We get into the Seattle airport at three in the morning, drunk on Jack Daniels. Our flight was delayed six hours and our eyes are red and raw, pinched and muddled at the corners. There are no cabs in the taxi line, so we take a group limo into downtown, buzzed and tired and mesmerized by the ceiling lights as if it’s prom night. The hotel is on a sloped hill with a view of the lake, or the bay, or the sound. I don’t know: there is so much water, so many bridges and ferries and overpasses, that it’s impossible to tell sometimes where water ends and land begins. People here will never know what being landlocked feels like; they will always know the comfort of looking into that oceanic abyss.
The next day it is freezing: legitimately, honestly, East Coast freezing. I buy a hat even though it looks silly on me. We go to the original Starbucks and drink clover brewed coffee. We go to a French bakery and eat chocolate macarons. Everyone here is so nice; they have grown used to rain, learned to cope with its emotional partner grumpiness, and so when the sun shines they are giddy like children. A random woman walking down the street smiles at me and says, “I like your hat.”
We drive to Bellevue and I wait in the car and clutch my stomach while Steve plays the synthesizer in a used music store. I am getting sick, so we stop at a kitten adoption place on the way back to the hotel to cheer me up. We tap on the glass and I make my voice high and all silly-stupid, all gooey.
We cannot sleep in Seattle and the tacky irony of this is not lost in us. We read and watch late night TV and order room service. We read the Internet and I try to fall asleep on the chair by the window. In the morning I wake up with a stiff neck.
We go to the Space Needle and the Science Fiction Museum. We get drunk on Old Fashioneds and Whiskey Sours in Belltown and eat truffles and chocolate mousse. We walk up and down hills, avoid checking our e-mail, kiss in the elevator. Still, we cannot sleep.
We rent a car and drive an hour to the Snoqualmie Waterfalls. We get lost in the woods and everything is so quiet. I have never seen mountains like this, I have never smelled air like this. We get wet from the mist of the falls. We look at rock candy and charm bracelets and stuffed animals in the gift shop. One kid shows off a squirrel puppet to us while his brother digs through the rock farm. “I’m looking for a rock for my Dad,” he says, and gets right down to business.
Seattle is hilly and rainy like San Francisco, but I could never forget how far North we were. It was an apocalyptic, uneasy feeling: that inability to ditch mental geography. I pictured every place we went as a dot on a map of the U.S., wedged all the way up there in the left-most corner. We were at the edge of the sea and the sound, at the edge of something I could not put my finger on. It was not the furthest I’ve ever been from home, but it was close.
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