The Former Homeless Man and the Future Ivy League Student.

As befits Seattle we arrive underground. For reasons unknown to me, we arrive in the smaller and externally more decrepit King Street Station instead of much larger and more ornate Union Station right next door. I am too tired to notice that evening the moderately grand well maintained tiny  little lobby by turn of the century before last standards. It even has what looks large internal portholes to complement its functional though ugly square columns. Why I don’t know?

My prior planning included finding the route and schedule of the appropriate express bus rout to the Courtyard hotel I selected two bodies of land east of the train station. It is way too expensive downtown and I could not find any hotels I could reserve with a moderate number of points. Anyway, I knew I needed Sound Transit Express Bus 550. I knew its map location in relation to the station. I even knew the scheduled frequency well enough to adjust to the fact that we arrived more than 30 minutes earlier. [Yes, you heard right. An Amtrak train arrived e-a-r-l-y.]

What I did not take into account is the 3-D nature of this town. First I had to go west to 2nd Street before going east to 5th Street on Jackson. Then I had the choice of walking up two stories via a wide curving concrete stairway or hauling my butt up the incline that is 2nd Street and virtually every other street in town. I choose the street only because I missed the partially concealed stairway in my haste to get moving after sitting for so long. My overheard compatible rolling back with the 18 lb battery and other stuff is actually siting crosswise on my roller-equipped suit bag with no suit. My overstuffed laptop backpack is providing lateral but not vertical stability. What choice would you make if you knew you had a choice?

The bus bay for ST Express 550 is beside a new clean transit court and across the street from an old seedy transit bar. Also across the street is the gate to Chinatown. The Los Angles area Chinatown is just one block west of Union Station. This one is just south of another Union Station. Food for thought.

Out of the bar comes a thin sleek black man wearing a blue King County jumper. His check of the  plaque mounted schedule for buss 545 reveals he came out just about on time. When I comment on his good fortune, we start up a conversation. I tell him about Clockwise Around America. He tells me about his life, the short version. Four years ago he was homeless after moving some undisclosed time before from the east coast. Today he is a twice promoted maintenance worker. Proud of it too as he has every right to do. He smokes and he drinks but he has held onto his job. He frequents the seedy bar he used to spend panhandling money in because it is a “man’s bar” where he became a man again.

Nice Guy.

Beside us forming a rough equilateral triangle is a young short pear-shaped African-American girl with a cute face and enough curiosity to kill a cat. Her eyes keep darting to us as our discussion progressed. I ask her if she is taking 545 or 550. When it is clear we will be on the same bus, she tells me how she just missed the prior one that was right on time. That was the bus I missed because I had to go west  before east and up two stories not revealed on the flat map.

She fidgets with her pink Palm Centro. I ask her why she is not using a Blackberry that I read is  popular with women. Too wide. Too ugly. Plus she turns out to be much young than I thought. She is proud of her pink Centro since there are only three other she knows of in her high school. Clearly she is not a conformist.

When the bus comes, I offer to pay her ticket. She already knows this is only because I have no change and no ones. I will be forced to pay $5 for a $2.50 ticket which I am glad to do to avoid pay over $60 to a cabbie. This allows me to maintain my public transit cred unlike in LA.  She owns a monthly pass so I get ready to run my five dollars through the bill reader. To my utmost surprise, the bus driver says: “This time, its on the house”.

We sit near the center joint in the articulating bus. The high rise side seat she clearly expects me to sit in is snatched as I am dealing with my bags. So I sit down in the windowless accordion joint compartment beside and below her.

“Did you go to college?”, she asks. “University of Chicago”, I say. Her plans include Stanford or maybe Cornell. These are schools I considered before settling on Chicago. Before I can stop myself, I ask: “Are your grades good enough to get into those schools”? Before I have time to be embarassed at the rude and potentially discriminatory comment, she cheerfully tells she is a grade A student.

As we talk, I am trying to get either of my two GPS bluetooth units to pick up a satellite signal through the overcast sky and laminated window. Nope. Nothing Nada. I ask her to hold one and then the other closer to window. Still no dice. So I revert to old school methods. I scan the sign posts for names and track or route manually using Google Maps on my cell phone. That’s old school for me. I don’t use paper maps.

Seattle is one of the few 3-D Cities. America’s Hong Kong.

Going anywhere in Seattle requires you to go up, down and through as often as left, right or around. Stairs, escalators, bridges, and tunnels abound. Flat land must be created by bulldozing hills or  by landfilling water courses which is frowned upon in the heavily Green city. So bulldozing it is. Before building their subway, Seattle already had a transit tunnel keeping much traffic underground.

Building rise parallel to ridges they only sometimes surmount while houses cling desperately to hills with concrete walls and cantilevered rooms. It is not uncommon to enter on one level and leave on another in larger structures. You need both limber necks and strong legs to  navigate this place.

Maybe this is why Vancouver is home to the largest expatriate community to Chinese from Hong Kong. In addition to more favorable immigration laws for former members of the United Kingdom than the USA, the greater Seattle area looks like home. Colder and greener but in other ways familiar.

The Fiords of the Northwest

Washington State is being pulled apart, not by two, but by three different continental plates sliding and crunching past one another. This is my first thought when I see the oceanic blue water on our left that tells us we have reached Tacoma. Yes, I know this would not be among the first dozen thoughts of most people. The grandeur of any view is not lost on me. It is perceived almost instantly then quickly supplemented by, not replaced by, the question “How”? How did this come to be. Geology has been a fascination since I moved from “why” to “how” as a young child.

The land north of Tacoma is shredded into roughly north/south strips of alternating land and water. The land is bunched up into mountains to the left, mountains to the right, and hills between. The water runs deep. Deep enough to conceal submerged naval submarine bays. Deep enough to make some shorelines vertical. Deep enough to make traditional bridge building impossible.

The preponderance of waterways rather than roadways makes the Seattle/Tacoma/Vancouver area the ferry capital of North America. Oh and by ferry, I mean big water taxis not other homonyms that middle-earthers or conservatives associate with this neck of the woods. In fact, new and used ferries come from all over the world to be commissioned in this waters.This ragged segregated land is a transportation nightmare. Just because you can see your destination does not mean you can get there easily.

Luckily the Seattle Sound region has a transit system that is getting better every day. A real subway, expanding light-rail, regional trains, long-standing electric buses, and large articulated buses that run express routes well into the surrounding suburbs. Density and higher than average costs are driving a greater proportion of folks to join the dedicated commuters and those with no other options that use transit elsewhere. This makes Seattle an appropriate node on a circle tour of America.

The Willamette Valley Offers a Data Cell Signal

For half the day on the train, there is no reliable data quality cell signal. The initial posts of the day were written offline to be posted after we descended the 4000 feet from the southern Oregon cascade highlands. Breakfast around Mt.Shasta then no signal until Klamath Falls. The intermittent mostly absent signal was voice only for the next for hours till Eugene. From half past noon to 4:30 will be be progressing north through the Willamette River Valley to Portland Oregon.

Our longest break of the entire pacific coast trip will be in Portland, almost 40 minutes. Now that there is nothing I can do about it, I long for a layover in Portland. I lived there for a few years not so long ago. It was a bleak time despite the city rather than because of it. My residence was actually in a RV Park in Troutdale, Oregon at the east end of the metro area right at the beginning of the Columbia River Gorge wilderness area. The spot was nestled in the bottom land of the Sandy River that marks the western boundary of the gorge.

Portland has everything I seek in a city: a vibrant downtown with close in neighborhoods of radically diffrent and intriging characters, a dramatic landscape carved by one of the most climactic floods in North American history, a viable and varied public transportation system with one of the most effective light rail systems in the USA plus a downtown trolley, and a wide spectrum of entertainment and dining options.

Note: This post was published the day after being written.