Shakleton in Seattle

July 17

Monday we took the ferry across Puget Sound to Seattle. We were warned by the friendly couple sitting across from us that the trip might be rough, so the four of us took dramamine as a preventative measure, but in truth the water was unbelievably smooth and out jet catamaran got us there more than half an hour early on a 2 1/2 hour trip. It poured rain just as we arrived in Seattle. In fact I had expected it would rain in Seattle, and I expected to like it anyway. Surprisingly, it stopped raining after twenty minutes and didn't rain again while we were there, but I didn't really like it. I suppose if I had explored the city upon leaving New York, I might have found it interesting and remarkably western, but coming from Alaska, with only Vancouver and Victoria to compare it to, it seemed distressingnly eastern, with sky scrapers and traffic jams, prices in real American dollars (an adjustment after only three days) There is also a coastline which might be impressive, but not after the incredible harbors and fiords we had seen. .

I was delighted to find that an exhibit about the exploer Ernest Shakleton, which I had missed in New York, was at the university museum and we got to see fabulous photographs of Shakleton's remarkable journey to the Antarctic in 1914, where his ship was seized by an ice flow and ultimately crushed, but where he was able to manouver a small 20- foot lifeboat across 800 miles of the Antarctic ocean and saved every one of his men. Just before I left New York in June I had seen an IMAX film about the trip, with my cousin Margot, whose book on the subject (Shakleton's Way) is a best seller. The film was impressive, but after my time in Alaska I brought a new perspectives to the photographs of icebergs, glaciers, and the climate of the polar extremes.

Shakleton's men spent a winter with their ship jammed in an ice flow, but when spring came and the ship was lost, they were limited to three small boats and some tents, with nearly a year left before rescue.

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It was here in Seattle that we picked up a car that we would keep all the way to San Francisco so we were able to drive around the city on our own (trying to defy the traffic) and get a sense of the place. We headed up to the top of the Space Needle at Sunset, but there were too many clouds on the horizon, and like Mt. McKinley, Mt. Rainer eluded us too, hiding out in its own micro-climate of couds. Well, you might say, there is nothing micro about these mountains except their climates, but I'll have to take that idea of faith....

We spent our last night in Seattle at Pioneer square, where we learned that "skid row," which I always assumed to be an urban term for those "on the skids" actually referred to the ended of a logging road, when the timber landed at dockside and the newly paid lumberjacks shared their wages in gambling dens or getting to know the women of the evening. We checked out a small urban "national park" (just a storefront, really) which is run in tandem with a similar storefront in Skagway, Alaska where we had just been. Seattle managed to set itself up as the gateway for ships heading to Skagway, and in doing so, took prominence away from Tacoma and Olympia, which were larger cities at the time, having direct train connections to San Francisco..