This is part one of a series on America. Stay tuned for more.
America.
There’s just something about it. There’s so much to be said about this country.
I absolutely, unequivocally, love it here.
The people, the landscapes, the culture of excess. The food, the colours, the space, the clouds, the cars, the weather.
It’s all just a stone’s throw away from my current home, and yet there’s always something about it that draws me in, takes me down the sentimental path, a nostalgic one that the child in me is never not amazed by.
Every single time I get off a flight, or a bus, or a train into American borders I feel filled with inspiration; my creative juices start flowing.
I want to write about my travels. The vastness of this country makes me want to. I imagine it’s what led Kerouac to write On the Road, a book that was a bible to me in my young, hippie, college days.
My last trip here was almost exactly a year ago, and I remember sitting in the Vancouver airport – having just had my privacy egregiously violated by an immigration officer – feeling a cocktail of contempt, content and curious at the same time.
Contempt for having just had my bank statements read by this stranger.
Content for having been “allowed” into American borders, waiting for my flight to board.
Curious for what was to come.
I had had plans; and driven by the child-like excitement only the end of a global pandemic could cause, I was so ready to travel again. I didn’t care what was to come.
That trip took me to three different cities in three weeks. I could’ve stayed longer, and explored more, but alas I was homeward bound a lot sooner than I would have liked. I began a story about my travels, but I got too caught up in the momentum of my daily life here and left that story to gather metaphorical dust amongst the bookshelf of files on my laptop.
My travels this time were shorter. Four days. A long weekend if you will.
I felt that creative rush immediately, and this time I was determined to not let this sit.
My story begins as I crossed the border between British Columbia and Washington on the Amtrak Rail, – fuck Amtrak by the way – arriving at my destination an hour short of midnight. A journey that should’ve taken four hours had taken me seven, and I was cranky, hungry, and pissed off.
An inexplicable logistical error had caused this delay, and my precious holiday had been cut short before it had even begun.
Someone had to pay for this faux pas. It was after all the American thing to do. Look for a target, shift the blame, rage at the unfairness of life. Things must go my way, and if they don’t it isn’t my fault.
I was angry. I wanted, nay, deserved to have my feelings validated. I wanted off this fucking train, and I wanted off this fucking train right now.
But of course, there was nothing that could be done. I had to take it on the chin and accept my twisted fate. I would have three less hours on my holiday, and there was not a single thing in the world I could do about it.
It was time to go Zen.
Going Zen is a practice I like to use during times of travel – at airports, for example – where I try my absolute best to step into the void of nothingness.
The idea is simple.
I will be going from point “A,” to point “B.” That will happen. Bar a natural disaster, it is as inevitable as the sun rising and setting. However, nothing can speed up the time it takes to get there.
The only thing that can be done is wait.
No matter how grumpy I might feel, no matter how justified in my anger I think I am, and no matter how big a fuss I might kick up, I don’t control time (oh, how I’d love that superpower), and therefore the only solution is surrender.
Expect delays. Expect your needs to not be met. Expect a stiff neck. Expect sub-par food.
Expect the worst to happen.
When you reach that state of acceptance, that literally nothing is in my control here, I go Zen.
My friend, and host, picked me and my travel companion at the station. We were staying just one night at his place before my Amtrak veteran jetted off across the planet to an exotic destination, and me, my host, and another paisan began our own journey through the wilderness like Charles Marlow did in the Heart of Darkness.
Except instead of floating up the Congo River, we were driving through to Glacier National Park.
Not quite as thrilling on paper, but I was brimming with excitement.
We didn’t have a plan. We had a heading, a car, music, and snacks. The 18-year-old in me was grinning ear to ear. He was about to live his Kerouac Dream.
But that was tomorrow.
This was my first time in Seattle, a city with a rich musical history–weather like Vancouver, but misery and depression channelled into the creation of Grunge. There was time to explore all that later. First, I needed food, and Christ, I needed a drink too.
As I was being zipped about in a car on this brisk, late Thursday evening, I started to notice that Seattle seemed to be a lot less lively than Vancouver.
The streets were empty; you almost expected a stray ball of hay or cotton to fly across the road like they did in those old Clint Eastwood films. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the chunk of cowboy boots hit the pavement or see a grizzled old man smoking a cigar sat outside a saloon.
The town was dead. It felt abandoned. There was of course the starry eyed, drunken college crowd gathered outside a tacky, strobe-light saturated nightclub. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this nightclub stood alone on a road with no shops, a half-filled parking lot, a fast-food burger joint across the road, and a hot dog stand grilling away despite the late hour.
This was eerie.
You would expect a string of clubs and bars blasting top 40s pop hits posted up right next to each other, fighting for the attention of this gullible group of kids, excited at the prospect of charging them 14$ for watered down vodka sodas – or worse, White Claws – after having extracted 20$ each just to enter the premises.
That was what America was about.
But Seattle had none of that and left me scratching my head at the prospect of why.
I had heard about how badly certain cities in America had been affected by policies during the pandemic, but to see it and feel it was something else.
The year before, when I was in New York, the world seemed to be opening properly, and it felt as though the pendulum had swung us right back to where we were pre-pandemic. Young people were everywhere, pouncing at the opportunity to get blindingly drunk and find a stranger to share saliva with again. The naïve part of me figured that that would continue for the years to follow. We would live our own version of the roaring 20s.
But what I saw in Seattle seemed to look like the real aftereffects of this disease. This city was dying, and I as I learned more about it, I couldn’t see a way back.
Crime, homelessness, and minimal police had led to an exodus of people from the city to the suburbs. This was keeping with the pandemic trend, but while most cities saw a rebound, Seattle seemed to still be reeling from this mass exit of its core population. All around me were boarder up shops, “For Lease” signs, and an utter lack of city life.
In Vancouver, I’m used to a plethora of homeless people on the streets. I’m also used to seeing people fire up crack pipes, shoot up needles, smoke joints and sell cigarettes on the street—a lot goes on in the homeless encampments of the downtown east side. It’s not a pretty sight, but it is distinct undeniable part of the city’s underbelly.
You become desensitised to it all, and try to navigate your way around it, live your daily life knowing that for the most part these people tend to keep to themselves, and the closest thing to an interaction you might have with them is someone asking you for some change.
Seattle had all those qualities yet seemed to have more edge to it. And not the “cool” kind of edge that rockstars carry. There was a nervous, dangerous energy in the air here. Like any moment something could happen, a gunshot, someone popping out from behind a dumpster with a shiny blade, even the rats seemed more bigger and more enraged, like they had been juicing.
It felt like the city was on the verge of tipping over, and when it eventually did, things would implode.
There was tension in the air. The streets were empty. It felt like I was in Blade Runner. A blaring alarm could go off at any time signalling that it was time for everyone to get off the streets and back into their houses. An flying car would pull up out of which an enforcer of the law would step out and clamp you in magnetic chains.
I couldn’t understand why it felt so different.
“People don’t live in the city,” they say.
“Nobody really parties here either.”
“It's just the area we’re in and the late hour of the night.”
If you were to go to the “right” places you would see a lot more people on the street giving you the impression that you do indeed live in a sprawling metropolis.
And the architecture did give you the feel that Seattle was a city. There was history to these buildings. There were of course the modern monstrosities being constructed at rapid pace to accommodate the ever-increasing workforce in technology, but like most American cities, and unlike most Canadian ones, the buildings seemed to preserve the architecture of old and build around them to maintain a certain feel.
Chicago had it, New York has it, Seattle seemed to have it.
As I was pondering all of this, I had hardly realized that we had reached our destination. A swanky, hip, dimly lit cocktail bar sandwiched between what looked like two boarded up, permanently closed businesses. A quick look up and down the street gave me this abandoned feeling again. Not a car in sight, a stray plastic bag flying across the road carried by the wind, one or two people hurriedly making their way indoors, and a vagrant carrying all his possessions in a shopping cart rummaging through the rubbish bin.
Cruelly denying its environment outside, the establishement oozed class. Dim, warm lighting, large, open booths with wooden tables facing the bar, which was well lit and stocked with the finest selection of liquor you could get. The drinks, unique, strong, expertly crafted, not for the novice drinker were priced for the yuppie.
How this place stood, hidden and alive in the midst city I didn’t understand. But I felt my musings wander away as the first sip of alcohol entered my blood stream, and the conversation started to flow. The 28-year-old was happy to get his hand on a cocktail. He was on holiday after all.
**
As we stepped into the building, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. To the right was a hip coffee bar serving Nepalese “Himalayan” coffee. In front sat a concierge behind what looked like a gold-plated desk. A huge chandelier loomed over the waiting area to my left, hanging down from the ceiling that could easily have been 30ft high.
My friend led us through to the lifts, tapped his key fob and dialled in the floor. There were no buttons on the inside. It felt and looked strange. Was this the future?
As he led us to his flat, he started narrating the story of the building.
The building had only condominiums. There were 41 floors(!) and was nowhere close to fully occupied. Every single occupant – whether owner, or renter, - worked in tech.
The apartment itself was what you would expect. Modern everything, space saving, packaged to look larger than its actual square footage. Giant windows faced the street below, and everything inside was hooked up to Alexa, who greeted us by turning on the lights, and setting the A/C to the perfect temperature.
From the perfectly manicured, expertly engineered rooftop, the view was stunning. You had a 360-degree view of the city of Seattle, the only thing standing in its way was the famous Space Needle. A view people would pay a premium price for just to roam around for 20 minutes and take lopsided selfies in front of. Not for these residents. This was just an everyday availability, like your morning coffee. You felt powerful up here; like you had made something of your life. And if you wanted to, you would never have to interact with another human being ever again. There were multiple party rooms – stocked with glasses, couches, tables, utensils, fridges - a two story gym, a work space, and least shockingly of all, the building had its own Wi-Fi.
The tech takeover wasn’t imminent. It had happened. My worst nightmare had come true. I was starting to understand.
Where were all the working-class locals? The ones that worked the night shift at the local dive or served coffee at the historic mom and pop breakfast place that has stood the test of time and is now synonymous with the city of Seattle. Do those places even exist anymore?
The pandemic coupled with the general unaffordability of the city meant that locals were (and continue to be) pushed out of the city. This problem isn’t endemic to Seattle of course; the scale of it however, truly unique.
The unobstructed view one has from the rooftop is that of the deep blue pacific on one side, and the Amazon monopoly in action on the other. One building after another has been taken over by Bezos’s ruthless, unceasing empire, and if there were any empty lots for sale, they were going to the highest bidder: Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft.
Almost of a bygone era
We took a stroll down through to the Amazon “campus,” the next day to get an idea of what the city was really like. It wasn’t really abandoned. In fact, it was packed to the gills. Packed to the gills with a sea of decently dressed, incredibly diverse, young professionals lining up in front of the next, new, hip, fusion, fast food, healthy, lunch spot that has been designed for maximum efficiency and premier taste.
It’s as if all those dreams – or rather nightmares – I had had when I had allowed my seventeen-year-old, over-enthusiastic imagination to take over and lead me down a not-so-distant dystopian future where sci-fi literature like the Matrix, V for Vendetta, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and Orwell’s 1984 had all amalgamated into one giant mutant creature.
It seemed that people were living in that dystopia in Seattle, blissfully unaware of the monster that had been created and the possible consequences of such vast levels of wealth inequality.
Technology after all provides us with a lot of benefits. Efficiency has improved; it’s hard to imagine anyone today going through 24 hours without using their phone. Technology has also neutralised the morning commute, perhaps even the office space itself. It has increased our access to information: one can literally learn about anything on the Internet. On paper, everything seems idyllic, quite truly, a utopia.
These giant conglomerates spend a lot of money promoting a healthy work-life balance for their employees as well. Outside the buildings of Amazon’s campus had gardens, bars, dog parks, restaurants, park benches, trees, and so much more strategically placed so that if one gets overwhelmed, they could simply stroll outside and calm themselves down – a shot of peace in the form of a man-made garden.
Inside, there were meditation rooms, masseuses, personal chefs, therapists, funky art pieces, bartenders, you name it, to serve the employees every need and ensure that whatever seemed to be overwhelming them in that moment could be taken care of with a click of a button.
Even the people – these nerds – who I had so enthusiastically classified into their stereotypic box, were different than the dweebs I remembered seeing in the films of the 2000s. They didn’t just code all day and play video games all night.
Alright, most of them did.
But many of them had lives outside of the office. They were into outdoor sports, they were hikers, musicians, artists, adventurers.
From the outside it all really did seem idyllic.
And no matter how intimidating and exclusive it seemed to an ignorant observer like me, I was constantly being assured that it wasn’t. There was room for everyone; all it took was a little bit of time, commitment, and re-training.
And I was starting to get tempted.
The promise of a stable, beefed-up salary hitting my bank account regularly, job security (pretty much) for life, almost unlimited amount of downtime, growth within a company, regularly learning new skills, there was so much to gain by entering this technology-driven, private, elite world.
And yet, the nostalgic, sentimental, romantic side of me that grew up reading about the summer of love, 1960s San Francisco, the psychedelic 70s in America and Britain, and the chemically induced, synthesizer led 80s and 90s dance in Europe couldn’t help but feel that something was missing.
There was a lack of character to all of this. I didn’t quite know how to pinpoint it exactly, but it felt as though the spine of the city had been ripped out, and the body was now being rebuilt artificially around it.
Seattle was the birthplace of Grunge; Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Jimi Hendrix all had great trysts with this city, but if you weren’t armed with this knowledge on your visit here, you would almost never know they once existed in this tech overrun brave new world.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, maybe there’s an underground to the city that I don't quite know about just yet. I’m not hopeful, yet I know that I might need another visit to the city before I can make any real judgments about it.
But the future is here. You can either jump on board this technological ship designed to guide us through the waters of uncertainty as the world continues to spin on or be left behind. I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Darwin had in mind when he coined the term, “survival of the fittest.”
I spent that day walking through the city like a zombie – head up, jaw open, wide-eyed – shocked, and marvelled by all of it, filled with confusion and uncertainty about my life’s choices.
There was a lot to ponder; for now, the open road called.