Seattle Interlude

Judy and I took the Amtrak train from Portland to Seattle yesterday. The Portland railroad station, built over a century ago, has a lot of neon signs, left over from the 1950s. At the Seattle station, the porters load your baggage onto little wagons that date from the late 1930s.

We lived in Whittier for seven years, long before the road was inserted onto the Maynard Mountain tunnel railroad tracks. But neither of us had ever taken a train ride this long in the USA. In 1999, we took our kids from London to Paris and back on the Eurostar.

The Amtrak, though not an express, was comfortable and I enjoyed seeing a different view along the route than one gets from I-5. From Olympia through Tacoma, the track follows the shoreline of south Puget Sound, where one can glimpse oyster traps, dilapidated marinas, and recent development. From Tacoma into Seattle, the track follows the Puyallup River past Sumner, and then the Green River valley down into the industrial south side of Seattle.

When I was a kid, growing up near the then-new Sea-Tac Airport, my friends and I would ride our bikes for ten miles in the summer, to make a bit of money, picking strawberries and raspberries at farms in the Green River Valley. Most were owned by Japanese-American families who had lost earlier farms in 1942, when they had been hauled off to the internment camps. After World War II, families and communities pooled financial resources to buy new farms and other businesses.

The train cruised up tracks familiar to me from the late 1950s and early 1960s, near where these farms used to be. Now almost all the farms are gone, replaced by industrial and warehousing sprawl, punctuated here and there by the occasional mall or mega-mall, like Southcenter. The topsoil of the lower Green River Valley is reputed to be 600 feet deep. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, hundreds of square miles of some of the richest topsoil on the planet is covered by three inches of asphalt.

We're staying with my sister, her husband and my mom on Mercer Island, in the middle of Lake Washington. Mom is an award-winning quilter. My sister is an avid gardener and landscaper. She's over at South Seattle Community College this morning, training new docents for the Seattle Chinese Garden Society, an organization she has long been associated with. They're constructing a fairly large classical Chinese Garden in West Seattle.

The weather in Seattle is now officially being touted as the coldest early June in Seattle history. Like Alaska's Mat-Su Valley, farmers are delaying the start of some crops, concerned about mildew and kinds of root rot.

Some things are growing quite well, though, in the damp environment: Peas, potatoes, lettuces and garlic. Here's some of my sister's garlic, in her rich, coffee grounds and goat manure enriched garden.