Seattlement

We’ve recently returned from our trip to Seattle whereto I will shortly be displaced. Displaced perhaps being too harsh a term, we’ll say re-portated. In short, we are moving there, and Liz and I spent a week finding a place to live. After the last trip, we’d come to the conclusion that we’d try for a place on Bainbridge Island so that I might walk to the ferry boat each morning for a short jaunt across an icy inlet of the Pacific to the new office downtown. The ferry boat is nice. It’s like a floating high school cafeteria but without a “band table” which is where I usually sat in real high school because most of my friends were in band, and I was made an honorary band member. Sadly, this did not impart any particular musical skill. In any case, the ferry is better than high school because, when lunch is over, I get to either go to my office or my new apartment rather than to algebra or something.

The whole process of finding a new settlement proved rather draining, not so much physically as mentally. The trick of it was constantly having to re-imagine myself and family in each potential situation, ranging from hardy pioneers scratching out a living in a ramshackle house, nestled deep in the evergreen forest, to swaggering land barons astride a hardwood deck larger than the house which we presently inhabit. We’d return from each day’s hunt, brain-weary and damp, for it is eternally damp there. Lying in the hotel room, we’d watch cable television (a rare treat for us), learning how chocolate is made and what part of the taran-tula is edible. In the end, we decided on the apartment, for it seemed the most familiar and pleasant to us in a land of unfamiliarity.

It is strange to stand on one stone that is tilting swiftly beneath your feet, seeing and knowing the exact stone to which you will leap. You marvel at the strange inevitability of it all, grateful for the certainty of choice, yet childishly resentful that you must leap when the stone turns. I feel as if I were once better suited for this sort of adventure, and have slept too long, forgetting the dreamer and losing myself in the dream. I need to shake off the sleep of thoughts and spring lightly to this new stone as I would have done before. This was just such a nice stone. I hate to see it turn and sink beneath me. But then that’s the trick to walking on water, isn’t it? You can’t stop moving, and you can’t look down.

I did get to eat a king crab… well some of his legs anyway. I’ve always thought about ordering king crab but never worked up the nerve. Following my policy of “gots to know” I did this time. It started out well, being the best crab I’d ever eaten, but, by the last two legs, I began to stare in horror and revulsion at the table before me. I sat and plucked quivering scraps of pallid flesh from the cracked carapace of this Lovecraftian creature, gnawing languidly at the larger chunks, and discarding others. The most awful thought just now occurs to me… that not all the beast was accounted for. Certainly, he’s short a few legs and a claw, but the majority of the thing may yet be out there. I did not see it die. Could such a thing truly die? Might it not lie still, slumbering beneath dark waves, and dreaming of man-flesh and revenge?

I’ll be waiting, Crabulon… I’ll be waiting.