Leaving for Magnolia

Bus 24 leaves downtown Seattle for Magnolia every twenty minutes. I'd pick it up on 3rd and Bell, where the homeless people sat outside the dog park by Dan's Groceries. In front of a vacant lot down the street, crackheads sell beaten up shoes off of a blanket. When the bus meets Broad Street, the line turns left under the Space Needle's shadow and barrels down a hill, leaving downtown for the bridge.

Magnolia Bridge makes this bus line. As far as bridges go, this one is pretty shit--grey concrete, no suspension rigs soaring into the sky, a lot of traffic. The Nisqually earthquake damaged the bridge fourteen years ago, but no one's made any improvements, and its concrete is crumbling. The bridge spans paved tidelands that now hold warehouses and cruise line terminals. One of the bus's stops is in the middle of the bridge, right there in the margin with traffic rushing one side of the bus and straight drop to concrete on the other. Old Hispanic men and young white guys in coveralls get off and head into Ivar's, a fish shop, or climb down the rickety staircase to the railroad tracks under the bridge. My first summer in Seattle, I ran out of time walking from Magnolia to downtown. It was the very end of summer, one of October's last good days. The blue sky waned, and although my face was sunburned, rain clouds threatened over Smith Cove. I stopped in the middle of the bridge, straddling the sidewall as I waited, one foot perilously close to the rushing traffic, the other dangling over a parking lot below. The wind picked up, licking my hair. The light dissapated into the aftertaste of blue sky, bringing grey clouds, and my skin stung with the day's sunburn and the briny air of the coming storm. In the distance, the Space Needle looked surprisingly large between the hill and the vast body of water. The bus arrived, pulling to a stop in no man's land, caught for a moment between downtown and Magnolia. The doors opened, swallowed me. I rode with my legs stretched over a row of seats, my forehead against the glass. The choppy waves disappeared as we crossed the bridge into downtown.

Magnolia is suburbs: it's babies in strollers, white people with money, mom and pop stores on main street. I love Magnolia. It's a Twilight Zone episode where the city is a black and white set where moms still wear house dresses and every house costs a million dollars. The neighborhood, set on a vast, fat peninsula, has only three roads connecting it to the rest of the city. Magnolia Bridge is one of the roads.

I used to go to Magnolia a lot. Their library is sweet--a Magnolia tree, heavy with white blossoms in the springtime, watched over their entrance. Everything, even their front doors, is made of big, beautiful blocks of wood. The interior is a single room of windows and low bookshelves and open space. The furniture was designed by a guy named George Nakashima, and each chair is estimated at $1500. Bus 24 stops right by the library, and I'd ride the line through the suburb's back streets, eyeing the trellises, the balconies, the Victorian charm. There were maybe two bus stops on Main Street; the rest were outside beautiful homes, stepping off sidewalks well-used by little feet. By wintertime, my bus ride was through the dark, and the homes would be lit from the inside like Thomas Kinkade paintings. Those bus rides made me sleepy. My stomach always felt warm.

One night, the bus stopped besides one of these warmly lit million dollar cottages. A girl was waiting, alone. She was obviously cold, rubbing her hands together despite her thin gloves. The street was empty for a mile, lit just with yellow windows set back behind hedges and trees. The bus doors opened, swallowing her, taking her from this lonely place to downtown. I felt a strong rush of affection for my city--my city--at the end of the line, in downtown. The indistinct sounds from the sports bar next door, the low wail of sirens through the night, and the look of surprise from pedestrians as I turned my bike around a tight corner for the alley behind my house. I liked leaving my front door with a ceramic mug of tea and walking by Tavolata and Wasabi, both solid walls of glass windows and people dressed in silk enjoying cocktails.

Downtown Seattle is dirty. The few skyscrapers of downtown seem gross and overreaching. Most of the city's bad is centered in Belltown, known for its drugs and decaying hamburger wrappers at the bus stops. There's a homeless guy famous for his "I want a fat bitch" sign. Third Avenue is the worst of it, with the string of homeless services giving berth to a population with an aggressive approach to passing women. Belltown is a mix of homeless, tourists, and increasingly, young techies with start-up money. Downtown is a paradox. It's living in a temporary space. It's the city--but it's not.

I've since moved away from Belltown to the Central District, which kind of reminds me of the suburbs of Magnolia, if suburbs were poor and colored differently from white. It's known as the gunshot neighborhood, which is ridiculous with the amount and rate of gentrification. We don't have a main street, we don't have skyscrapers, and we don't have a lot of stores. We're mostly houses. There's Cappy's Boxing Gym one block from my house, three bars, and enough Ethiopian restaurants to feed you for a month. But we're Seattle too.

Seattle is a bunch of neighborhoods someone stuck together and called a city. Each one is vastly different. Usually, there's a lake or a hill or a part of the Puget Sound physically dividing the neighborhoods from each other. The city has 149 bridges. Water makes up almost half of the city, occupying 41% of its total area. The Lake Washington Ship Canal literally divides the city in half.

All I'm saying is, there's a lot of no man's land. There's a lot of places, and a lot of time, to find a space here.