“An artists’ republic?” he says, lighting up. “I thought Plato kicked artists out of the republic.”
We ease off the interstate and down past small, cottage-like houses pressed into the hillsides. I watch for the sign that says Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, Set Your Watch Back Five Minutes. Or the one that advises Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, Set Your Watch Forward Five Minutes.
“Maybe somebody stole them,” Wayne suggests. He seems to like the idea. “Or maybe they disappeared into the temporal shift when everyone changed their watches.” He likes that idea even better.
We do find a pole stuck with arrows painted in Neapolitan-ice-cream shades. They point every which way: Timbuktu 10,029 mi. Bermuda Triangle 3.75. Xanadu, East of the Sun. Dinosaurs 3 Blocks. Troll 2 Blocks. The pole itself is striped with an arrow that points straight down: Center of the Universe.
We get out to stretch our legs and stroll past a sixteen-foot bronze statue of Lenin; a rocket mounted on the side of a building, blowing smoke as if trying to blast off; a corral of life-size dinosaurs shaped from living hedges. Tucked under the highway overpass, someone has shaped a giant troll in ferro-cement, a real VW Beetle crushed under the weight of its left hand. A block away, three billy goats gambol across a yard, cut-outs in rusting steel. But these are relics of a quirky past. The stores that line the short main street sell souvenirs made in China, bins of organic vegetables, and vintage clothing arranged by colour on chrome racks.
“Do artists still live here?” I ask a young woman wearing a heavy brown khaki jacket and pants and a Peruvian woollen cap. In one hand she holds a bouquet of brushes and balances a palette; with the other, she dabs at the painting on her easel. It’s a reasonable likeness of the troll.
“No way, it’s too expensive. There’s lofts in old warehouses south of the piers,” she adds after some thought. “Some artists live there.”
“Is that where you live?”
She hesitates. If I’d brought a pair of gloves, I’d give them to her; her fingers are blanched from the cold.
“No,” she says. “I live with my parents.”
Fremont’s motto may still be “De Libertas Quirkas,” but clearly, the freedom to be peculiar is not what it once was. The artists have crept back into Seattle, leaving painters to paint each other’s art. And the hippies are history, just another part of the Fremont brand.
History, it seems, is malleable. Fremont, indeed all of Seattle, is in King County, which was named in 1852 in honour of a plantation owner from Selma, Alabama, a certain William Rufus DeVane King, who was a United States senator, a supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850, which extended slavery into new states and territories. At the time, William Rufus King was vice-president-elect of the United States. A hundred and thirty-four years later, in 1986, the county councillors decided they were no longer comfortable living in a place named for a slave owner, so they passed a resolution denouncing Rufus King and replacing him with Martin Luther King, Jr., “renaming” the county for this other King, who embodied “the attributes for which the citizens of King County can be proud, and claim as their own.”
“The King is dead,” Wayne says, as he manoeuvres out of the parking space. “Long live the King.”
I read the story of the Kings in a brochure I picked up in a coffee shop, where Wayne bought a T-shirt: Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe: throw away your watch. We ask store clerks and waiters and the concierge of the downtown hotel where we take a room for the night; they’ve all heard of the Fremont signs, but no one has ever seen one, which strikes me, in an odd way, as perfect.
Chatting with the concierge, I have a hard time remembering we’re in a foreign country. The hotel is a chain: we’ve stayed in dozens exactly like it back home. The Stars and Stripes is nowhere in evidence. The people we meet speak in the same flat tones as we do, they dress like us, drive the same cars, buy the same snacks in convenience stores, drink our favourite coffee. It may be that we all watch the same TV shows and buy goods from the same manufacturers, or maybe it’s because for seventy years after the American War of Independence, Washington, like Canada, was still part of British North America.
And then we see the sign on a post going into the hotel bar: No knives. No guns.
We have entered a different country, after all.
WHAT’S that yummy smell?”
After checking into our hotel, Merilyn and I have gone for a walk—our favourite urban pastime—and now find ourselves outside the Pike Place Fish Market, on the corner of Pike and Post Alley, in downtown Seattle. The marketplace is crowded, people milling about, bent over tables of produce, pinching lettuce leaves, peering into the eyes of fish. Fresh Pacific salmon bask on crushed ice, hosed-down organic greenery drips from every stall. An Asian woman smiles at us from behind a counter covered with wooden dinosaurs; another sells woollen baby bonnets knitted to look like strawberries. I inhale.
“Caramel,” I say.
“Caramel popcorn,” corrects Merilyn, sniffing suspiciously as we carry on past the meats and cheeses, the chili peppers, and the apples. “It’s everywhere. They must pipe it in.”
Merilyn and I are a lot less naive than Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who visited New York in 1986. Like most outsiders, he wandered among the towers of Manhattan expecting to be overwhelmed by meaning and significance. Instead, he was overwhelmed by absurdity and fakery. His disillusionment reached its peak when he complained to the workers in a bakery that the cinnamon rolls he’d bought there the day before had lost their flavour by the time he got them home. The bakery workers laughed at him. “They explained that the heavenly cinnamon smell that made you long for the sweet rolls the moment you walked into the bakery was actually an artificial fragrance they pumped into the store.”
The “bakery,” it turned out, did not even have an oven on the premises. The rolls hadn’t lost their flavour; they hadn’t had any flavour to begin with. It was fake-’n’-bake. Like this aroma of caramel popcorn, although here there is not a kernel of popcorn to be seen. At least the bakery sold cinnamon rolls.
What astounded Pamuk was not that so much of America was fake but that everyone knew that everything was fake and they loved it anyway. It was like Dorothy finding out at the beginning of the movie that the Wizard of Oz was a little old man behind a screen and going along with the gag for the fun of it. Americans, Pamuk suspected, may even love things because they are fake. The fake Gothicism in New York’s architecture, the fake ice cream in the ads, the fake smiles on the faces of the people in the elevators and on the streets—nobody believed in any of it, but they still wanted it. Why? “Why do they keep smiling at me, why are they always apologizing, why are they so solicitous?”
Pamuk found the whole experience Orwellian. Americans behaved the way they did not because they were happy or sorry or cared about Turkish politics and customs, he said, but because they had collectively agreed to forget “the old philosophical distinction between appearance and reality.” They didn’t want buildings that were featureless and functional—the Soviets had those—or bakeries that smelled of diazinon and blocked drains. Or, apparently, vegetable stalls that smelled like vegetables and fish markets that reeked of fish. They wanted the appearance of civility, of artistry, of benevolence, solicitude, whimsy. For if they had the appearance of them, and if they didn’t make fine distinctions between appearance and reality, then they would have the reality of them, too.
Jonathan Raban found the same thing when he visited New York a year later. In the first part of his book about America, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, he spends considerable time trying to deconstruct Macy’s department store. When