thinking about the kind of people who ended up here, I expect them to be self-reliant and freethinking, something Americans claim as a national birthright. Historically, Americans seem always to be running from home, whether from England or New England, resolutely heading into the setting sun, away from family and tradition, looking for places to survive on their own. But once they arrived here in the Northwest, they became social-minded. Not only did they elect the first woman mayor and erect the first Hispanic college, but this is the home of consumers’ co-ops, mutual aid societies, and publicly owned utilities. Internet cafes, emblems of both real and virtual connectivity, were spawned here. They may have the lowest rate of church attendance and the highest percentage of atheism in the country, but social conscience runs high: three of the ten greenest communities in the United States are part of this I-5 megacity. And the two biggest online magazines devoted to environmental sustainability are produced out of Seattle. Maybe that’s because they still have an environment to save—over half of the land mass of Washington, the Evergreen State, is still covered with forest.
At least, that’s the way it looks on the map. From where I sit, though, gridlocked in traffic in the endless urban sprawl that is Seattle, this could just as easily be Mississauga or Washington, D.C. Fifty years ago, when John Steinbeck approached Seattle after decades living away from the Pacific, which he called his home ocean, he wrote that he “remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage—a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land.”
The highway is twelve lanes wide now, and we can hardly see the earth for houses. We certainly can’t see the matchless harborage: skyscrapers block the view. Wayne counts twelve building cranes rising above the downtown high-rises. The rain pours down. The traffic is going nowhere. Clouds settle like tired Sasquatches onto office tower roofs.
“Let’s just drive on,” Wayne says. He would rather be moving. Something about sitting behind the wheel of a car sucks the curiosity out of him. He’s not venturing through new territory, he’s locked in a video game, earning points for every car he passes. Sitting still is not sitting well with him.
“How about going into Fremont?”
“What’s that?”
“The Artists’ Republic of Fremont. It’s the old hippie part of Seattle.”
“An artists’ republic?” he says, lighting up. “I thought Plato kicked artists out of the republic.”
We ease off the interstate and down past small, cottage-like houses pressed into the hillsides. I watch for the sign that says Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, Set Your Watch Back Five Minutes. Or the one that advises Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, Set Your Watch Forward Five Minutes.
“Maybe somebody stole them,” Wayne suggests. He seems to like the idea. “Or maybe they disappeared into the temporal shift when everyone changed their watches.” He likes that idea even better.
We do find a pole stuck with arrows painted in Neapolitan-ice-cream shades. They point every which way: Timbuktu 10,029 mi. Bermuda Triangle 3.75. Xanadu, East of the Sun. Dinosaurs 3 Blocks. Troll 2 Blocks. The pole itself is striped with an arrow that points straight down: Center of the Universe.
We get out to stretch our legs and stroll past a sixteen-foot bronze statue of Lenin; a rocket mounted on the side of a building, blowing smoke as if trying to blast off; a corral of life-size dinosaurs shaped from living hedges. Tucked under the highway overpass, someone has shaped a giant troll in ferro-cement, a real VW Beetle crushed under the weight of its left hand. A block away, three billy goats gambol across a yard, cut-outs in rusting steel. But these are relics of a quirky past. The stores that line the short main street sell souvenirs made in China, bins of organic vegetables, and vintage clothing arranged by colour on chrome racks.
“Do artists still live here?” I ask a young woman wearing a heavy brown khaki jacket and pants and a Peruvian woollen cap. In one hand she holds a bouquet of brushes and balances a palette; with the other, she dabs at the painting on her easel. It’s a reasonable likeness of the troll.
“No way, it’s too expensive. There’s lofts in old warehouses south of the piers,” she adds after some thought. “Some artists live there.”
“Is that where you live?”
She hesitates. If I’d brought a pair of gloves, I’d give them to her; her fingers are blanched from the cold.
“No,” she says. “I live with my parents.”
Fremont’s motto may still be “De Libertas Quirkas,” but clearly, the freedom to be peculiar is not what it once was. The artists have crept back into Seattle, leaving painters to paint each other’s art. And the hippies are history, just another part of the Fremont brand.
History, it seems, is malleable. Fremont, indeed all of Seattle, is in King County, which was named in 1852 in honour of a plantation owner from Selma, Alabama, a certain William Rufus DeVane King, who was a United States senator, a supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850, which extended slavery into new states and territories. At the time, William Rufus King was vice-president-elect of the United States. A hundred and thirty-four years later, in 1986, the county councillors decided they were no longer comfortable living in a place named for a slave owner, so they passed a resolution denouncing Rufus King and replacing him with Martin Luther King, Jr., “renaming” the county for this other King, who embodied “the attributes for which the citizens of King County can be proud, and claim as their own.”
“The King is dead,” Wayne says, as he manoeuvres out of the parking space. “Long live the King.”
I read the story of the Kings in a brochure I picked up in a coffee shop, where Wayne bought a T-shirt: Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe: throw away your watch. We ask store clerks and waiters and the concierge of the downtown hotel where we take a room for the night; they’ve all heard of the Fremont signs, but no one has ever seen one, which strikes me, in an odd way, as perfect.
Chatting with the concierge, I have a hard time remembering we’re in a foreign country. The hotel is a chain: we’ve stayed in dozens exactly like it back home. The Stars and Stripes is nowhere in evidence. The people we meet speak in the same flat tones as we do, they dress like us, drive the same cars, buy the same snacks in convenience stores, drink our favourite coffee. It may be that we all watch the same TV shows and buy goods from the same manufacturers, or maybe it’s because for seventy years after the American War of Independence, Washington, like Canada, was still part of British North America.
And then we see the sign on a post going into the hotel bar: No knives. No guns.
We have entered a different country, after all.
WHAT’S that yummy smell?”
After checking into our hotel, Merilyn and I have gone for a walk—our favourite urban pastime—and now find ourselves outside the Pike Place Fish Market, on the corner of Pike and Post Alley, in downtown Seattle. The marketplace is crowded, people milling about, bent over tables of produce, pinching lettuce leaves, peering into the eyes of fish. Fresh Pacific salmon bask on crushed ice, hosed-down organic
