labor day, seattle
Sep. 15th, 2010 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishSo a week or two ago I spent an extended weekend in Seattle.
It's hard to talk coherently about Seattle because it didn't feel like a "vacation" as such; it felt like a right and proper extension of real life.
Bits of it were vacation-like, especially early on: Friday we drove up to the Learning Center at the North Cascades Institute (where![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nixve did her grad school residency program) for one night of an environmental short film festival, which was neat: one on crazy tall trees in Oregon, one on global warming (few things are more depressing to me than global warming: "the world's gonna end, it's gonna be somewhere between incredibly unpleasant and fatal for large swaths of the population, mostly the poor, there's probably not much we can do about it, and between the Big Money Boyz and the denialists very little will get done anyway"), and one lengthy one on the impact of roads on wildlife, the environment, and culture.
That night we camped in the mountains. Th next morning I climbed out of the tent to a general sense of a rightness to the air: crisp and chill and dappled light through the trees and a bit of cloud hanging in the air, exactly the way that morning ought to be. I felt more alive than I have in months.
Then I came around a corner facing down into a valley, and I saw the mountain.
(For those of you who've never left the east coast, just take my word that the mountains out west really are that much bigger.)
There's all manner of mess about the Pac-NW, both geographical and social, that I'm trying to sort out in my head. Thus I'm not terribly surprised that my immediate reaction to being towered over and all but pushed aside was to think "I don't belong here." And I don't: the North Cascades aren't my place. I might someday be an accepted visitor but that morning I was an intruder.
The rest of the extended weekend blurs together: pancakes on a real griddle and my ongoing dislike of electric stoves. Unexpected blackberrying and the resultant ice cream, Pike Place and piroshkis, the standard ton of bookstores ("And one copy of 'The Erotic Poems of E.E. Cummings.' I just get a kick out of saying that."). Guinea-pigs. Meeting a handful ofnixve's friends, and her OSO. (Neat guy.) Tidepools with fat purple starfish and gooeyduck fountains and the occasional adorable crab. A respite from the obscene heat of this summer in DC, mist and cloud and rain and sunlight. Some amount of emotional collapse, as expected; far more relaxation and safety and love and contentment.
Plus, after four years we finally got to see the bridge troll.
Travel lesson learned this time: it's better to drive to BWI because that will get me home at a reasonable time for a reasonable amount of money. However, it's probably better than that to just not fly into BWI at all; the cost savings may be made up for in lack of hassle and lack of transit time by using National.
It's hard to talk coherently about Seattle because it didn't feel like a "vacation" as such; it felt like a right and proper extension of real life.
Bits of it were vacation-like, especially early on: Friday we drove up to the Learning Center at the North Cascades Institute (where
nixve did her grad school residency program) for one night of an environmental short film festival, which was neat: one on crazy tall trees in Oregon, one on global warming (few things are more depressing to me than global warming: "the world's gonna end, it's gonna be somewhere between incredibly unpleasant and fatal for large swaths of the population, mostly the poor, there's probably not much we can do about it, and between the Big Money Boyz and the denialists very little will get done anyway"), and one lengthy one on the impact of roads on wildlife, the environment, and culture.That night we camped in the mountains. Th next morning I climbed out of the tent to a general sense of a rightness to the air: crisp and chill and dappled light through the trees and a bit of cloud hanging in the air, exactly the way that morning ought to be. I felt more alive than I have in months.
Then I came around a corner facing down into a valley, and I saw the mountain.
(For those of you who've never left the east coast, just take my word that the mountains out west really are that much bigger.)
There's all manner of mess about the Pac-NW, both geographical and social, that I'm trying to sort out in my head. Thus I'm not terribly surprised that my immediate reaction to being towered over and all but pushed aside was to think "I don't belong here." And I don't: the North Cascades aren't my place. I might someday be an accepted visitor but that morning I was an intruder.
The rest of the extended weekend blurs together: pancakes on a real griddle and my ongoing dislike of electric stoves. Unexpected blackberrying and the resultant ice cream, Pike Place and piroshkis, the standard ton of bookstores ("And one copy of 'The Erotic Poems of E.E. Cummings.' I just get a kick out of saying that."). Guinea-pigs. Meeting a handful of
nixve's friends, and her OSO. (Neat guy.) Tidepools with fat purple starfish and gooeyduck fountains and the occasional adorable crab. A respite from the obscene heat of this summer in DC, mist and cloud and rain and sunlight. Some amount of emotional collapse, as expected; far more relaxation and safety and love and contentment.Plus, after four years we finally got to see the bridge troll.
Travel lesson learned this time: it's better to drive to BWI because that will get me home at a reasonable time for a reasonable amount of money. However, it's probably better than that to just not fly into BWI at all; the cost savings may be made up for in lack of hassle and lack of transit time by using National.
