Living in a Box

 The city I live in has never known what to do with its downtown which I blame on the fire that burned it to the ground a little over a hundred years ago. Nobody died in the conflagration of 1889 but it was enough to send inhabitants of the 38-year-old city to other areas where they established small communities that flourished. Even now these places, now part of the city of Seattle, have their own stores, libraries, and community centers that have made them independent of downtown. 

Instead of becoming the heart of the city, Seattle's core lost most of its residents and grew through a series of booms and busts. It boasts a profusion of lackluster skyscrapers that house offices, a large number of hotels, and many restaurants. Its driving force is its Public Market, which in recent years has become a quaint and sprawling outdoor shopping mall. From a goldrush boomtown to a manufacturer of ships and jet planes to a center for high-tech, this part of Seattle has become a tourist trap that depends upon the economic vagaries of cruise ship passengers.

The number of small shops can fit comfortably on the fingers of both hands and they're boutiques, not the mom-and-pop stores that would give the streets some character. There is no supermarket. 

Low-income housing encircles the Market but those residents can no longer afford to buy food there, assuming they can find anything other than fish and the same kinds of vegetables that are sold in grocery stores, but at much higher prices. Tourists come to this place because there are few other places near their hotels where they can shop and supply has adapted to their demands. They eat their way through a place that once held farmers with dirt under their fingernails and horse meat that was trucked in from Montana. Holding little containers of mac and cheese or cups from a Starbucks that falsely claims to be the original location, they use the few surviving vegetable stalls as photo opportunities.

A working waterfront that in the not-too-distant past smelled of salt water and the creosote that preserved its wooden piers has been turned into a carnival with great views for more photo-snapping. There are no more fishing boats that used to sell salmon from their decks several decades ago. The only utilitarian features left are the ferry boats that carry commuters across Puget Sound, and those commuters have to fight for a space onboard when the summer tourists arrive.

I have a view from the windows of my studio apartment that Bill Gates would kill for. I can see only water, sky, a forest of evergreens that border the opposite coast, and ferry boats. Once in a while a container vessel appears, guided by tugboats and I've positioned my chairs so I never see the huge white behemoths that disgorge passengers from March to October. 

Ostensibly I live in a city but my life is a lot like one that I used to have in a one-room Alaskan cabin. I go out for supplies and come home to isolation. Or as a catchphrase once said "If you call that living." I have Sam Cooke as my lodestar. "Change gonna come."