Looking East: Where the Wild Things Are

Illustration by Demian Johnston for City Arts

In Bellevue Downtown Park, a writer can get as close to living in the woods as she’s ever going to.

A few weeks ago, I came home to my Seattle Greenwood neighborhood apartment to find the front door wide open. My video camera bag lay on the ground disemboweled, cables strewn all over, the camera missing. Two empty squares on the cluttered dining room table told me both my MacBook and my boyfriend Greg’s laptop were gone. By the time the police report was filled out, more belongings, including jewelry that belonged to my grandmother, were on the list, too.

The thief came in through the bedroom window. Decorative boxes I use to collect spare buttons lay dumped over on the dresser. My bathroom drawers, full of valuable tampons and hotel shampoo bottles, had been rifled through. Every closet door was open.

For a half hour, I walked around my apartment crying. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the entire world held ill will towards me — and was lurking just outside my window.

Since then, I’ve worked hard at getting zen about it. We have renter’s insurance (though you could argue that after the settlement, we were robbed twice). Worse can happen. But I feel afraid sometimes.

I’ve thought, if I lived in the suburbs, I wouldn’t be so afraid. That’s naive. I know homes in the suburbs get robbed, too. Besides, since I’m too poor to buy a house anywhere, I’m stuck where I am. But I’m working on finding ways to get out of the city. Like the bona fide nerd that I am, I started by scouring my bookshelves.

In his essay “Walking,” Henry Thoreau writes: “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”

I think he’s saying that satisfaction breeds in the same bog as do conflict and uncertainty. I sort of get it. After enough hours of rusting in front of my computer at work, streaking through the wilderness sounds pretty ideal. The city is loud, polluted and crowded. Sometimes it’s ugly, and — as Gertrude Stein said of Paris — parts of it smell like a urinal. Worst of all, there’s no place to park.

Of course, you also get places where you can enjoy food you don’t know how to make at home. Plus: art, theatre, film. Conversation. Happy hour!

Thoreau would say I’m an idiot for not finding greater satisfaction in nature. Whatever. So far as I know, Thoreau didn’t have asthma or allergies. Or student loans.

But I agree with him that we need uncultivated space. As much as I love witnessing what civilization can think up while crammed into a forty-two-seat theatre with no air conditioning, living forever in such close proximity may push me into a less constructive place. Sometimes I need to be where I don’t rub up next to anyone. That’s why Bellevue Downtown Park is becoming one of my favorite reasons to go east.

It’s no Walden Pond, but the first time I visited the park, it reminded me of Luxembourg Gardens, which I walked through once on a supersonic tour of Paris. Woods bump up against lawns, up against palace, up against playground, up against Renaissance fountain, up against crunchy gravel, up against street.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway refers to Luxembourg Gardens as a good place to walk when you’re experiencing hunger pangs. Though it was right there, looming over the walls, I forgot Paris while I was in the park. I stopped worrying about seeing all the things I was supposed to see and just watched sparrows eat crumbs on the edge of the fountain. 

While technically a “passive park” (that means no regularly scheduled programming), I like that Bellevue Downtown Park forces me to experience it. It has a huge expanse of green space for starters. Unless you’re escorted by a golden retriever or a rugby team, you’re immediately faced with what to do with yourself in all that space. Also, the water ladder is a beacon of repose. Step by step, it eventually spills into the frenzied waterfall. But from there, the water spreads out into the calm reflecting pool. It’s the circle of life. And there’s free parking.

Some parks are where a kickball game goes down. Others have a spot to fish. Others still are places to build condos next to . . . with a view. For me, the park in Bellevue is a place where I can peacefully rub up against the conflicting points of view around me. And remember to just shut up, sit still and smell the turf.