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Pacific Northwest Magazine William Dietrich

'Our Town'

Defining Seattle's evolving soul

SOMETIMES I WISH you'd all just go away.

Northwest newcomers, I mean. The driven who are striven toward condo-livin' and who want to remodel our soggy Eden into an urban, glossy facsimile of wherever rat cage they escaped from.

You know who you are. Hip, Botoxed fashionistas in $250 jeans and $350 Goretex, with a restaurant of the week and book of the month you might not even read, piloting a luxury 4x4 to "camp" in a four-star within frenetic Wi-Fi range of the stock market, Wine Advisor and e-mailed sushi alerts. Condescending workaholics who carry the Robb Report in their daypack. Eastern eggheads out to gauge native sentiment. Cozy covens of corporate transferees who give each other outrageous executive salaries to downsize Northwest companies into cautionary bureaucracies and are rewarded with steroidal McMansions of such hideous architectural pomposity that they only confirm that undeserved wealth, no matter how ostentatious, cannot confer taste.

A pox on all of you!

I don't really know anyone like that, of course.

It just seems like I do. Our Northwest has been taken over by an invasive species, as pernicious as tansy ragwort, Scotch broom and Himalaya blackberry.

We had a net increase of 81,000 newcomers in 2006 — about 38,000 of them from California, judging by driver's license data. Throw in the babies, and we added about 130,000 people last year.

Enough, already!

I know I'm weird. I was actually born and grew up here, or rather there: South Tacoma, circa 1950s. The B&I Circus Store was as exciting as it got, and our house in the McChord Air Force Base flight path shook from the mammoth military transports that screamed overhead. My town, like most Northwest towns, stank of pulp, sulfur, creosote and fish. We were not cool. Culture was something you traveled a thousand miles to see.

In retrospect, of course, being from Hoquiam or Everett has acquired a cachet. Back then, we knew we were hicks.

But we were smug! Our climate was among the world's most temperate. Our geography was the most beautiful. Our power rates were the nation's cheapest, our schools the nation's best-funded, our blue-collar wages the nation's most generous. My dad could rent a kicker boat at Point Defiance and catch a salmon after work. You could drive to a popular state park on a Friday evening and score a good camping spot.

Everything was post-World War II-new: the freeway, parks, rest stops, bridges. The dams were a tourist attraction. Hundreds of gillnetters twinkled like fairy lights at night on Puget Sound, and razor clams were plentiful whenever you wanted them. Some highways were still slits of shadow down eerily glorious, 200-foot-high corridors of trees.

Like the children of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, everyone was above average.

Not that we knew what we had. Shortly after high school my father pointed out a $20,000 duplex and suggested it might be a good investment. I thought it was too expensive. After all, my folks had passed on a $2,000 water-view lot in Anacortes.

Washington state was so far from everywhere that it was kind of exotic to live here. Really. The state also seemed two or three times bigger than it does now. I don't know what happened.

I'm 55, and the state's population has risen 2 ½ times in my lifetime: from about 2.4 million in 1951 to 6.5 million today. If I can make it another 18 years, Washington's population will have more than tripled, to 8 million. Most of that growth has been concentrated in the Puget Sound basin. King County's growth rate has matched Washington's, and surrounding counties have exceeded the state rate.

It isn't population alone that has changed things, however.

One is money. We have more of it on display. This used to be a place of blue-collar labor and middle wages, a union stronghold. At least by popular myth, the rich had a Northwest reticence about their good fortune: Mansions were discreetly tucked away in places like the Highlands. The wealth disparity has since exploded, and success is in-your-face. Yet more stuff hasn't increased contentment, it has intensified greed and jealousy. The recent bidding up of housing, some of it fueled by speculators, is corrosive, bad for young families.

Another is a loss of regional identity, which is a planetary phenomenon, not just a Northwest one. It's hypocritical to complain about chain stores and mega-businesses when you come from a region that exported Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Nordstrom, REI, Eddie Bauer and Costco, to name just some. Still, you find the same formula stores, restaurants and hotels everywhere: comforting, yes, but creepy, too. Fewer and fewer own more and more.

A third change is the collapse of traditional resource industries as an economic mainstay. This isn't newcomers' fault, we simply overfished and overcut as the economy matured. But few of us are brawny manly-men striding the world in calk boots anymore. We inhabit someplace a lot more like TV's "The Office," and have more in common with Dilbert than Paul Bunyan. It's hard to write legends about crunching code.

Even the weather has changed. Maybe it's global warming or maybe it's the "Pacific Decadal-Oscillation," but the Northwest has been warmer, drier and less miserable, as if Californians dragged sunshine in with them. The Paradise ice caves have melted. The glaciers are receding. We create our own heat islands.

That's bad? newcomers are asking. Do I really want to turn the clock back to wigwam sawdust burners, chainsaw white-finger, a skyline that consisted of the Smith Tower, Ivar Haglund as the epitome of Northwest wit, and hydroplanes as the premier spectator sport? Can you spell p-r-o-v-i-n-c-i-a-l?

For one thing, complaining about immigration sounds racist. The numbers of non-white Washingtonians have zoomed from 16 percent in 1990 to 23 percent in 2003, and are projected to hit 32 percent by 2030. And yes, they've made Seattle and the state much more interesting and vibrant. Let's face it, all white people is boring.

Another sneaky fact is that many of the most interesting people I know — the most ambitious, the most artistic, the most creative and the most visionary — are from someplace else. Their "otherness" gives them new perspective, and their willingness to re-invent themselves in a new place gives them drive. I admire them, even when I stick pins in little wax dolls of their likeness.

I also have the problem of being a complete hypocrite on the subject of newcoming. My wife and I moved from King County to Skagit in 1998, inflicting our presence on Anacortes just as so many others have sloshed into Seattle and Redmond. I'm chasing a receding Northwest, using relocation as a time machine, and I can't blame people from Jersey or Indianapolis for wanting to do the same. Next stop, Omak.

The Northwest tribes are laughing at my lament. My family ancestry here only goes back to the 1930s, theirs several thousand years. There goes the neighborhood? Join the club, white boy.

In countless ways Seattle and Washington are better places, not worse. For every traffic jam there's a new theater, or sports venue, or museum. And sometime around 2000, the post-war trend of sprawling outward finally reached its impossible, two-hour-commute limit, and migration back to the center began, sparking an urban renaissance in Seattle that is still playing out.

What do I want? Glamour without the gridlock. Vibrancy without the rudeness and road rage. Glittery towers without the Yuppie pretension. Interesting food, but dishes I can actually afford, and which aren't piled into a leaning tower that topples and bleeds raspberry sauce when I poke at it.

That never happened at Ivar's.

We native Northwesterners have a way of finding our own nest. Folks I know have wound up in the Methow, Port Townsend, Bellingham and the Willapa Hills. If we could do that, and the rest of you could get better at clustering, maybe it will all be OK.

But the Seattle I knew is as gone with the wind as the antebellum South, a lost artifact in a nation that just hit 300 million.

The one that is replacing it looks a little too much like Boston or Soho to me.

William Dietrich is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Paul Schmid is a Seattle artist.

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