Pilot Report

It may have been Carl Jung who once talked about how everyone eventually goes to visit Seattle, and that every cultural narrative reflects this eternal return to the emerald city.  Or maybe it was something I dreamed, but either way, it’s still something that keeps me from staying asleep for too long.  The idea of spending time in a city where it rains almost every day has an exotic appeal but only when I’m living in the desert.  That’s really when I start to remember the time I spent a month looking for the actor who played Chris in the Morning on Northern Exposure.  I was working at a bookstore in downtown Seattle, and every once in awhile Rob Morrow would come in and browse through the Madame Blavatsky ephemera we had.

He wouldn’t ever answer any questions, but I wouldn’t ask, either.  We had a policy to let people follow their own instincts, and that wasn’t just in the store, that went for the whole state.  People here are free to sleep on the beach if you don’t get caught, or if you have the money, you can stay in a luxury hotel.  Washington has a lot of different lifestyles, and many different ways of accommodating difference.  People often meet up with their secretly favorite icons and heroines here all the time, and won’t make a big deal out of it.  It might be an extensive live and let live philosophy, or it might also be that the constantly gray skies makes us all permanently sleepy.

But I didn’t become suddenly unsleepy when I left western Washington for the desert in Moses Lake, either.  I still sleep and dream enough to consider this a very full life.  But I am very glad that I had the chance to go looking for John Corbett when I was younger.  I never met him, but I did get to spend a lot of time in Roslyn.  That’s a town with a sense of self-assurance.  It’s made even more cocky from the tv show filmed there, but it’s earned its cockiness, because it really is as lovely as they think it is.  For one thing, it’s in the state of Washington, and for another, it’s far enough from Seattle to have its own identity, and its own peculiar view of the mountain when it’s out.  We all climb the same mountain eventually, and we all get to speak on our own radio show when the karmic wheels have all been properly balanced.