May brought very urban walking thanks to a conference in downtown Seattle. My trip from Olympia to Seattle: Dropped off by car at the Amtrak station with my bike, train to King Street Station, bike to the hotel on the 2nd Avenue protected bike lane for an appropriately multimodal start to the spring meeting of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
When we first moved to Seattle in 2012 we lived in the heart of downtown and I walked those streets to try out new restaurants, get groceries, go to Pike Place Market, and catch transit for longer trips. At the time Seattle had more cranes on its skyline than any other city in the US, changing all the time.
The changes continue and more cranes hover over the city. By all accounts downtown was hollowed out by the pandemic, which I didn't witness directly since I stopped going to my Pioneer Square office March 10, 2020, and we moved to Olympia that fall. It's coming back from what I could see. Plenty of people walking around, eating at restaurants, biking and catching transit, rolling down the bike lane on foot scooters, Solowheels, and other little wheeled devices.
The first night of the conference I walked from the hotel, not quite sure where I might go for dinner. I'd started to look on the map to see what was open that would have good vegetarian/vegan options, then realized I could just head out and read menus at the doors. The luxury of a downtown: so many choices! I followed my usual urban strategy of taking whichever leg of the intersection gives me the walk signal first, tacking my way downhill.
This brought me to the Virginia Inn by the market. My brother Don had taken me there with his wife Lisa at some point and told me this was one of his favorites as a fixture of downtown, so when I saw it I decided this was the spot. I sat at a small table outside with a view straight down to the water. The sunset, a Washington State Ferries vessel moving gracefully over the calm water, a light breeze all made it enjoyable. The man who repeatedly circled several blocks blasting music from his motorcycle, passing our corner again and again? Not so much.
It felt funny to have to navigate my way back to the hotel. Did I really have to, or have I become overly dependent on the magic box in my hand? Granted, Seattle has a really weird street system derived from conflicting grids imposed by competing batches of settler colonizers on a steep and challenging topography bounded by bodies of water. I put my phone down and counted on my memory to take me back most of the way, then checked to confirm I was doing okay.
The conference included a great riding tour of Seattle's bike infrastructure, a little over 11 miles. I got to ride places that brought back memories of the early days living in the city and finding my way to different neighborhoods, and on new infrastructure I hadn't had the occasion to use before we moved away. I remember the feeling a few years ago of going on a study tour to Vancouver, BC, and riding on a network that varied in facility types but kept connecting from trail to bike lane to bike boulevard. This felt like that.
Conference organizers held an evening reception at MoPOP, the Museum of Pop Culture (formerly the Experience Music Project). They suggested people might want to ride the monorail there. Given that the walk to catch the monorail wasn't that much shorter than just walking to the museum, I set off to use foot power the whole way, collecting a few others as I left the lobby. Along the way we all commented on sidewalk maintenance, signal timing, and everything else you'd expect from transportation professionals. This time I did rely on navigation; since I worked for the host agency I got nominated by the others as the de facto guide in this group of folks from other states. As we got closer to the museum, though, it emerged that one of the people with me had worked at the EMP back in the day running a ride called Funk Blast and he knew where he was going. Sorry I missed that phase of the museum's programmng!
I made up for it when the DJ started, though. There's always that moment at an event with dancing when someone has to be the first one out on the floor. A bunch of professionals standing around the edge of the open space, bopping in place just a bit to the beat, feels a lot like a high school gym, to be honest. Having moved on from my high school awkwardness, I've realized the sooner I start the more I get to dance, and if I get out there the ones who are holding back don't have to be first.
The DJ kept us moving with plenty of funk, disco, and other numbers that communicated they knew a big chunk of the attendees are from my generation. Watching the videos on the huge screen as we all sang along took me back to seeing some of those videos when they first ran on MTV (once upon a time, when that actually stood for Music TV and they showed, y'know, music videos). A young Madonna. A young Prince. A young Michael Jackson. A young Donna Summer. They were all so young, pivoting and strutting and jutting out a provocative hip. Fast forward 30—wait, make that 40?—years since some of those songs came out and we're all a lot older. I was struck by the thought that just as I was dancing in my older, softer body, those singers who are still alive may look at those videos and remember when their bodies could do those things. (We can't all be Tina Turner, may she rock on in the next world the way she did in this one.)
After a second reception at another venue I walked back through the city streets, humming a bit and walking in time to the songs in my head.
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