Urban Embolism

I hate driving in Seattle. To say Seattle is overcrowded is a gross understatement. Seattle is insanely overcrowded. There’s no margin of error when you’re out on the road. None. Not a bit. Let your mind wander one critical inch from its focus on all the chaos and impending threats around you and the next sound you’re going to hear is the crunch of metal on metal. You’ve got to be hypervigilant each second of the way. And by hypervigilant I mean wide-wake, jazzed, circumspect, fast on the draw, maybe a little goosed by panic, sweat trickling down your neck. Except, of course, for those many occasions in which you’re stuck in traffic and not moving at all. Frozen in space and time. Your mind and head assaulted by someone’s idea of music: the thump! thump! thump! emanating from the leviathan four-by-four next to you.

I used to enjoy the kind of daydreaming that driving sometimes inspires. The trances induced by the hum of the engine, the music playing on your radio or CD player, the pleasant sensation of having a goal, a direction, a reason to be living your life, grasping the wheel of a car, participating in the general pageantry of piston and gas and that wonderful phenomenon of forward motion called momentum. I love momentum. The only thing I like better than momentum is inertia. But inertia can get old. Momentum hardly ever gets old. It’s the very nature of momentum to present you with something new each moment. Each moment of momentum. Momentum isn’t a moment momentum is a hectic interplay of moments.

I remember when you could travel anywhere in Seattle with relative ease. Rush hour downtown was the closest I ever came to gnarly traffic entanglements and stress. Most days and nights Seattle’s streets could be navigated with broad accommodation and expediency. That disappeared with the incredible affluence that began pouring into Seattle in the mid to late 90s, and then exploded in the new millennial. Seattle’s infrastructure has not kept up with the frenzy of construction undermining civic equilibrium. What was once a relatively easygoing city of pretty parks and funky coffeehouses has become a festering canker of neoliberal rapacity, income inequality, homelessness, rampant corruption and a stressed and crumbling infrastructure.

This is pretty much the norm now in all the coastal cities, perhaps worse in the less affluent cities of the deep south and Midwest and rust belts of New England.

Late Monday afternoon R and I get in the car to go to Best Buy near Northgate to get a new charger cable for my tablet and a new DVD player. The traffic on Mercer is mercifully – and surprisingly – free of traffic. This is most unusual for a weekday afternoon. But then when I make my right onto Aurora – an insanely busy arterial full of stressed, hot-tempered, aggressive drivers – I encounter a tow truck picking up a stalled car, hoisting it up onto a flatbed. This prohibits me from picking up speed and joining the flow of traffic. I have to stop and wait my turn to get into the left lane. I have a bit of luck; there are no immediate cars. I maneuver left and pick up speed and stay safely ahead of the traffic behind me. But then I have another problem. The bus just ahead of me starts without warning to move right. The driver either doesn’t see me or sees me and doesn’t care. I brake and let the bus – an articulated bus – get far enough ahead that he doesn’t force me off the road. And for the third time, I manage to get into the left lane and pick up speed and enter the flow of traffic. The rest of the way is not without its hazards but is otherwise uneventful. We get to Best Buy, make our purchases, and take 105^th back to Aurora, make a right on 85^th, a left on 15^th NW, a right on West Emerson Street and park in the lot in front of the Fisherman’s Terminal. We go to Chinook’s for dinner. The host – a tall young man with long hair done up in a bun – seats us at a table by the window. We prefer sitting at one of the booths, but it’s crowded, so we settle for the table. A few of the boats outside in the marina are festooned in Christmas lights.

It’s nice to relax and eat dinner after the stress of driving. I gaze at the headlights streaming across the Ballard Bridge, take a bite of bread, then shift my attention toward the woman in the booth across from us nursing a newborn while eating dinner. She’s an unusually large woman, as is her bearded husband seated across from her, and the infant is so tiny, swaddled in blankets, oblivious to the circumstances it will one day have to negotiate and occupy. I can’t remember consciousness at that stage of life. What’s to remember? Sleep and hunger. The warmth of a human body. Those things never go away. They just get lost in traffic.