Seattle

Flaming down Broadway

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Passing the torchI’ll expand this entry more later on tonight with pictures and such, but last night the Olympic Torch relay came through Seattle. I’d already checked the route maps provided by the Seattle Times and King 5 and seen that the route was scheduled to go within a block of my apartment at about 5:45pm! Since the walk home from work only takes about 20 minutes, I knew I’d be home in time to wander down and watch the relay come by.

Just before 5:45 I left the Shoebox and wandered down the hill to Pike Street. There were already a few other people standing on the corner of Pike and Boylston waiting for the relay to come by, and we chatted off and on for the next few mintues as we waited. Round about 6-ish or so some trucks came by handing out noisemakers for us to play with as the runner came by, so we each grabbed a few and kept waiting. And waiting. Apparently the procession wasn’t exactly keeping to schedule.

By 6:15 or so we were getting a bit chilly — though the temperature last night was in the mid-30’s, which isn’t too bad, there was a fairly constant wind that made things a bit colder — when a couple ladies came by selling t-shirts. We asked them if they knew how far along the runner was, and they said that he was still working his way through downtown Seattle! At that point, we all decided that a stop by the Rosebud to warm up sounded like a good idea, and off we went. I grabbed a table right by the street so I could keep an eye on the crowds still gathering along Pike Street to get a feel for when things were coming our way, and nursed a very nice Malibu Rum and Coke.

It was probably around 6:30 or so when we noticed that the news helicopters were now hovering almost directly overhead (side note: even when you know they’re news choppers, it’s a wee bit disconcerting to be able to look in the sky and see three hovering helicopters with spotlights trained in your general direction), and a few minutes after that people on the street started pointing down the hill. Everyone waiting in the Rosebud took that as our clue, and headed out to the street.

The next runner gets readyI hadn’t known this before, never having seen the Torch relay before, but it’s not done with one runner from start to finish through each town. Rather, they have multiple runners, each one carrying a torch for a short distance, at the end of which the flame is passed on to the next runner with their own torch for the next leg. As it turns out, they were switching runners just a block before the Pike/Broadway intersection, so I was able to get a couple shots of the new runner getting ready to go, the passing of the flame, and then the previous runner getting his congratulations. It was a pretty cool thing to be able to see — I’ll try to get my pictures up this evening.

Suicide isn’t painless

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I did want to take a moment before I went home to comment on the recent suicide attempt that has, apparently, been making national headlines (see Suicide attempt draws nation’s attention, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Aug. 30th; and Commuters’ mood turns ugly as suicide try snarls I-5 traffic, Seattle P-I, Aug. 29th).

Now normally, suicides — or suicide attempts — aren’t really newsworthy events (unless, of course, they happen to be by some already-noteworthy personality…and even then, I often question if it’s really that newsworthy an occurrence). However, this event has been garnering national media attention not because of the suicide attempt itself, but because of the depressingly horrendous way that people here reacted to it.

In a nutshell, an unidentified woman decided to at least appear to want to commit suicide during the Tuesday morning rush hour. Pulling her car to the side of the Ship Canal bridge, she got out her car and sat on the railing overlooking Lake Union 160 ft. below. Someone called the police who quickly arrived to try and talk her down, but by this point, the mood was already getting ugly. Someone sitting on the edge of a bridge is sure to draw attention, and the arrival of police officers drew more. As traffic was slowed by the gawkers, people frustrated by the slow pace started yelling at the woman, telling her to jump. Eventually, the comments and obscenities from the passing traffic were causing enough problems with the police officers’ negotiations with the woman that they found it necessary to close down I-5, causing a huge traffic jam in the middle of the morning rush.

About two hours later, the woman jumped. Surprisingly enough, she survived the fall into the lake, and was taken to a hospital, where her condition has gone from critical to serious over the past day.

The thing that gets me about all of this — and what has been getting to many people — is how horrendously people acted. When I-5 was closed down, it was not closed down because of the possible jumper. It was closed down because so many people felt that they had to insult and verbally abuse an obviously already distraught woman, to the point of purportedly yelling, “Jump, bitch, jump!” as they drove by. For a city that has an image of being one of the nicer areas in the northwest to live in, this seems to have taken quite a lot of Seattle — and the nation, from the ongoing stories — by surprise. It’s a sad commentary on things when something like this happens. A freeway full of people, and not one would pull over to try and talk to this woman, or to see if something could be done. Instead, they did their best to urge her on — because as she had the temerity to try to commit suicide in a public place during a high-traffic time of day (now, is it just me, or doesn’t that scream out “cry for help?”), she was inconveniencing them.

Right.

Anyway, there’s not much I can really add to the general onslaught of reaction to this travesty. I’m surprised and somewhat disheartened that it all played out like this, of course. It’s not at all what I would have expected to see happen. Hopefully the next time something similar happens (though, admittedly, it would be best if that weren’t to come to be), people will think a little less of themselves.

I’m not sure I’m too optimistic about that, though.

Shake, rattle and roll

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I just found out when I got to work that Seattle got quite a bit of a shaker yesterday — current estimates put the quake that just hit them at 6.8. CNN has ongoing coverage of the quake posted.

Since I know a fair amount of people down in the Seattle area (Casey, Chad, Dez, Kate, Nikki, fivefootfourteen, and many others that aren’t coming to mind at the moment), I just wanted to send out my hopes and wishes that everything’s going well for them down there.

On the brighter (if somewhat cynical) side, I wonder if this means that there will be a few more open apartments when I move down there?