The Map

Mukilteo, Suquamish, Puyallup, Pt. Defiance, Driftwood Key,Shilshole, Bothell, Commencement Bay: the map of the city of Seattle and its surroundings, like the maps of other territories to which travelers have laid claim, is studded with thousands of names, thousands of tenuous links in a cartographer's network, each insistently etched, all locked in enduring relation. Seen up close, at 0.68 miles to the inch, the city seems a delicate, ordered abstraction, its areas laced with an infinity of lettered and numbered lines, its names pinned onto those lines precariously, as though the whole would float away were it not for the encompassing red grid that restrains it, latitude and longitude employed to hold both water and land in place. Seen from farther out, at a scale of 3:1, the city becomes a small white block ringed by bands of blue, these now tiny areas themselves dwarfed by the yellows and greens of larger areas seeping yet farther out. The county lines, newly visible from this vantage point, are drawn with dashes that sometimes bisect the waters circumjacent to the city, as though to suggest that any entity can be bounded, once named, and constraint imposed upon fluidity. At this distance, however, what distinguishes the city from its environs is less apparent than in the first view; it seems as if the city, though marked off in myriad ways, still cannot truly be separated from what surrounds it.

I believe that lives are like cities in this regard.

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