Looking Out for the Lookers Out

An inveterate (and deeply regretful) procrastinator, wrapping up the penultimate leg of a contractual historical journey this week (15,000 words down, 2,500 to go -- and yes, she is well aware of the folly of squandering any of her finite weekly verbal supply in telling this particular tale), takes a brief skating break on the last beautiful day of fall. On her way out to Alki and back, she observes the following:

Scarlet leaves littering the asphalt path crunch satisfyingly under blue urethane wheels, but also conceal pebbles, goose poop, and other hazards. A Parks employee she has waved at many times is out with a rake, clearing them away. Shouted greetings are exchanged, along with mutual hopes for an enjoyable weekend.

A baby harbor seal resting comfortably on a rockery at the south edge of the Don Armeni Boat Ramp would have escaped her attention but for the small crowd of officials (and fans) gathered around a ring of saw-horse signage and yellow caution tape.  A Seal Sitters rep explains the situation, and fumbles in her pocket for a business card. "Do you skate here often? We count on people like you to help us spot these critters. Here's the number to call if you happen to see any stranded seals or sea lions."

The skater's apologetic admission that her customary rate of speed would preclude the close observation of somnolent marine mammals is met with an understanding smile. "Well," says the Seal Sitter rep, "often you'll see a little knot of people like this, and that's your clue that there's something going on." The skater, intrigued by this strategy of looking out for lookers-out as a way of pinpointing interesting things to look at, rolls on.

Just around the next curve in the path she encounters an opportunity to employ said strategey: a skinny guy in a baseball cap has set up an easel. Upon it he has placed a tiny canvas, whereon he is painting a massive ship: a rusty tanker floating out in Elliott Bay, with the words "DOUBLE HULL" painted on the side in letters twenty feet high (this is a guess, size being difficult to judge at this distance, and distance being difficult to judge at this size). She guesses she wouldn't have looked twice at DOUBLE HULL if this intense young man had not elected to spend all afternoon staring at it.

Back at the car, she gets back to work at once -- starts the engine and fires up the oral history tape she has been transcribing while driving: pad in lap, pencil in teeth, one finger on the pause button, pulling over to the curb to scrawl down key quotes when the red lights aren't long enough to capture them all -- she's pretty sure this would qualify as texting while driving, if only the results were legible enough to qualify as text.

As she zooms up the ramp to the West Seattle bridge, the tinny voice of Bob Griffin fills the car. Born in 1924 at the south end of Beacon Hill, Bob grew up before Holly Park was built down the hill to the east, before I-5 cut through the landscape to the west.  "It was just woods all the way from here down to the airport," he says. And Beacon Avenue in the old days, "it didn't have the median strip, it was all paved with asphalt, not concrete." It turns out Mr. Griffin was a concrete guy in his professional life, and goes into rather more detail than is strictly necessary about exactly what kind of asphalt Beacon Avenue was paved with, but suffice it to say it was extremely smooth asphalt, smoother than anything you'd see on a road today. And the traffic was so light, he says, "sometimes two hours would go by without a car." Young Bob Griffin and his pals had the whole smooth surface to themselves. And what did they do? Of course: they rollerskated. 


The regretful procrastinator pauses for a moment to trace the chain of connections that carried this particular story from skater to skater, today of all days. How a woman named Frederica Merrell went around with a tape recorder and asked a bunch of old timers to tell her their stories for a book she was working on, Seattle's Beacon Hill. It was a homegrown operation: you can hear the interviewer's baby shrieking in the background on several of the tapes. That was back in 2002; the baby is now in second grade, and the tapes are in a box at Frederica's house. When the procrastinator, having found Seattle's Beacon Hill on a library shelf and deduced the existence of these recordings, called and asked to borrow them for the project she's working on -- like, could she come pick them up tomorrow? -- Frederica was happy to oblige. (As an added bonus: the procrastinator got to say hi to Frederica's husband Robert, who -- in an unrelated connection -- had played at her wedding fifteen years ago. He appeared remarkably unchanged.)

She thinks of all the other people out there whose work she has pulled together and woven into 15,000 words (2,500 to go) this month -- all the note-takers and shot-snappers, the interviewers of eyewitnesses, the memoirists and family historians, the occasional bureaucrat who actually wrote the truth in his report. She thinks of them as a kind of Federation of Lookers-Out: the people who keep their eyes peeled, who stop to ask what's going on, who take the time to go dig up a new story, or find out the real story, instead of repeating the same story everyone else is always telling.

The Federation of Lookers-Out is closely allied (though not exactly aligned) with the League of Hoarders: the folks who document all those stories -- with cameras and tape recorders and pencils and typewriters -- or easels and oil paints, for that matter -- and stow the evidence someplace safe, where a regretful procrastinator can go and find it (quickly, please!) when the need arises. (The League's unsung heroes are, of course, the archivists and librarians who keep watch over such places.)

The procrastinating skater counts herself among both tribes, now that she thinks about it.

And now (a thousand extracurricular words later) -- back to work she goes, eyes peeled for the next napping seal -- or surprise skater -- among her sources.