The Point Is, Progress Isn’t All Behind Us

How I spent my summer vacation:

I spent it, nearly every penny, in the shadow of the Space Needle, a blackened salmon burger in hand, listening to some of the best music in the world, in a beautiful place that was most certainly not Orange County. So there.

I usually haul up to Seattle over the Labor Day weekend--not just because I have family and friends in the area, but because this is when the city hosts its Bumbershoot Festival, which is kind of like our county fair, except instead of corn dogs and Three Dog Night, they get ballet, Tony Bennett, grunge rock, African music, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, the aforementioned blackened salmon burgers (I sometimes have one in each hand), crab cakes, Lebanese garlic chicken, focaccia and corn dogs if you really need one.

It’s a great city, from the museums to the panhandlers. The more recent architecture isn’t too appalling, and the older stuff more than makes up for it, from Victorian houses to jet-age neon business places. It has communities that act like communities, a vibrant street life, places to congregate, plus the monorail and ever-present Space Needle to give the impression that you’re in a Disneyland without borders, with that early ‘60s vibe, where everything seems to be leaning expectantly toward the future.

“What’s all this oxygen stuff here?” string whiz David Lindley asked the festival audience, and it is pleasantly disarming, having all this velvety real air to breathe. I’d lucked into a red convertible through a free rent-a-car upgrade and was so determined to make the most of it I had the top down in the rain half the time. Even their rain seems better than we have here, though I do admit Seattle isn’t my favorite gray place to be come January.

But in September? You wake up happy; subject the stomach to a breakfast of Tabascoed shrimp paella , drenched blueberry pancakes and black coffee at the Athenian Restaurant in the Pike Street Market overlooking Elliot Bay; wander the old downtown with its inviting mix of style and seed; perhaps go canoeing on Lake Washington, gorging on fresh blackberries growing along the shores of the arboretum, then hit the festival at noon.

There, you stop off for the requisite salmon burger, that onion-jeweled orb of kings, and hit the performance stages: Richard Thompson weaving his dark Celtic musical tapestries; Me’Shell Ndege’Ocello fusing funk, jazz and hip-hop; the St. Petersburg Ballet actually being kind of wretched, and Bonnie Raitt playing to an audience of more than 30,000. (It probably didn’t hurt that, rather than a $30 ticket, Raitt’s show was included in the $9 festival admission.)

Things seemed very right with the world when watching South African singers Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens dancing and leaping about in lion skins and such, celebrating their nation’s new freedom, while the sleek monorail glided by behind them. It’s like that “Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” they used to sing about on Disney’s Carousel of Progress.

I love Seattle so much that I refuse to move there now that so many other Southern Californians are mucking it up. Besides, it’s kind of fun to stay down here and complain.

My favorite part of the old Carousel of Progress ride was on the way out, when you’d walk by a miniature model of the “city of the future.” It was a night scene, all twinkling lights and lagoons, linked by monorails and aerial tramways. Everything was clean, modern and tropical.

I’d probably despise the thing now, having seen the planned-community sterility of Irvine. But back then it raised for me the same question Seattle does now: How shall we live?

That question, which definitely warrants being bothered with, presumes that we have some actual say over the manner in which we live. That supposition is implicit in our way of life, wrapped up in that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” stuff. The human-scaled life in Seattle and a handful of other U.S. cities gives me hope that we perhaps can create the sort of world we’d want to live in.

But take a good long look down any major O.C. thoroughfare--at the soulless mini-malls, garish billboards and gated condo compounds--and tell me there’s anything resembling someone’s best intentions involved. Fountain Valley ain’t exactly Florence, is it?

I do another column for this newspaper, called Fixations (shameless plug: It runs Tuesdays in Life & Style), that covers people in the county who bother to be a little different. It’s a varied bunch: Barbie addicts, opera-writing doctors, tightrope-walking retirees and such.

Recently, through no design, I’ve hit on a run of stories that could bear the heading “Idyllic O.C.”--conversations with people who saw this place at its best. Their stories are rich with orange orchards, local dances, beach parties, surf, woodies and 16-pound lobsters pulled from local waters.

These people still see some of that rustic magic in the county, though one of them, it should be noted, does so by living in a rock in Laguna Canyon. It may not be so easy for the rest of us, though I have to say this past summer may have been the most beautiful one I’ve seen here.

Sometimes I get so caught up in the day-to-day bustle, I forget I’m even on a planet.

But this summer had an undeniable shimmer to it, in the breeze, the sunsets, starlight and other things I rarely bother to notice. It was a great barbecue summer. I’d go to them expecting to stay an hour and would still be there when the tiki torches were burning out.

So I’ve been loving this place more than ever, though it also seems bittersweet to me, as if it’s a love that’s intensified because I know the thing is passing away, inevitably as youth.

I stepped into my back yard one recent morning. The sun was coming in warm at an angle, and the sky above was an inverted bowl of pure blue. Solitary as a poem, a huge crow circled above the house. As with hawks, its wings only made single flaps at lazy intervals, the rest of the time riding currents that must have been as palpable to him as ocean currents are to us. Over a quarter-hour they slowly spiraled the bird up and away.

I wondered: From its vantage, did our streets and homes look to him as the miniature “city of the future” had appeared to me? The cheap postwar boom houses and force-fit condo tracts; the business roofs with their corroding air conditioners; the money-sanctioned graffiti of billboards; the anxious, ant-like traffic, the asphalt laced over the Earth like a constricting net. Is this how we shall live?

T. Jefferson Parker’s column resumes in this spot in two weeks.