Seattle

Seattle surprised me. Prior to our unintended detour, the only time I had been to Seattle was in transit to someplace else. Consequently, my only memory of Seattle was a convoluted maze of highways criss-crossing above my head as I gazed bleary eyed out the window on a family roadtrip to Disney Land. I assumed we were downtown because the sign said Seattle, but after spending time in the city, I realize the city is nothing like the fast-paced metropolis I imagined it to be. It shares a lot of the same characteristics that I've grown up loving about Vancouver; it's laid back attitude, outdoor markets, yoga enthusiasts and hippies of all shapes and sizes (ie. vegan or simply vegetarian). I think my most joyous observation about Seattle was realizing that my favourite advice column, Savage Love, and my idol and favourite advice columnist, Dan Savage, both made there start on the streets of Seattle writing for The Stranger an alternative weekly newspaper. I had the great joy of reading his column from the original source and could barely make sense of it through my giddy jumping.

To pass the time in Seattle, other than visiting the mandatory Pike Place Market, my mom and I went on the Underground Tour. Apparently, Seattle has had a lot of historical....sewage....problems. When the settlers arrived there they were overjoyed to find a large expanse of uninhabited and unforested land with a beautiful seafront view. Little did they realize such ideal real estate was uninhabited for a very important reason. You see, the oceans have these things called tides and twice a day the sea level raises in an attempt to drive foreigners away. But these weren't just any tourists, they were pioneers and thus ridiculously stubborn. They found a slightly higher area with a coastal view and started to build a settlement there.

There wasn't much to do in this town to begin with due to the small area it encompassed, so people began to have children (one can only assume due to the monotany of being a pioneer) and the town began to grow. Luckily people's homes weren't flooded because they lived on the safety of a nearby hill and it was only the business district that was located down on the mudflats. Unfortunately, one of the icky things about natural history, as the novel so eliquently states, is that Everybody Poops. There is also gravity...gravity is another unfortunate element of this story. So we have everyone pooping up on the hill into tubes that flow into the sea, which is all well and good until the tide appear (no thanks to a certain celestial body orbiting a town, which shall not be named) and decides that it would rather not be covered in human defication, but would much prefer that it returned from whence it came. As a result, twice a day sea water and human waste would do exactly that through the lovely means of creating geysers pouring into the streets and through people's brand new Crappers into their homes. America's second Old Faithful.

The city's solution to this issue was to build the piping system one story up from sea level and hope that gravity would be in there favour. Luckily for the Seattle-ites, they were presented with just this opportunity when a fire burned down the downtown core. As everyone was rebuilding they made a plain looking store front at ground level and ritzy looking store fronts at the current level of the second floor. So you'd be walking around downtown Seattle back in the day and floating above your head would be all the stores you actually wanted to enter, but you were only able to look at them from afar and wait. Then they built up the streets around the sidewalks, so they were supported at second story level and created a labarynthian waffle of hidden pockets throughout the city's downtown area. Hence, the ever so fascinating Underground Tour.

It just goes to show how good urban planning makes for mind-numbing history books.