Tomorrow marks a turning point in the evolution of our dear little city. Join the masses in South Lake Union to welcome the South Lake Union Streetcar [a.k.a. SLUT] on it’s maiden voyage. Note all the free stuff highlighted in bold print:

Festivities begin at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, December 12, with music, refreshments, and opening remarks by Mayor Nickels. The mayor will then lead the streetcar inaugural run and “break” the ribbon, followed by the official start of passenger service. Streetcar rides will continue to be free for the rest of December, conveniently connecting downtown, the Denny Triangle, and South Lake Union.

Starting from the Westlake Hub (Westlake Ave & Olive Way), passengers can pick up a fun South Lake Union Passport to explore the neighborhood and collect stamps from participating businesses. Riders can turn in their completed passports to win fantastic prizes at the South Lake Union Discovery Center.

During the entire weekend following grand opening day, passengers can also ride the streetcar down to the Lake Union Park station to experience a free ride on a classic sail or steamboat from the Center for Wooden Boats.

The best moment of the ferry ride to Bainbridge Island is near the end. At a certain predetermined yet unpredictable moment, the engines shut off and the ferry glides on in eerie silence. If you’re standing on the deck and the wind is fluttering your clothes, it’s almost like you’re flying. Each time, a small part of my brain can’t help wonder if the captain cut the engines or if something mechanical and bad has just happened. Nevertheless I enjoy that moment to its fullest, because it is the peak of my ride from Seattle to Bainbridge. It is the moment when I am most aware I am in a different place from where I am going and where I have been.

Transportation is always about movement between places, journeys from one world to another. The journey itself is often its own world. The interior of a car or bus or train, the cabin (or cargo hold) of a plane or ship, these are as much places as the interior of the building or home they eventually deliver one to. The fact that automobiles often sport the creature comforts of home – hi-fi stereos and heated seats, jumbo-sized cup holders and climate control, DVD players and flat screen monitors – is a testament to this. And most car owners have spent at least few moments (and often considerable time) decorating the interiors of their cars, making them into livable spaces in anticipation of the time they will spend in them. The US Census Bureau estimates that the average American spends 100 hours a year commuting to and from work (that’s 12.5 workdays, folks, or two weeks of vacation). As cities become more and more expensive and people move further out from these urban cores to economically survive, commute times will get longer and longer.

The worlds we inhabit during our journeys seem to me a kind of borderland, a place between places, just as the Limbo of Roman Catholicism separates the present, the corrupted earth and the eternal hereafter. Since it’s always fun to coin a new term, let’s call this the “limbic world”, after the Latin limbus - “border, hem, or edge” - from which Limbo and the limbic system (another important term for this discussion) are both derived.

It makes perfect sense on the ferry, which we inhabit only during the time between places. Indeed, in ancient Greek myth, it was a ferry ride that transported souls from the land of the living across the Rivers Styx and Acheron (Charon is the ferryman) to the land of the dead, although one doesn’t imagine that ferry had vending machines, video games, and a bar.

Our trips to work or the grocery store or the post office or the dentist, are all within the orbit of our familiar world, and I believe we view these journeys as of a different sort than the ones we take to visit loved ones in far cities or to vacation in strange lands among strange people. I think we tend to not see them as journeys at all, because they are so short and so regular, but I think they are powerful reinforcers of the limbic worlds we inhabit. One doesn’t really look at the world outside during these shorter commutes. We are more likely to gaze out the car window or out the plane window if it is a new or infrequent trip than if it is a regular journey. If we do it everyday, we turn inward to our electronic - or, for the Luddites like my girlfriend, paper – devices. (Note: As I write this sentence I am sitting on the Bainbridge ferry, gazing at a laptop screen instead of looking out at a summer day where the sun is shining on the water like a glittering, rippling, highway of gold and the sky is a huge vault of faded blue hung with tattered white streamers and the mountains jut up out of the ground like the shoulder bones of fossilized gods. See? I prove my own point.)

One wonders what it must be like for a nomadic people like the Tuareg, where the journey IS the home? Or the homeless, where the outside world that would normally be a temporary, transitional space is instead a trap they can’t escape.

Limbic worlds are a big part of the hero myth (read Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, or Edith Hamilton and you’ll start to see how important a trip can be). Almost invariably male, the hero goes on a transformative quest that also tends to be a journey through a series of exotic new worlds. In the successful quest, the experience of and adventures in these new worlds changes the individual for the better, changing boy into man, weakling into warrior, scoundrel into hero, etc. The question is, are we in our real lives transformed or changed by our journeys, even the common, day-to-day ones? If not, why? Is it a matter of control? Meaning, now that we are able to warp our limbic worlds to please ourselves instead of being forced to allow ourselves to be changed by them, does that new power destroy the possibility for transcendent transformation? Let me put it to you this way: When was the last time you looked out the window and were moved by what you saw?

“Death On The Breeze”
A Danny Stark Mystery
by James Walling 

Chapter 1

The scent of wood smoke carried on the night air—touched with a flavor of tar, paint, and rubber. Danny Stark knew right away that a house was on fire.

He sat up in bed and reached for the old rotary telephone, but stopped himself mid-dial. He could hear the sirens approaching already. That was some comfort, but not really, as it confirmed his suspicions. He brushed his fingers over the surface of a Braille clock and noted the late hour: just after midnight.

The distinctive baritone wail of the fire engine’s siren and the low rumble of its engine roared past Danny’s open window. These sounds were followed by the high-pitched cries of an ambulance and a series of sheriff’s cruisers. Rare noises indeed amidst the empty fields and fir trees of Chelatchie Prairie, Washington. The quiet little burg was unused to having its stillness interrupted.

Danny freed himself from a tangle of blankets and stood up. Even as middle age advanced, he found he woke easily and was instantly alert. He had been blind long enough that he had no need of light or assistance to find his way about the room. He slapped the bedside table in search of his blue jeans and pulled them up over his narrow hips.

After dressing to brace himself against the evening chill, Danny made his way carefully to the front door of the old concrete block building that did double duty as his apartment and place of employment.

Danny’s Garage was among a jumble of buildings at a bend in the two-lane country highway that wound its way through that part of the state toward Mount St. Helens. The bend bordered the remnants of what had once been known as Fargher Lake, but was no longer a lake at all. It had been drained over the years to make room for farmland. Danny’s place was perched on the edge of the fields that blanketed the former lakebed, with a large wooden deck in the back that had functioned as a pier back in the days when Danny still had his sight.

It was raining softly as he stepped outside. Danny retrieved a derby cap to cover his close-cropped, sandy blond hair and locked up. He had never used a cane or a dog or any of the usual gear. He had lost his sight to an advanced case of Retinitis pigmentosa—known in its early stages as night blindness—and from the very beginning he had sought to mask his disability by doing without the ordinary accoutrements of the blind. To the surprise of many, he discovered he was better off without any crutches, real or metaphorical.

Danny sniffed the air and wondered what to do next. The fresh scent of spearmint growing in the fields behind the garage mingled with smoke and rain. The sirens had ceased their screaming nearby, and he guessed the fire must be in or around Yacolt, at a junction just a few miles to the northeast.

The familiar growl of a semi truck with distinctive muffler problems pulled to a halt on the highway in front of the garage. Danny had repaired the hulking wreck more times than he could count. He could tell by the bright squeak of the brakes that it wasn’t pulling a load.

“Hey there, handsome,” shouted Angie Elmer from the driver’s side window. “I knew you’d be up.”

Danny smiled warmly and stepped forward. “You driving truck for your daddy now?” he asked her. “I thought you were a business major.”

“That bum,” the girl said. “He sent me out to see what all the ruckus is about. So much for spring break and uninterrupted rest.”

“I suppose you need your beauty sleep?”

“I need to get down the road, old man,” she kidded. “You coming?”

Danny stepped around the front of the truck and climbed inside.

“Any idea whose place is burning?” Danny asked her, unable to keep the trepidation out of his voice.

“I don’t know,” she answered, shifting the truck into gear. “But those were state troopers. And that ambulance didn’t race all the way out here for a barn fire.”

Danny nodded and the truck lurched forward into the night.

[Editor’s Note: Tune in next Sunday for Chapter 2!]

A trip to Yakima, WA has stirred up thoughts about place. Why people leave places, why people stay in places.

Yakima is a small, small town on the steppe in eastern Washington. The Yakima Folklife Association describes the town as “culture-hungry,” and the Yakima Folklife Festival, which is what brought me to town, is one of the biggest events of the year. What I discovered, through conversations with locals and explorations in the Yakima Valley Museum, was a deep irony; right there in the midst of people who seem to be clamoring for a kind of big-city “culture,” is a land of rich history and fascinating tales.

This primarily agricultural community has an incredibly well-documented history and a large collection of artifacts from the daily lives of its residents. Among other things, there is a collection of spurs, a neon sign garden, and one of the country’s largest buggy collections. There is an entire exhibit dedicated to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a Yakima native. The front wall of his exhibit bears this quote:

Why this compulsion to leave the valley? Why this drive to leave the scenes I loved? To reach for unknown stars, to seek adventure, to abandon the comfort of home? But what of pride? What would I say if I returned?

If “culture” is some sort of notion of urban, cosmopolitan living, people and things that tour the country, then I think it speaks more of the speaker than of the objective value of experience. For instance, in yesterday’s NYT, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes about “footprints of vanished places,” about the familiar experience of imagining all the past events that have happened in the apartment we live in, or the “for lease” space across the street. Understanding that things in the past have a very real place in the present - that is culture. In New York City there have been more people in more places, but the equation does not add up in a linear sense; it does not mean that New York City has more culture than Yakima.

“And what of pride?” Belief in the power of the past to fuel the future is an essential part of living. It’s no accident, I think, that V. Klinkenborg is a writer of a column on rural living, being accustomed to these sorts of observations on animal nature. Something that I found out this weekend is that sometimes this belief runs stronger in the places in which you would least expect it, where it cannot be taken for granted.

After I forwarded Klinkenborg’s moving essay to my friend Leslie Blitz, she wrote back:
I know exactly what my grandparents house looks like - I know what the stains in the carpet look like next to the front door and where the wallpaper in the kitchen peels away from the wall next to the phone.  But, actually, these things havent been there in like 8 years at least.  But, I know where the peanut butter is in the refrigerator.

This time of year we all start to think about vacation. Most likely a result of our years in school, the undeniable urge to take advantage of “summer vacation” remains long after the school years have faded into the less-than-recent past. Instead of sinking into a deep, dark depression once you realize the impossibility of actually taking that trip, take a visit to the map archives. It can actually help the wanderlust to at least imagine the places you could go. And the archives have everything. Don’t believe me? Watch these videos: A World Of Maps: Part 1 and Part 2.

Our very own Riveter Ryan Trager, best known for the soundtrack portion of the magazine, is heading out to the UK for a tour with the Silent Years, the Detroit indie rock band that Spin Magazine’s polls named the 2007 Underground Artist of the Year. Have you heard them? Visit their MySpace and check it out. Are you in the UK? Have a good look at the extensive tour schedule and get a ticket. And Ryan, come back safe…and with an accent.

Memorial Day Weekend is always a catch-22 for us here in Seattle. The sun is finally out, temperatures are warm, and we have to figure out how to make that age-old decision: Sasquatch or Folklife?

For some people, it’s a no brainer. OK, you people, lovely - good for you. For others though, it can be a real headache. I mean, we finally have a long weekend, we want to be in the sun, we want to be listening to groovy music. Do we want the big ticket headliners from the radio, like the Hold Steady or Bjork or Neko Case or Blackalicious? Do we really want to drive out to the Gorge for a weekend of insanity in the desert? Do we want to love Seattle Center for all of the things it’s good for (millions of stages, lots of space, in the neighborhood)? Don’t we love megacrowds, free music, crazy workshops, and funnel cake?

So many questions. Sasquatch offers the glam and the hits. Folklife offers the community and the chill vibe. Take your pick. Make sure to spend a good amount of time perusing the schedules for both festivals so that you can make an informed decision. And have a fantastic weekend. Find some music somewhere…you have no excuse.

It’s time for Rivet to party east-coast style! Tomorrow night in Brooklyn is the celebration of R18: The Secret Issue. There is no cover, an hour of free beer courtesy of Red Hook Brewery, bocce ball, and—oh yes, the new issue at the discounted price of $5.

Stop by the party and hang with us. We’d love to meet you.

Details.

So every so often I like to post some funny things that are said at our meetings. It turns out that there tends to be really only one person making the funny comments—that would be our lovely boss, Leah Baltus. So here are a couple of the latest from Leah. Take note that the first one is in reference to our upcoming SECRET release party in New York City—there will be Bocce Ball. And for those who are closer to home, don’t miss our hometown hurrah right here in Seattle this Thursday, March 12. As for the second quote—there just is no excuse.

 ”All my life I’ve waited for the marriage of Rivet and Bocce.”

“Looks like a corndog, acts like a magazine!”

Here’s yet another intriguing Seattle blog. Heard of Friends of Seattle? They’ve got a blog, and therefore we link to it. Rivet’s got a piece in the upcoming FAKE issue (release! oct. 21!) about urban things and planning and development. You’ll have to wait a little bit to catch that, but in the meantime, brush up on your vocab with FoS. Read through, post some comments, join the discussion. There are many things on their agenda that affect all of us Seattlites, like transit and parks and sustainability. For that matter, they affect the whole world.