprises, and shops where they know what you eat on Wednesdays. It’s all about trans-organic, locally-sourced, direct-from-the-farmer, grass-fed, free-range, hormone-and-antibiotic-free, artisanally-produced-in-small-batches, and hand packed from our farm to your home. There are farms you can go to study such techniques up to and including how to slaughter your own free-range hog once you’ve caught it. It is a place of artisanally crafted bread, cheese, jam, and Asian cuisine. You can even buy hand-blended, artisanal gasoline. Chickens are not merely free-range, but actively encouraged to cross the road. BI is about You-Pick-‘Em farms and roadside blackberry patches where happy locals can be found clutching plastic pails and wearing juice-stained clothes.
The reality is less bucolic. When you stop and think that an image of a departing ferry filled with people is the City of Bainbridge Island’s official logo you get a truer picture.
BI was originally settled, as was Seattle, in the middle part of the 19thCentury. Within thirty years the island had been chopped to the stumps for shipbuilding and subsequently resettled by Japanese farmers who grew berries on the now-open ground. During World War Two the farmers were sent on a non-optional vacation to the eastern part of the state to prevent espionage (as if) and the berry fields were left to be run by the people who used to work for the farmers. Now, those fields have given over to nouveau-agriculture, some subdivisions and townhouse developments, and the stately homes of the 1%; all of whom daily climb, en masse, onto the ferry and head to Seattle.
Where the action is.
To be fair there is a very active arts community consisting of writers (of whom I am the least well-known), musicians, actors (including Russell Johnson – AKA The Professor on Gilligan’s Island – and Tori Black – a porn star of some note I am led to believe – as the most famous), along with other notables such as Jon Brower Minnoch, now deceased, famous for, at 1400 pounds, being the heaviest human being in history. A trend-setter if there ever was one.
But when the ferry whistle for the 8:45 fades across the sound and the last of the commuters vanish into the well of employment that is the City of Seattle, the real Bainbridge Island emerges. The real islanders, the few hundred who stay behind every day, know that those workers are the ones who allow them to live in such a beautiful location and drive Land Rovers while the commuters walk and pedal through the rain. Those commuters are the ones who bring back enough disposable income that they’ll drop six-bucks a pound for locally grown rutabagas and parsnips. They’re the people who will pay twenty-five dollars for a thin sliver of artisanal cheese produced from hand-fed goats raised in historically accurate reproductions of the barracks at the internment camps. They’re the ones who all translate grass-fed, free-range, and organic into cold, hard, cash. They are, in short, the ones who are willing to pay, so that the few who stay behind, can play.
And so a year has passed and, with its passing, the opportunity for first impressions has gone. On this date, last year, I woke up jetlagged in a drafty room over a bar in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. The mattress was a futon on the floor. The room had six-foot tall windows, no drapes, and no heat. The building it was in had a truck route out front and the landing approach to Boeing Field fifty feet above. The train tracks and I-5 were right across the street. This might have put off a lot of people but, despite all that, I went out looking for first impressions. I wandered, lost, through a strange, new town. Yet even in these unfamiliar surroundings, something felt right about this Seattle place. I didn’t know what it was then, but I do now.