Reasons I Love: Everett’s History

Everett Washington. A sprawling city near the water's edge anchored by its historic roots.

Historic roots that become more fine in time.

As time passes, those roots only encroach further into our present. Commanding more attention as our connection to the past further erodes.

What is this past, silently lingering like a playful muse?

Historic Buildings

Built by careful craftsmen whose grand visions were made manifest by the very mills surrounding the peninsula in which they sit.

As if the mills of Milltown were a type of capitalist army surrounding its enemy of natural lands and airy homesteads, enforcing progress of wood and stone as rectangular giants ornately arose from the mud.

Gridded Streets

Whose connectedness allows energy to flow freely in endless combinations. Connoting trust and vulnerability and the lost art of community. Radiating nostalgia of yesteryear. Before mass culture completely traded community for commodity, cities for suburbs, and charming bungalows for sterile McMansions.

Deep Water Ports

The catalyst of progress. As Port Gardner swallows the Snohomish River, the commoditization of our depths is the very progress by which we regress. Evolving a way of being that can only be maintained by continually becoming further detached from its origin.

Salty Air

Willfully wafts while seamlessly connecting. Being breathed by every being from each generation to the next. Infusing a common thread of complex dreams. Cycles of failure and gain and grit and disdain. From deep shame to high praise and every pain in between. There’s an air here, and it's something that can’t help but be fully felt without the past being fully present.

Presence of Our Ghosts

Elitists and brothels. Shameful sheriffs and pioneers of industry. Myths of mob mentalities and romantics whose version of their stories could stretch to the Atlantic. Varied layers of blood and sweat immortalized by their many tellings who can’t quite remember to forget.

Innocent Depth of the Complexity of it All

The fleeting cleats of clouds we cleave to by the long lost hands that laid the bricks we sing to. When we ignore the roots. And then trip over them. And can’t not see them the same again.

As they grab us.
And trap us.
And slowly reveal their mystery.

And the making of history.
And herstory.
And their story.
And our story.

Unraveling still.
In us. And through us.
As we realize, this was never ours to begin with.

And with salt stricken air in our lungs,
We plunge from the depths
of the sea of progress.

Realizing, maybe the engineering of our westward pioneering that catalyzed our whole history was only an overzealous grab of fear.
And maybe the lost art of community,
silently begs still-

For the catalyst of encroaching roots to be revisited once more.
For a new muse to reflect the heart of the roots in which it trips-
of something deeper still.
Tripping a visit of new eyes to see a new sea-
swelling high in being.

And perhaps that sea is Everett history.
And perhaps those eyes are me.