A brief field guide to Seattle-temperament: on the morals of moderation, drizzle as civic religion, and the subtle beauty of never really giving a shit about anything at all.
While information is limited, this document has been copy-circulated privately. As ever, not officially sanctioned. By all accounts, mildly true. Photo by Luis Gilberto.
Ode to the Kingdom of Perpetual Maybe
It’s a city of maybes.
Every opinion prefaced by, “Well… it depends.”
Disclaimer and calling card all in one.
Forever buffered by degrees of certainty and wandering, emotionally, somewhere near the stranger middle of that spectrum.
Seattle is the reverence of civic balance turned religion.
Anything too hot can be tepid by Thursday.
Flare too quickly, and your enthusiasm will be documented and gleefully held against you in future interactions.
Here, balance is not worshiped.
It is embodied.
Not too happy.
Not too sad.
Not too enthusiastic.
Not too damned sure of yourself.
At 85 degrees, the city performs seasonal mourning.
“Stay hydrated my friends!”
“Check on your neighbors!”
“Cooling centers will be opening throughout the city.”
By all accounts, we should be outside.
Get snowed on for four days straight, and people pretend like this city has anything resembling infrastructure.
If two inches of snow fall, hills spontaneously combusting into things you make out of sticks and warm concrete become a very real concern.
Grocery stores prepare for Civil War.
Classes of vehicles become banned from existence entirely.
Vehicles driven on the theory that one might need them, not the guarantee.
Shouldn’t rain, shouldn’t snow, shouldn’t drive in sun, or leaves.
Drizzle is the only condition anyone truly understands.
Not rain.
Not mist.
Not weather, exactly.
Just a form of persistent atmospheric hesitation.†
Somehow, it’s not weather at all.
It arrives without urgency.
It asks nothing of anyone.
It leaves room for interpretation.
Let two inches of snow fall, however, and we instantly devolve back into metropolitan mud.
You know it’s bad when driving becomes a philosophical argument.
If you can avoid giving a firm opinion or position on the matter of rain, you do it.
When you live here, drizzle becomes as ambient a concept as elevation.
Seattle avoids confrontation as though it were a municipal obligation.
Things aren’t certain here.
They’re “pretty likely.”
Questions are rarely asked directly.
Decisions are rarely made completely.
Firm positions become soft suggestions, and soft suggestions eventually become local custom.
Something about the weather makes it feel perfectly reasonable to never commit fully to anything at all.
Seattle sits eternally comfortably between thermostat settings.
If there are two sides to a statement, Seattle will listen to both of them for hours, gently pick them both apart, and then invite you to draw your own conclusions at a later date.
Maybe.
“Let’s do it.”
“Let’s think about it.”
“…maybe we should wait until after summer.”
And there it is.
The governing philosophy of the city.
Not yes.
Not no.
Just a permanent and highly functional state of maybe.
Appendix A (Unofficial)
The defining trait of Seattle is not introversion, nor politeness, nor even weather tolerance. It is the persistent belief that decisions, like seasons, will improve if given enough time.