Seattle days

This weekend I went to Seattle. I spent New Year's with friends in Portland, then headed north from Portland the extra two hundred-odd miles. New Year's Day dawned clear and crisp, colder than usual for Portland. Temperatures hung around freezing all weekend. Chilling winds hustled me into my car and on the road. It was an idyllic winter's day, crisp enough to keep a person moving briskly outdoors, but gorgeous enough to beckon one outside, and an absolutely perfect day for driving through forested mountains.

There was a time in my life where I drove frequently to Seattle along I-5, but it's been a number of years since I've made the drive. Once you escape the metropolitan hubbub of Portland, the evergreens descend and the mountains rise. On this clear Saturday, mountains stood starkly, beautifully against the cloudless azure sky. Living in Ohio, I forget about mountains. I forget their enormity and their omnipresence. I pulled over more than once to run around in the life-giving mountain air and snap pictures to capture this monumental apparition. As I neared Seattle, I was reminded of another landform integral to life in the region: water. I left the interstate and found Washington State Route 509, which curves right along Puget Sound. The sun set to my left over the water, illuminating the sky with pinks and oranges which in turn shone off the water. To my right, another phenomenon: alpenglow, which is about what it sounds like. The sunset reflects off the lofty, snow-capped peaks of the Cascades, creating a rosy hue in the sky to the east.

Seattle is divided up into so many official neighborhoods that it's hard to keep track as it seems to change every few blocks. My uncle lives off Greenwood Street, so apparently he lives in Greenwood. He also lives in Phinney, so named for the major street which runs one block parallel to Greenwood. I had never realized how endlessly hilly Seattle is. With its sloping streets, Victorian-era homes, and maritime air, it reminded me of San Francisco at times. Except for the mountains. I am going to gush a little bit more about the mountains. Their existence in the sky is utterly unavoidable, and I was in constant awe of their altitude and beauty.
This is what it looks like when you step out the door of my uncle's house. I know, right?

In the morning, I went on a jog around Greenlake. Maybe it's Green Lake, but I just know that the neighborhood is known as the Greenlake neighborhood. My uncle lives on North 73rd, which cuts straight down the hill, ending as the lake appears out of nowhere in this urban jungle. I jogged past two bars and a breakfast joint and cut through the parking lot of the Shell station to reach the 2 1/2 mile path that wrapped around the lake. The January sun shone mightily over the east side of the lake, glinting off the water with such intensity I regretted not wearing sunglasses, frozen though the grass was in the shade. The lake is ringed by a mixed-use path that, early on this Sunday morning, was filled with bikers, joggers, families out for a stroll, toddlers on trikes. My circuit took me past a dock where several men fished, a movie theater, picnic areas, and enough entryways that I began to worry that I wouldn't recognize where I got "on" the path and would wind up running around the lake a second time. That didn't happen, as a Shell station tends to stand out quite starkly against a backdrop of trees. I dashed across the frozen greenery, and hoofed it back up the hill. I run hills all the time in Athens, and I've really lamented their absence in the flat, suburban landscape that surrounds my parents' house in Eugene.

I went to breakfast at an adorable joint called Mae's on Phinney Ridge, just down the major street of whatever neighborhood it is my uncle lives in. I went with Mark, who I marched two years of drum corps with and was one of my best buddies at the time. He now goes to school in upstate New York, though he's from central-eastern Washington (yay for people who move across the country!), so it was fantastic that we had the opportunity to meet up for a bit in Seattle. Mae's was bustling, a Sunday, but the wait was short. We sat in a booth carved into a spot in the wall that was built to look like a mouth. The waitress was more friendly than the whiteboard promised, and she helped me select what to order, offering up suggestions for what I might substitute in place of sour cream & cheese, her smile never wavering. We watched the breakfast crowd cram into brightly colored booths, sipping coffee, and barely scraping the surface of the several years we'd spent apart. The sun shone brightly, though the day was yet crisp and cold.

My uncle and I spent the afternoon driving around Seattle, up and down hills, around water, past water, as he showed me neighborhood after neighborhood. We paid a visit to Discovery Park, which afforded us some breathtaking vistas of the mountains and water. Discovery Park is on a former military base of some sort, so the park is sprinkled, somewhat eerily, with buildings once used to house personnel. All built around the turn of the century, all repainted a mysteriously utopian mustard yellow. Doors were boarded up on several, and there was nary a sign explaining the existence of or purpose for the houses. Like the Greenlake, the park was populated with folks enjoying the day. Though chilly, the respite from rain was welcome. We walked around for a bit, then hiked back to the car. We drove through many of the north Seattle neighborhoods, pointing out historical oddities, pubs, restaurants. My uncle described the specific character of each little neck of the woods. We stopped in Fremont, the less-yuppie, less-hipster version of some of the nearby neighborhoods. We paid a visit to the Fremont brewery, a cold warehouse where customers huddled on benches built from old kegs as the brew fermented in towering silos mere feet away. We drank four-ounce samplers of each of their unique house brews, discussing this and that. My uncle used to be a brewer, and still holds a deep affection for the craft, and a palate more highly refined than anyone else I know. We talked about the next movements in urban food production (which I really feel is a hot topic right now) about microbreweries and small-batch distilleries, kitchen herb gardens, basement mushroom growing, any way to liven up the urban space with fresh products made right there. I am intrigued by these ideas for bringing the rural in-tune-ness I love so much into the city, but I still prefer the rural life I have in Ohio, every day that I am gone.