Visiting Seattle

I had never been to Seattle before, so I smiled when I saw the Space Needle in the distance. It seemed to follow me wherever I drove, throughout the steep, hilly streets, refusing to fade from view.

Then as I parked and toured on foot, it decided to play peek-a-boo with me, hiding behind colorful, orange brick buildings, then suddenly appearing overhead between alleys and streets.

The day was uncharacteristically clear and hot for Seattle; beautiful blue sky and eighty-five degrees. Perfect for this California boy who had just left one-hundred-plus degrees in the smoke-filled skies of Los Angeles. Yes, I smiled here today.

My group and I agreed on Pike’s Place. Dozens of brightly-lit fluorescent signs brought the main hall alive. They all hung in the shapes of fish. Rows of multicolored flowers from vendors became a background to the signs. The whole scene looked like a live painting.

Pike’s Place was packed with people, making it a fun challenge to navigate through the main aisle. It seemed the entire city was here.

The temperature dropped as the warm, flowery colors changed to cold white. I was flanked by tall mounds of ice in this seafood-selling section. Large fish were flying through the air. Not flying fish, but salmon being tossed by loud, energetic workers entertaining the visitors.

As the crowd gathered in a crescent around a fish vendor, who was soliciting our attention, a huge salmon catapulted over the counter. It flew over the vendor’s head, right towards us. We all screamed and jumped back, only to see the fish land lightly on the ground without a sound. It was made of soft cloth. Ha! The joke was on us. I had to apologize to the girl in back of me for landing on her foot.

Leaving Pike’s Place, we decided to enter another world, an underworld. The underground tour of old Seattle. If there ever were a positive spin on “crappy,” this was it. As we walked the dark, empty rooms, our witty tour guide explained the former city’s sewage system. She told us the first flush toilet had been invented by a Mr. Crapper. These “crappers” became very popular, for obvious reasons, and soon everybody owned one. However, the seaport city rested on a hill and the sewage system was less than perfect, for every time the tide came in, it would backwash all the crappers and create quite a mess. I tried to find humor in this situation when our deadpan comic tour guide made repetitive jokes and references to the backwash, the mess, sitting on the crappers at high tide, and the bathrooms being flooded with: starts with “c.”

Due to strong hunger pangs, I still ate lunch after this enlightening tour.

With the sun high, and the Space Needle still looking down at us, we gravitated toward the landmark with scores of people from all directions. It invited us to go up, up, and still up to its very top, where it shared with us its personal three-hundred-sixty degree view of beautiful seaworthy Seattle!