Seattle part 2: Food, guitars and Mount Rainier

Tasty, tasty

Need I say more than Guava icecream from Shug’s on 1st Avenue between Pine and Pike? All right: mac cheese from Beechers in Pike Place Market.

I’m here at the right season – blueberries, peaches, figs, raspberries, strawberries. I thought Huckleberry was a boy’s name, but it also looks like a wild blueberry. Mount Rainier cherries are like you’ve never eaten cherries before. Yum.

I can’t say the burgers are small, or tasty. Fresh hash fries are something different from the ones we get in Britain, a pile of them and oily. Otherwise the fried breakfast is English. Mexican is everywhere, burritos and tacos are the USA curry. My favourite meal has been fresh bread and fruit and cheese from Pike Street market, eaten on the tables overlooking the bay.

In the 20th century suburbs the houses are wooden built, detached with a patch of land, and have verges between pavement/sidewalk and road. And on those verges I’ve seen cherry, peach, apple, grape, tomato, courgette, herbs: mini market gardens. And the paper-bark Maple tree is awesomely beautiful.

Ballard farmers market every Sunday. I walked to it ignoring the smells from the Tall Grass Bakery and the Stepping Stone Norwegian

Café, a place selling waffle-egg-bacon breakfast with maple syrup, three petrol stations, and finally got to the market and the recommended Corn Dog stall. That’s a large tasty hot dog covered in a maize pulp and grilled. Eaten with yellow or red. Delicious. Followed by coffee in the Umbria Café, where I had to have with an Okie in homage to Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck. It’s a big jammy dodger. Or maybe it’s not always that, because I just looked Okie Cookie up online. I do some fact-checking so this blog is half-empty of errors instead of half-full.

Turkish shakshouka is a new dish on me. Another Pike Place Market speciality.

Lenin and guitars

Where would you find a 20ft statue of Lenin on a busy USA shopping junction? Answer: in Fremont, the suburb which protects the freedom to be quirky, including its annual naturist bike ride. The Lenin statue is an imposing spectator of US commerce, sandwiched between a FedEx, a Taco Bar, a Felafel Café, and an office offering ‘Psychic Journeys’. It’s a shame it isn’t facing off a finance company HQ. Commissioned in 1988 in Romania but never erected there, it was bought by a US admirer of the artist. The buyer died before it was resurrected. His family, the Carpenters, at first wanted to melt it down but now ask $250,000 for it, and until it’s bought it stays where it is.

People get angry about it or put up with it, not many feel as comforted by it as I did. It regularly gets its hands daubed red, but also gets decorated during festivals as a friendly icon of the community. The critics can’t get it taken down because – here’s the final irony – it’s on private land.

On the other side of Seattle outside Renton in the Greenwood memorial park (burial ground) is the Jimi Hendrix memorial. Not quite as high as the Lenin statue, the memorial has space for 27 family members. His grandma Nora is there along with Jimi, in a three-sided structure that has engravings of Jimi and notes of songs as he wrote them. A larger-than-life metal guitar sits upright in the middle like he’s playing it. No biography, lovingly designed. I got comfort there too.

There are many plots in the memorial park with two spaces and only one space fully engraved. Not even death will us part. And what happens if the other gets hooked up with someone new? There was no-one to ask.

Later I went to the Museum of Pop to learn something but I was only interested in what I already knew. They have Woody Guthrie’s guitar,

saying it’s one with ‘This machine kills fascists’ scratched on the back. I can’t make it out.

They also had a ‘Jimi abroad’ exhibition without mentioning Ilkley. I’m not impressed.

Mount Rainier

It’s no rainier than everywhere else, hot hot hot. And it’s pronounced Ray-near. I’d been told not to miss the Olympic mountain range but mount Rainier is closer and was the way of getting 3 days there with company. Mary took the time away from Camille and Wolfie and we really enjoyed it. It’s hiking along designated paths, but they aren’t heavily used apart from the Paradise tracks which are very popular and partly tarmacked (blacktopped!), with spectacular views of Mount

Rainier which is massive at 14,000 feet, visible from Seattle 80 miles away, poking far above any clouds. A lot of paths get snowed over and are only accessible 2-3 months mid-July to October. There’s skiing and long-distance skiing. I met chipmunks for the first time (smaller than squirrels, and they hibernate) and a marmot that in my photo looks like a cartoon character.

We stayed at the Packwood Inn, and hiked (not walked) 6 miles around Paradise, 10 miles up Frying-pan Creek to Summerland, and 8 miles to Sunrise Camp and a bit beyond to a lake of reflections. Even I had a swim in a shallow lake that wasn’t so cold.

The National Parks got a huge boost of administration, investment and path-laying during Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.

I carried a very round number of the ten essentials for hiking ().

Finally

For stamp lovers. I have received the most wonderful stamps on letters and parcels from Nancy for just on 40 years now. I’ve always wondered how the US postal service could issue such a range of delicious images from the civil rights movement, feminist activists, and black activists, and the natural world. How could it be a centre of progressive media? I went to a post office and a really patient guy behind the glass turned the pages of all the stamps he had, quite a few dozen. None of them were ones I recognised or would want to get for postcards. So now I know Nancy has had a lifelong adventure to find and keep for years the rare fine stamps that are sometimes issued.

I could write pages about a dozen hours spent trying and failing to get working phone SIM Cards and plans bought online... my advice is now is to wait and get a SIM in a dedicated phone shop in your destination country and don’t leave until it's working.

I can't do justice to my last four days in Seattle, which were not in Seattle but on Vashon Island with generous Betty and Richard. I had a tenuous connection with Richard based on a zoom session of George's book group. They live in a dozen acres of woodland and market

garden, are women's football fanatics, and keep a very tidy arty house. They have introduced me to daily Democracy Now online TV, took me to a Palestine solidarity meeting hosted by Jim, and gave me the space to write this. In the pictures, Richard and Betty are posing with Mt Rainier seen from Vashon Island, and Richard is holding his figs. Belmont Crescent will have figs like that, maybe next year.

Next week a cruise up the Alaska coast.