Staying Alive

What a stranger in Seattle taught me about the creative life

On Mount Rainier,” Imogen Cunningham

I wish I could explain, no, convey to you what it felt like that day I spent with her. I wish you could feel the light there on that early spring day like it had just been born, the mountains shining, shaking with white, the cherry blossoms exploding onto the church parking lot behind my apartment, the air washed fresh blue like the blue had been under those thick clouds all along. Sky! Mountains! The hill above Seattle. I could see everything down the slope to where the cars rushed past, blurry candies over the six-lane arched bridge. Even that looked so clear and I felt clear and I was going to meet Lisel Salzer and the long rainy season had finally broken.

Me and Baltimore in Seattle, or maybe Victoria. He never needed a leash.

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That winter in Seattle things got dark, or grey, really. My apartment was empty except for the fold-up camoflage camping stool and my one enamel pot and the bitter greens and long burdock root from the Japanese market down below the hills by the ocean. My big living room with the curved walls and old wood floors and windows overlooking the baptist church parking lot. I was pretty depressed. My dog, Baltimore was a bit depressed too. Or bedraggled. It just kept raining and raining. Mount Baker hovered above the single heavy cloud that was the whole sky, a white pyramid as vague as a dream. Like Rome, Seattle is a city ringed by hills. Beacon Hill felt like an outpost and when I got there the only contact I had there was from my cartoonist friend who gave me the name of an eccentric old artist. He was bald with a grizzled white goatee one of the founders of commune called Fish town, an early adopter of ketamine, and an artist who made porcelain skateboards and grenades and machine guns painted in delftware with the likeness of Martha Stewart and later was discredited as white nationalist. His name was Charlie Kraftt and he was a wizard gone mad. And so I was alone in the rain a lot of the time there.

The woman was tiny, ancient, bent over double orthopaedic shoes, slow but steady-moving with a thick cane and huge milky blue eyes behind the thickest glasses. I liked her immediately from afar because she was busy in the photocopy shop like me at least once a week and because she seemed absolutely focused on what she was doing, after seeing her every time I went to the copy shop where I was sending off faxes of illustrations to a newspaper back East. I couldn’t help peeking over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of what she was working on. I saw the strangest drawings with her shaggy, wobbly but sure line, the line of someone who has been drawing for a long time.