Seattle Is This Curious Liberal Island.

Inaugurals Conventionally Start With A History Lesson And Finish With A Prayer.

Seattle Was Built Out On Pilings Over The Sea, And At High Tide The Whole City Seemed To Come Afloat Like A Ship Lifting Free From A Mud Berth And Swaying In Its Chains.

Life, As The Most Ancient Of All Metaphors Insists, Is A Journey; And The Travel Book, In Its Deceptive Simulation Of The Journey's Fits And Starts, Rehearses Life's Own Fragmentation. More Even Than The Novel, It Embraces The Contingency Of Things.

Travel. It Was An Intransitive Verb. It Didn't Involve Any Destinations. It Was Going To The Going's Sake, To Be Anywhere But Where You Were, With Motion Itself As The Only Object.

The North-south Line Of 'the Mountains,' Meaning The Cascade Range, Forty Miles East Of Seattle, Is A Rigid Political Frontier.