The “S” Word

Molly and I have long thought of ourselves as “city people”. Before moving to Seattle a decade ago, we lived in San Francisco. At the time my employer was moving its headquarters south to San Jose and I joked that moving to Seattle would be a smaller change than moving down there. It seemed to me that an amorphous and undifferentiated spawl started just south of Oakland, curling around the Bay to butt up against Palo Alto on the other side. The horror, the horror… the suburbs. Yet now here we are moving out to a Seattle… uh… uh…. The word just doesn’t want to come out.

Bainbridge Islanders seem to collectively have a conflicted relationship with the S-word. On the one hand, preserving rural character and not becoming just a “Suburb in the Sound” is practically a mantra on the Island. On the other hand, Bainbridge Island is factually a bedroom community with an overwhelming economic dependence on commuters to Seattle, and real estate brochures and even BI’s own Chamber of Commerce cheerfully describe BI as a “Seattle suburb”.

I share this evident schizophrenia. For me, “suburbs” has never been meant strictly a satellite relationship to a metropolitan nucleus. After all San Jose is now the 10th most populous city in the country, far outstripping San Francisco and almost two Seattles. To me “suburbs” means a prevalence of cookie-cutter housing developments, strip malls, zig-zagging highways, lack of pedestrian-friendly downtown core. By way of example, to me Phoenix is basically one conglomerate suburb. Yet perhaps most of all the “suburb” pejorative to me signifies the presumed SUV- and minivan-driving denizens, snug next to their 2- and 3-car garages, who create and consume chain-store suburban culture. And, while I absolutely do not self-identify as one of those people, objectively, I “are one”. Two kids – check; minivan – check; corporate job – check; moved out of the city to the low-crime great-schools suburbs – check. Cue Once in a Lifetime. Damn.

But yet… but yet. Bainbridge Island is not Bellevue: there’s a lot more open space, and a lot fewer parking lots. We are moving from Seattle but we are also going from two cars to one car, from a 3300 square foot house to a much smaller home, from being walking distance from a faux village shopping center to living in a real village, and effectively being walking distance from downtown Seattle. 

And that “rural character” badge is not just hype. I can walk to more restaurants and caffeination than in in our Seattle, but there are also chickens right here, and a woods. People complain about traffic on Highway 305 but it’s a cakewalk compared to any major Seattle arterials, much less I-5. We have the Grand Forest, Fay Bainbridge, Manzanita Park, Battle Point Park, and IslandWood, and more. And only 23,000 people. My kids and I were strolling Battle Point yesterday during a sunbreak, and stumbled on a paved trail around a large pond reminiscent of Green Lake. Yet instead of the hordes and the lycra-clad there was just us, and a lone stroller-walking mom. You couldn’t have that experience on Green Lake in the middle of a rainstorm, unless it was accompanied by a neutron bomb.   

I guess the bottom line is that I feel a real connection to this Island, and to the community which we’ve joined here. I’m still conflicted about “leaving the city” but if that conflict is simply part and parcel of the Bainbridge Island psyche, it seems like a reasonable deal. S-word and all.

Hello to Bainbridge Island

A new study concludes that men and women use the Internet differently, and I have to agree. While I may be more of a communicator than some of my gender, I tend to be “goal focused” even in this medium. I kept a personal weblog when I was investigating the use of weblog technology in schools almost 4 years ago, yet after the resulting CMS-based school site was launched my itch to post dwindled. Now, as my family and I undertake to move from metro Seattle to Bainbridge Island, I feel a similar itch to put down in writing some of my thoughts and experiences as an arriviste to our new community (“communities”, actually, but that’s another subject).

This may end up another goal-oriented blog of limited duration. But truly arriving in a community can take a lifetime, or longer, so then again it may last a while. Ten years ago, on first moving to Seattle, I read Andrew Ward’s excellent Out Here and almost tangibly felt his public embarrassment at being put in his newcomer’s place in a town meeting by a 4th-generation Bainbridge Islander. Little did I know I’d myself end up a newcomer here “on the Island”, much less that I’d be tempting public embarrassment myself (I do hang it out there in my corporate blog but for that at least I get a paycheck).