From the cold to the bold

Stale and cold, a dead end up here. The men at the bar would sit on these stoold until the end of time, sipping beer and lost in the glory days of the past. I had shanked, cut, peeled and eaten fish for two long years, filling my pocket with money but leaving my spirit hooked on the door of the small shanty where I lived. I had stayed in this village of slaves to the sea too long, drinking my beer in this seat everyday, trying to kill the boredom between bouts of sailing. But, as I stood up and looked around, there comes a day when the spirit of a man can no longer be shoved aside and instead demands to be heard upon his whole being! That day had come and, thus liberated I no longer felt the shackles of finance and comfort. A man stumbled in suddenly, letting in a shower of white flakes to fall on the dirty sawdust of the floor. I was there, before the door could fall shut, with fingers gripping the wood and throwing it open. Outside the door snow blanketed everything, the fringe land of a solemn and uncaring world. I shrugged my pack on and took a deep breath. "The first step is always the hardest," I muttered. The first step on an unknown journey into a world that cared nothing for heroes or dreamers. The second step followed the first, a little easier. Soon I had faded into the snowy mists, away from the warmth of the firelight that was the small village. The falling snow covered the footprints behind, leaving no path behind and no direction but forward.

It has now been two months since I left that little corner of stagnant comfort and I sometimes miss the steady arduous work to lose myself in. But it is my first time in the coastal waters of Washington and I find the myriad tiny islands, scattered about like flower petals in the rain, strangely appealing. In Canada I met with a vagrant girl looking to make it to California and so volunteered to accompany her for some time. Since then we have made a leisurely pace affecting the role of lovers from Europe researching locations for a book. We have chartered many a boat to visit sometimes gloomy islands, sometimes fantastical bastions of peace and silence. Great forests of green rise out of gray bedrock with blankets of fog threading through the trees. The locals are at once rude and extremely jealous of their privacy yet often turn suddenly about and share all they have with wanderers such as us. It is as if they wish to make sure you carry no taint or trace of the great city that haunts the west coast of the Pugent Sound before they dare show any honesty. I spent many a night on these small beaches, a roaring fire and good friends all around. Often the night held strong and clear, the atmosphere made magical by the popping embers trailing off into the starry night. But I still can`t quite quell the desire for something more, something complex that exists in my mind as a jumbled knot of images and ideas.

So I have again left another life behind, one of possible peace and fulfillment in rustic living to seek out a vague calling. I am on a boat bound for the city of Seattle. A city I have heard spoken of as one of contradictions: enlightenment in its open-handedness towards all life-styles; cynical and hypocritical with each other. A land of towers reaching to the sky, of buildings designed to the whims of a man`s artistic muse. Yet word reaches my ear of people that suffer in slums and back-alleys, fight over ideology and the right to love. I cannot even believe to hear about the constant stream of cars, noise and arguments that fill the city to the brim. All, though, fade into a mere gnat`s buzzing at the first sight of Seattle`s profile rising up to the horizon across the ocean. Such shapes, so boldly raised and proclaimed! So bright and young, how orderly the arrangements of lines appear! "Surely here," I thought "here I could make it. Here I could find a ground fertile enough for what I wanted to do."

The boat drew nearer to the city, the buildings growing in size and detail until I could see the busy lives of the very people that inhabited it. "There" I stabbed a finger outward, talking for the future, "there. In the cement and glass, in the streets and squares, in the garbage and poor, and in the beautiful and pure, there I will learn this city, there I will find my answer and there I will plant a seed to save the world."