A Wish Unfiltered

My work of late is taking me to some interesting places. Specifically, to garbage dumpsters, full of intriguing refuse from businesses in the SODO district of Seattle. This is where manufacturing plants, the trucking and shipping industries, wholesalers of every stripe, seafood brokers, commercial bakeries, foundries and so much more form the backbone of the city. It's a bit overwhelming at times, with trucks and NOISE and odors and dust . . . but it gets quiet too, in the most unlikely places. The Georgetown area in particular is dotted with pockets of green and houses that date back to Seattle's earliest days. In the triangles formed by adjacent industrial office parks, you may find a sweet little espresso and sandwich café, or a soup stand, or a falafel wagon. In between towers of crushed automobiles and concrete blocks are buildings with no visible names or addresses. These are warehouses full of workers handling imported stone, artisans creating with metal and clay, or perhaps seamstresses assembling sportswear with customized logos.

Needless to say, the trash bins outside these places are filled with trade remnants. I've come across hundreds of malformed zippers, pieces of exquisitely polished marble, dozens of long purple eggplants unfit for sale, slightly wilted but still beautiful flowers. I get to meet the people who work in these blue collar environments too, and I could be projecting, but mostly they seem more engaged than office workers – maybe because they are more active, using both body and mind.

At a commercial bakery the owner packed me a free box of warm donuts, glaze still dripping, right from the assembly line, which I passed along to a road crew down the street after being tempted to eat more than one. I made the rounds on Perimeter Road, along the eastern edge of Boeing Field, where airplane hangars for the wealthy and the little King County Airport provided yet another show I had never seen before.

It was here that a new, clean thought occurred to me while I was talking to the owner of a flight school about his recycling. Suddenly came the idea that I could learn to fly a small plane. It seemed interesting, and doable. Slightly stunned, I realized it had never before crossed my mind - or if it did, it was shot down in milliseconds by visions of malfunctioning controls. Just like thoughts of sailing on the open ocean invoked my reflexive terror of being lost at sea.

It was the first time in long memory that my psyche delivered a wish unfiltered. There was no split second debate, no voice in my head steering me away from doing something as unfamiliar and potentially risky as flying a plane. No aversion whatsoever to a new and wild idea.

It seems that my work among the dumpsters is serving as an education I never got – one in which certain professions were off the radar because white collar work promised a more suitable life, or held more cache for my status conscious middle-class peers. I may never end up employed in the freight yards or airplane hangars of South Seattle, but my eyes are open now to more possibilities than I knew existed. Flying – or trusting that I can learn how – is suddenly a symbolic and appealing option.