The United States is known for possessing a great number of cities containing many entertainment options. Among these include New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Las Vegas, and Miami. In terms of being economic and cultural capitals, Seattle and Portland, the largest cities in the American Pacific Northwest, are relatively new in the American pantheon of cities. Being a young person in desire to travel, and attracted to the temperate weather and lack of direct sunlight in the region, I procured a set of travel tickets and set off for Seattle, with the intentions of arriving in Portland later on.
My flight arrived in Seattle in the mid-afternoon. To enter the city from the main airport, I took the recent Light Rail installation, the LINK. In the 45 minutes of travel, I gained an immediate recognition of the geographic aesthetic of Washington State. With limited means and a great tolerance for literal “Strange Bedfellows,” I booked a room in Seattle's City Hostel, a European-style youth hostel. My room contained three other beds, to be occupied by people I did not know. The first group of three to arrive were a set of friends from Vancouver, having came down to celebrate their friend's 26th birthday. All three were women, and despite the tyranny of outdated moralizing that occurs all-too-frequently in the United States, this mixed-gender dynamic proved to be no problem at all. These folks failed to betray their Canadian heritage; they were incredibly welcoming to me; locking my belongings in the room's safe felt more a formality than a necessity.
There is one incident of notice during my rooming with my hostel-mates that I remember with some degree of fondness. While sleeping after a long Saturday of touring the city, I awoke to loud reminders of, “Be quiet! Brendan is sleeping!” I would later come to find out that the birthday celebration had gotten the best of my Canuck friends, and one had gotten separated from the two others, which made them extremely fearful that the wayward friend had been coerced by a creepy, hipster-looking young man to return to his place of residence. Fortunately, that was not the case.
Beyond my roommates, I found myself amongst a group of other young people, all of them meeting for the first time that night. Only in this environment can a group form like this, consisting of a world-traveling, opinionated Las Vegas English Teacher, a Dutch girl who wants out of the Netherlands, a German dude who used to be in a metal band and now wants to become a photographer, a redneck Australian miner from Perth, an underaged German girl on a United States' tour, and an eccentric vegan guy who's an aspiring comparative religion scholar go on a trek through Seattle's nightlife. The Australian bought a round of Jaegerbombs for the whole of us. At this particular bar, we ended up discussing a variety of things, including educational systems in our various countries, and how awesome the German guy's hair used to be (very 80's metal). Just being around these people fascinated me. We took advantage of Seattle's rich microbrew tradition, especially in regard to IPA, which I find to be more difficult to drink than they are worth.
The German girl was only 19 years old, and somehow we managed to sneak into about three different bars without her even possessing a fake ID. I'm not quite sure how that happened. By the time we finally approached a night club, she, along with the Australian guy and the German guy turned back, leaving the Dutch girl and the Las Vegas teacher and I to enter a dancing space with rather short men and a DJ that insisted on playing remixes on too many obscure 90's songs (and not the good ones). The night ended shortly after the closing of this location at 2:00 AM, and the two fellow partakers in the city.
This was mostly a digression, but I think this speaks to a broader point about what made an experience like an open-ended trip to the Pacific Northwest enjoyable. Seattle and Portland have a great deal of accessibility and openness to young, ambitious people. One can enter as a stranger, and immediately make friends. Another example: I spent two days hiking the mountain trails in Portland, the largest city park in the United States, with a Ayn Rand reading, horn-rimmed-glasses wearing kid from Austin, Texas that I met by chance in my 8-bed hostel. Dr. Seuss was correct in predicting the places I'd go.
The aesthetic qualities of Seattle and Portland are similar in certain aspects, but also divergent in others. Seattle is mainstream; Portland is Avant-Garde. What does this mean? While Seattle is not a media hub or as immediately recognizable as some of North America's other famous cities, it maintains a lot of similar 20th century architecture, intersperses of contemporary public art, a downtown consisting of business and a pleasure districts that gradually peters out into more residential neighborhoods. However, Seattle simply does a mainstream city better: its archetechure is more artistic, its streets are cleaner, its schools are better, the atmosphere is more welcoming, the sidewalks go everywhere, the public transportation is decent, and the share number of things to do are immense. Geographically, Seattle's waterfront fascinates me to no end, because it serves as a perfect compromise to the problem of beaches. To my sensibilities, an ocean serves to be just as intimidating as awe-inspiring; the observer looks to the horizon to see no end. The pleasure potential of swimming or boating in the water aside, a direct coastline horizon is almost identical to the vast prairie of North Dakota or Eastern Montana. By being along Puget sound, Seattle gets a broader water access than a river, but also the aesthetic of its horizon to be complimented with a mountain range.
Seattle and Portland do lack one thing: Churches. I recently visited Boston and New York. Both of these classic American cities have one foot in the progressive/secular, and the other in the historical/traditionally religious (I recognize that these aren't mutually exclusive, but they tend to have a sense of contrast). New York has places like St. Patrick's cathedral, St. Bartholomew's cathedral, and All Soul's Unitarian, while Boston has more Roman Catholic, Episcopal, UCC, and UU churches than you can count. Seattle and Portland are profoundly secular in a way that New York isn't, it simply lacks the framing narrative that Christianity serves to irreligious back in the East. Yes, Seattle has Mars Hill, but the city has a much more negative view toward their own arch-conservative, patriarchal, homophobic, reactionary megachurch than the warm ambivalence the Midwest has for theirs. Aesthetically, I see this as a reminder that the Pacific Northwest is a region carved out of economic opportunism, Seattle as the Space-Age economy, Portland as a home for the weird. They have little room to spare for the institution of American Christianity, so often linked with moralizing and the responsibilities of family life, if I can muster the courage to suggest a postulation to why secularism is the case.
Portland is Avant-Garde; Portland is weird. Anybody who tells me socialism, or communitarianism in general, does not work needs to go to Portland. Its Downtown contains a truly astonishing display of public art, in terms of not only its quality, but its quantity. That along with the well-developed city parks proves this city has a conscience about managing its public space to the pleasure and aesthetic of all. Jeremy Bentham would be proud.
William Shakespeare wrote in his play Coriolanus, “What is a city but it's people? True, the people are the city.” Portland provides a facinating dialectic between the people of the city, and its geographic and archeological makeup. While walking the streets toward a budget movie theatre that doubled as an arcade that took nickles instead of quarters, with the intent of watching the film Cabin in the Woods, I came across Monday Funday: a horde of Hippies in a park. There were white men with dreadlocks, a guy playing electric sitar, an individual who gave me a killer back massage for $2, a woman in fluorescent jazzercize tights and a 3rd eye temporary tattoo, a pick-up game of dodge ball, a crazy inventor with two side-by-side bicycles surrounded by a steel-framed hamster wheel that allows the riders of the bicycles (when harnessed) to do a forward roll, hula-hoopers, LARP-ers emulating Conan the Barbarian, mediators walking a labyrinth, and a 40-year-old woman with pigtails playing a keyboard strapped to her bicycle. It is in this display I am able to articulate why I love this city.
Perhaps I can give another example, one from a different voice. While walking the streets, I noticed the same individual who gave me the best back massage of my life. Standing outside a convenience store, he shook a small basket in a circular pattern, causing the ball to rotate around the rim by the centrifugal force. I recognized him, especially by his rich beard. I started to talk to him, and he made reference to his desire to purchase a mesh bandage wrap, but was unable to, due to cost. I entered the convenience store, purchased a number of things, including the bandage, and gave it to him outside. He applied the bandage while I asked him about his perspective about Portland and how he got there in the first place. Like most people, he had a complex past, and came to start anew. In history, all the people who didn't fit in kept going west until they found this beautiful place, he said. They found wonderful people, free in their ideas and expression, and they wanted to stay here. Portland, and Seattle for that matter, are places that are not burdened by the trapping of tradition. They have a great potential to reinvent themselves, try new things, and contently adapt to new circumstances, because they are places founded by the dreamers, schemers, and rejects. There is no “Golden Age” to endlessly pine over, what matters is what works. Perhaps part of this attitude comes in the weave of nature and city in the Pacific Northwest. The love of nature, the desire for conservation, is perhaps the ultimate conservative position, because nature is cyclical, declining to observe time the way we so often rigidly regulate it. The ultimate conservative position returns us not to the past, but to a time when the time was now.
Seattle and Portland are just two places I visited recently, but they brought me in a powerful state of mind that I cannot easily dismiss. Are they perfect? Not by any means (the homeless population and the lack of direct sunlight is not for everybody), but I fully recommend that everybody engage with these cities, as they are beautiful places that, rather then shame the rest of the United States for its stasis and toxic myth-making, offer to enlighten by example. I followed, and I did not regret it.
