Discovery Park

The hardest thing after she left was being alone with that voice: my own, second guessing, doubting. In that silence, I heard a lot of things I feared. She'd drowned them out, and I realized, I loved her precisely because she drowned them out.

I stopped drinking because drunk I couldn't keep them at bay. Sober, it was easier. But it was a hard realization. I thought she was dependent on me. To find, after all this time, that she kept me from me...

No one can really hide from themselves that way. I'm better off alone.

When Paula canceled on me, I went to the party without her. Paul thought it was great, that I'd have all these opportunities there. But my cynicism killed it. I stood there like a fucking wallflower. I wasn't drunk and so didn't dance. And most of the girls--I realized that I'd be covering old ground with them: keep talking; there are things I don't want to hear.

I couldn't do it anymore.

Bullshit myself.

When the hostess asked me to smoke outside, I left. No point in staying.

Got in my car and drove. To Discovery Park, which outskirts Seattle, a last strip of city before it slopes due west into Puget Sound.

It's a drive from downtown. Through industrial parks, glowering neon. The streets wind along Elliot Bay, past the cargo piers. Rows of cars line up dockside. Freighters anchor offshore waiting for shipping orders. They will travel west to the East, a slow transit by modern terms, in their course carrying the freight of tradewinds past, if only in the imagination of that rare deckhand filled with maritime sentiment.

Not too many of them left. These days, not a lot of sentiment left worth keeping.

It was late. Not many cars on the roads. Seattle breaks past Queen Anne Hill, bluffs fall into lowlands filled with old rail tracks. You cross them, and climb an empty bridge to Magnolia, the last highlands west of town. Discovery Park is there.

In Magnolia, the streets narrow. Trees drape over the tarmac. It's late fall, and leaves crowd the ground, skittering in the wind. Like in New England, on the other side of America, where the continent begins. Where I moved from over a year ago. Where Jenn was from.

It's a good bet not a single one of the tough bastards that settled here imagined they'd find a Discovery Park on this side of the Atlantic. They discovered nothing; they made things. They stripped the forest and built their homes and killed everyone that got in their way. They made their freedom; didn't find it. A self-reliant bunch. Or so the myth would have us believe.

My guess: the Indians discovered freedom. Not because the English brought it, but because the English took it. My guess: that sad discovery traveled west, with the smallpox. And by the time whites crossed the Cascades, Discovery Park was empty.

It's empty when I arrive. Closed. Lights hover above the black waters of the Sound. Foghorns toll mutely, distant. Leaves blow beyond the reach of my headlights and disappear.

Those pioneers must have discovered too much emptiness. Enough to hear the resonance of their own thoughts. Enough to hear that second, doubting voice, and they clutched God and drink and rifles to silence it. And filled that space and all the howling western wastes with the evidence of progress: farms and cattle and sons and daughters and banks. And killed anything that got in their way, just so they didn't have to think about it.

A self-reliant bunch. Especially if self-reliance means keeping yourself at bay.

But now, those spaces are gone and Discovery Park at the end of the continent slopes into the water. I've reached a dead end.

I can hear a second voice. So I turn the car around and drive back into town. I don't see another car until I hit Denny. And I turn the radio up.