False Fall

A few weeks ago I was invited to lunch at the University of Washington Faculty Club on a most lovely day. It was early afternoon fall blustery. I was sitting with a new friend, a wryly funny new friend, to whom I could barely listen because the view was not just beautiful but distracting. Distractingly wrong. I thought for a moment that I was at the Yale Club or the Harvard Club then reminded myself that I was looking north and east at the U-Dub stadium, the Seattle Children’s Hospital, the Montlake Bridge and the Cascade Mountains. South and slightly west were the University Hospital, Puget Sound and a portion of downtown. This view was stunning. What was shocking, however, were the trees. They were wrong. They were red, orange, yellow, deciduous. Seattle is the Evergreen State. Certainly, you could always see a few alders here and there during autumn. Or go through the Arboretum which is designed to show a wide variety of trees from around the world- that's its job. But the streets - green. None of this outrageously colorful stuff.

When I went away to college in Poughkeepsie, New York, my mouth fell open at the cacophonous color of the trees. And later, when in school in New England or living in various east coast places, I loved driving along the coast to see the ways that the cold concentrated sugar in their leaves. Darker and richer and brighter colors the colder it got. An amazing gift of nature. A feature of the eastern climes.

I have been away from Seattle a while, moved back five years ago, and have been moving around at ground level. Since 9/11 people have been nesting in new ways, moving here from other places and planting non-native trees. So this does not look like home to me. It looks like New England. Like Pennsylvania. Massachusetts. Vermont.

It is undeniably beautiful to see such a diversity of trees in Seattle. But unaccustomed. In appropriate to place. And now, somehow ubiquitous. Like the going to the mall. No matter where you go in the country, they have the same stores, the same

Botoxed clerks at the makeup counters, and the same harried bargain seekers. Now, as on the other far coast, we have the same trees. They are familiar to me and I will enjoy them. But the uniqueness of place is slipping away.

The list of stories we have to tell about yesterday is speeding up much sooner than I imagined. A friend of mine told me just the other day that someone asked him, "What's a dial tone?," causing him to reflect on the fact that they don't exist on cell phones.

Well, we are losing our city's claim on our arboreal contribution to the Evergreen State. It makes me wistful...and a bit sad.

Perhaps I need to pull out my Lincoln Logs and jacks, my game of Twister and see if I can find a rotary phone on EBay. I'll take it all and go sit under a fir tree and look backwards. Perhaps I will sing, Where have all the good times gone, long time passing....