Seattle in a Day

I started my drive today along the Hood Canal past stacks of shucked oyster shells, down to Olympia, and then back North again to Seattle.  As soon as I got off the highway it was apparent that although Seattle was clean and beautiful, parking would be a nightmare. My first stop was an hour (dictated by the parking meter) to run through the Frye Museum.  East met West in a display of four colleagues’ paintings from the interlude between World Wars.  I finished in the museum and pulled my car away from the curb as a meter maid was counting down minutes on my car.  I found another lot down town where I parked for the afternoon and headed to the Seattle Art Museum. The outdoor sculpture garden was a collection of fantastic shapes reaching towards a blue sky with perfect mushroom-cap clouds.  Tall buildings stood out against the skyline and from my vantage on the waterfront, it seemed as if they were the background of a two dimensional city.  

Oyster shells and the Hood Canal

 

Seattle Art Museum's sculpture garden and Seattle skyline

I strolled along until I reached Pike’s Place, a market hosting the famous fishmongers and a variety of other boutiques and jewelry shops.  Inside, I bought some postcards from a gentleman with a unibrow who had adopted an accent that made him sound like a close relative of Count Dracula.  A woman in his shop visibly started when he spoke to her from his vantage behind the bookshelves.  I left and meandered up to the top level, where I saw the fishmongers invite a girl up behind their counter and instruct her in the ways of fish flinging. To her credit, she didn’t drop the beheaded salmon that was tossed to her, but she must have caught some of the smell because she wasn’t behind the counter for long.  Back down to the lowest level, I stopped in a jewelry shop with tiny jade figurines in the window and fell into a conversation with the extremely friendly owners.  One of them was a shorter man with a round face who smiled from behind thick glasses and gave me a plastic cockroach. 

“Here’s a lucky cockroach… you know, they’re probably the ones who are able to time travel.” As an explanation, he offered “I always talk to them, just in case they’re here from the future.” 

To his credit, the logic seemed sound: since roaches are evolutionarily sturdy animals and the most likely ones to survive an apocalypse, he figured they would probably be the ones who would be around long enough to invent time travel. Therefore he wasn’t taking any chances in case his roaches were the ones trying to reach out to the human race. If he’s right and the roaches are coming back to communicate, I hope they visit him instead of me.

On the way out of town I looped around one block a couple times, which was when I realized that Seattle is like the Bermuda Triangle for my GPS.  Frustrated, I had to sit in a tunnel, trapped in evening traffic as my guiding system told me repeatedly to turn left. From museums, to the waterfront, to eccentric shopkeepers, to rush hour traffic, I’d say I saw a good chunk of Seattle today.