You have to come to this city, find a way to live, tough it out. For at least two years, you'll think you did the wrong thing. Then, suddenly, it's in your blood, you're trapped, hopelessly in love, and you actually live in Seattle. "Oh my god," you say, "what have I done?"

— Alan Furst, Esquire, 1983

I think of Seattle as having a gray-green heart, a city shaped and tempered by nature in a land smoothed and rounded by glaciers, pocked by freshwater lakes and indented by a saltwater sound. It is a city healed and nurtured by conifer and salal kept verdant by a persistently wet climate, as if the region has a rain forest for a godfather. Seattleites appreciate the grayness of fogs and cloud cover: They nose into books when the light pearls and wind moves through improbably tall trees we call evergreen.

Our gray-green muted world seems reflected in our politeness and our political correctness, a badge of living here. We stand up with a breathtaking pride for our motley architecture and flailing sports teams, our insular provincialism and our legendary rain. But it is the way we live, our NPR-listening, black Lab-loving, electric guitar-inventing, REI-shopping, book-reading, sea-kayaking life in Seattle that signals to others an enviable if damp happiness.

It is a Seattle personality we project that has caught the attention of the nation and the world. And one has to ask, what is it about a town removed from the power centers of the world that has garnered so much attraction over the past decade? Seattle was voted "America's Most Dynamic City" by Fortune magazine, "No. 1 City of the Future" by USA Today and "America's Athens" by the New York Times.

The answers may lie in Seattle's youth and resourcefulness, its geographical remoteness and natural surroundings. Seattle began as a rambunctious pioneer town with a liberal outlook born of a frontier expediency. And that civic character manifests itself today in the recent World Trade Organization protest marches, as well as the quiet creation of more millionaires per capita than any other urban area in the United States. Through six generations of gold seekers, lumberjacks, teachers, fishermen, airplane builders and software inventors, we all share the feeling that living here is an adventure.

It is this abiding sense of the adventure, continually refreshed by glimpses of Puget Sound through the downtown high-rises, or of Mount Rainier immense behind our residential hills, that sets us apart from other cities. Witness the arrival of new Seattleites imbued with the same start-over pioneer energy. As they settle in, dress codes fall away, social climbing turns to mountain climbing. The city is seemingly endowed with unlimited possibility. Yet Seattle is still thought of by those who live here, and those who might, as a simpler, quieter, woodsier and, above all, a more beautiful place to live and work.

This is Seattle: salmon trollers and Boeing 787 Dreamliners, three-piece suits and wet suits, cultural metropolis and comfortable backwater, an experiment in blending nature with human nature. We have been given a unique role to play in America and the world. The question now: Is the gray-green heart of Seattle robust enough to persevere? Can a city growing in popularity, capability and population maintain the sylvan character and slow pace that brings everybody here in the first place?

I'm here for the forests (what's left of them), for the world's best bookstores and movie theaters, for the informality, anonymity, general lack of hidebound tradition, and the fact that here and nowhere else grunge rubs shoulders in the half-mean streets with a pervasive yet subtle mysticism.

— Tom Robbins, "Edge Walking on the Western Rim," 1994

How does one fall in love with this city? Is it something primordial that captures your heart as suddenly as a beautiful day, the scent of cedar trees, the sense of the ocean beyond Puget Sound, the sight of an eagle overhead? Is that why so many East Coast post-college travelers who passed through Portland or San Francisco or other points west abruptly ended up here?

You would be hard-pressed to name another city with such physical features: the Olympics and Cascade Mountains, Mount Baker and Mount Rainier. And Lake Washington and Puget Sound hold the city in an embrace that makes household views of our surrounding marine environment a normal component of living here.

The attraction intensifies amidst the rolling-hill neighborhoods often defined by their particular features: Magnolia Bluff, Madison Valley, Alki Point. There is an ease of knowing where you are here: the horizon is a constant of ridge lines and coastlines, the Space Needle poking up over Queen Anne Hill, the Lake Washington Ship Canal shimmering across the narrow waist of the city. In time, these physical features become a familiar backdrop to our urban lifestyles, a calming yet invigorating influence confirming our decision to come or to stay.

Loving urban Seattle is a more complex affair. If there were a job in the city of Seattle as "civic psychologist," British-born writer and longtime Seattle resident Jonathan Raban should apply: "What's crucially wrong with Seattle is that it has no real consciousness of its own urbanity. It has earned for itself a strange place in urban history as the first big city to which people have flocked in order to be closer to nature," Raban said in The Seattle Times. He is right in many ways. Seattleites are an independent lot — we do not focus on building a better city; many of us do not even sense the obligation. The downtown skyline has not captured the attention of the world's architects. Weak growth management has not stopped our urban sprawl. And Seattle's vehicle gridlock is rivaling Los Angeles. Where I differ with Raban is in both Seattle's moment in time and our role as a city.

Seattle in 150-plus years has grown from split-cedar-plank longhouses to Rem Koolhaas libraries, logging-camp fiddles to symphony-fund drives, and one-room school houses to genomic bioengineering research buildings. But Seattle is still a teenager in city years: she is not going to behave like 380-year-old New York. Seattle is the 95th largest city in the world, with an estimated 2005 statistical area population of 3.7 million. Yet the nation and the world look upon Seattle with envy for our new and natural lifestyle.

Our pace, pastimes and priorities are affected by our natural surroundings in ways we may never fully understand. But if nature somehow softens Seattle's resolve to be like New York City, it also shapes her character and community in ways no other city is experiencing.

Backyard Wilderness

It should be no great surprise that my favorite childhood memories are not of Disneyland or parades or circuses, but rather of camping with my family in the Cascades along Nason Creek, or exploring the Oregon coast, or taking a simple day trip around Mount Rainier. Forest, mountain, and ocean were themes that defined my travel experiences well into my young adulthood. For the most part, they form what I am today.

— nature photographer Art Wolfe, Pacific Northwest, 1998

If Seattleites can be separated from Angelinos and New Yorkers, it is because of our fascination with the Northwest wilderness. Seattleites ski, hike, row, climb, kayak, sail, camp, bike, often leading the nation in these sports. The reason is that no other city in the United States can compare with Seattle's unique house blend of rivers, mountains, forests, lakes and seas.

The Cascade Mountains are out Seattle's kitchen window, so skiing is something most Seattleites do. With seven major ski areas and challenging backcountry within an hour or two of town, skiing is a Seattle rite of passage.

Sea kayaking is perhaps Seattle's most emblematic sport. With thousands of miles of salt and freshwater coastlines to explore, no wonder there are more kayakers here than anywhere else in the world. Launch early for a weekend at Blake Island Marine State Park, just 3 ½ nautical miles across Puget Sound from Alki Point. Head for the northwest point of Blake to camp at the Cascadia Marine Trail site, one of 47 such sites for human-powered watercraft through the Sound to the Canadian border. Amidst drift logs and beach grass, tents go up, dinner starts frying, and all settle back in wilderness solitude to toast the poor working stiffs manning the distant skyline of Seattle.

The hike into Shi Shi Beach follows an old logging road out from Neah Bay that runs south along the Washington coast, the path quickly turning muddy. About the time you've become an expert at wet-boot placement, the rhythmic sound of the Pacific surf reaches through the trees and hastens your pace. A final turn in the trail reveals a sweeping sand beach embraced by ranks of vertical sea stacks, a dazzling ocean, perfect sunsets, negative ions, and an ever-evolving community of beach campers dotted down the line of drift logs. Hikers with the gumption to master the soft sand beach will be rewarded when they reach the Point of Arches, there to set up camp, and then to explore the low-tide caverns and wave-cut tunnels of this dramatic point. Deep within, if you are lucky, you will find the opalescent nudibranch, a sea slug of uncommon beauty.

The north ridge of Forbidden Peak is a good intermediate climb: serrated granite building blocks with exposure on either side leading up to an 8,815-foot summit. But our team is moving too slowly and we turn back; darkness forces a bivouac 800 vertical feet above our camp. We scooch together for warmth and watch the light fade across the North Cascades, marveling at being about 90 miles from Seattle, telling stories, finding silence, seeing the aurora borealis for the first time.

Climbing Forbidden Peak is going to challenge anyone who tries it. Hikers must analyze group strengths and weaknesses. The challenge is individual, yet the Northwest outdoors experience often relies on a sense of teamwork, not a direct, bruising competition to reach the summit. That translates into a Seattle way of being, our own brand of competition and communication, one that is inclusive, daring and skillful. A sense of grace, staying power and mental surefootedness that comes from playing in our backyard wilderness helps Seattle stay young, fresh and competitive.

Future Work, A Seattle Ethic

Seattle represents a window for the nation in the 21st century.

— William Jefferson Clinton, Seattle, 2003

Talking with Dan Cook up at Herkimer's coffee shop, we got to thinking about the ability of this relatively small city to create an impact on the nation and the world. We quickly went to the why of that, which came down to four truths: a perennial pioneering optimism, the attraction of bright people to Seattle's natural and work environments, the region's remove from the centers of culture and commerce forcing us to stand alone, and a resiliency due to a young history and a lack of hidebound tradition. Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Boeing, REI are here because of these talents. But where will they take us?

By 2005, the Seattle-built economic engines once considered ours were moving on. Airborne Express relocated to the Sunbelt. Seattle's most successful biotech, Immunex, was bought by California-based Amgen. AT&T Wireless, which began locally as a Craig McCaw venture, was in the process of outsourcing 70 percent of its 3,900 Seattle technical staff, and Microsoft had begun to outsource its product marketing, support and design jobs to India and Europe. Boeing, having moved its headquarters to Chicago, announced plans to job out most of its Dreamliner fabrication overseas, leaving us the tail fin to manufacture. Seattle was fast becoming the most intelligent, creative, out-of-work city in the nation.

Happily, Seattle is smart. A United Kingdom study gave the Seattle area fourth-highest ranking of 125 regions worldwide using "knowledge-economy benchmarks." And Seattle has been characterized as having the third-highest concentration of what Carnegie Mellon University professor Richard Florida calls the "creative class." These are the people who can find a solution to their joblessness that in time results in a completely new career or an innovation that just might be what the world needs.

When the economists and pundits look to the future of Seattle, they tend to overlook the "creative class" that is reshaping Seattle with new ideas.

In 1990, Sherwin Shinn, a Sammamish-area dentist, had just finished trekking to the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal when he chanced upon a 5-year-old Nepalese girl with two severely abscessed teeth so infected he realized she might die. He operated at the nearby hospital so short of equipment he had to use his pocketknife. Seeing firsthand that the Nepalese lacked even simple toothbrushes, Shinn left his practice and founded, with his wife, Jerri, the International Smile Power Foundation, to establish volunteer-staffed dental clinics throughout the Third World.

Bill Clapp, heir to one of Seattle's oldest family fortunes, began applying his business acumen to the plight of the very poor in Central America in 1990 with the idea of micro-lending. Together with his wife, Paula, they founded Global Partnerships in 1994. Bill then had the idea for building a broader network of civic and business leaders called the Initiative for Global Development, whose mission is to raise national awareness of the feasibility of eliminating extreme global poverty in our lifetime. As co-founder, former U.S. Senator and past Gov. Daniel Evans put it boldly: The Seattle Initiative was "to figure out what America's role in the world ought to be."

Bill Gates' role in the world has been creating Microsoft, the planet's most successful software company. The interest of his wife, Melinda, and the willingness of his father, Bill Gates Sr., to organize and head what would become the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with its $29 billion fund, has earned the Gates family and Seattle a unique reputation in global philanthropy.

What these organizations can do for the future of the world is unknown. What their mission means to Seattle is only now becoming clear. Seattle has more nonprofit organizations per capita than most any major city in the United States. It is these rambunctious, worldly-wise organizations that are putting Seattle on the world map.

Like the gold-rush era of a century before, Seattle is attracting people from all over the world, only this time the settlers are talented researchers set on tackling universal problems on multiple levels. It is a citywide synergy of scientists at the University of Washington who attract research dollars (in the neighborhood of $1 billion annually), that stimulate nonprofit organizations like the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and PATH, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health. In turn these organizations are aided by grants from local foundations. As a result, Seattle is now the fifth-largest cancer, AIDS, disease-prevention and genomic-research center in the nation.

The mark of a great city is its ability to do all things well. Seattle has arrived at this threshold with a broad depth of talent, wealth and accomplishments that are already making a difference in a number of directions. The question for the city's future is what directions suit us best?

Our environmental ethic is perhaps Seattle's greatest trait. The expertise is here. The path, as evidenced by the city's biotech success, is clear. The nation, and world, is in need of an environmental champion. What other metropolis could so easily or so rightly take up the challenge but the city with the gray-green heart?

Joel W. Rogers is the author and photographer of several books, including the award-winning "The Hidden Coast: Kayak Explorations from Alaska to Mexico." He can be reached through his Web site at www.joelrogers.com.