I rode the light rail a few weeks ago, down to the Othello stop and back. I figured that would be a long enough ride to give me a decent feel for the route. It was about a week or two after opening and I wanted to see it after some of the hype quieted down, as well as to see who was riding it. Unsurprisingly, the crowd looked like just about every kind of person, demographically, one would expect to see riding on a Friday afternoon after work. More surprisingly, though, and amazingly cool was that the people riding it looked like they had been riding it daily for years. People acted and behaved themselves as if this was nothing new, as if it had been part of their lives forever. Their expressions were indistinguishable from those of rail transit riders in other cities. There was a non-chalance in the air; this rad little choo-choo already seemed to be second nature. That's about the highest compliment you can pay a new transit system.
I was not surprised that the ride outbound, just around 5 o'clock, was standing room only. I was surprised that the return trip inbound was. I teared up a little. On the way back, I stepped out at Beacon Hill to check out the deep underground station. I think that by the time I got there—somewhere in the median of Martin Luther King Way, actually, with real Mexican restaurants, Asian supermarkets, and seedy donut shops rolling past my view—I decided that this awesomeness must become part of my daily commute.
So when I came home raving about the Link to K., I had little to no trouble convincing her to move much closer to her work. As a certifiable J, she set in motion a plan of a manner from which the Cylons could learn a thing or two. As a result, we are moving south! Near the Othello stop!
Othello! So literary! Clearly, Chekhov's maxim has been maintained, to wit:
if in the first paragraph you have introduced a rail station, by the second or third paragraph you must decide to move near it.
Empirically, these are some details: The haus has a large yard, covered deck, patio, hardwood, two (!) fireplaces, dining room (dining room!), and a garage... all in understated 1950s glory. There's even
socialized suction a central vacuum system that thoroughly intrigues me. The Seattle City Clerk tells us that it is in
Brighton. Hermeneutically, it is appropriately on Warsaw Street (
SE corner).
Oddly, moving further away from both campus and work has increased my transit options exponentially. I will no longer be a slave to the smelly old
#28 or my old friend, the
#44. Though if I chose, I can still get a transfer-less ride to either location. But I will never have a boring commute! I can be like some of those grizzled old Chicago School
sociologists of the last century who rode the trains and observed urban development from their windows... except with less positivism and a smoother ride.
