Eighteen Feet


My friend Bob lives just south of Seattle, to the west a little.  I don't really know that region very well.  From the Kingdome and north I know well, then the downtown and most of the north-end districts I know intimately.  And once you get south of Seattle proper, getting into Tukwila, I know my way around.

But there's just that block of land on the south end of Seattle;  you notice it, you drive by it, your eye fails to differentiate a point of interest, then five minutes later you've forgotten all about it.

If you haven't lived in Seattle you probably aren't picturing this very well.

There is a sort of central 'hub' to Seattle, five or ten city blocks in the vicinity of Pike street.  Here you find malls, department/clothing stores carrying whatever is supposed to be 'hip' for those who need a clothing franchise to tell them what's 'hip';  the whole 'Planet Hollywood' area, credit-card shopper's heaven.  The sort of place people go for the pleasure of being there, a central place of activity.

Going south from that, you go through where the office jobs work, a lot of clean glass, and the lunch or a beer after work type restaurants.  Clean, nice.  A lot of the hardwood what-a-yuppy-thinks-a-real -english-pub-looks-like places.

South from there down by the Kingdome, you're starting to get into the lower-rent world.  More Salvation Army than Planet Hollywood.  Not as clean, not as new, not as many of the places people would go out of their way to get to.

Then further south is where everybody gets on the freeway.  South of that, if you look out your car window from the freeway you see a large sprawl of, I don't know, I guess it's all 'industrial zoned' or something.

Corporate headquarters for companies you've never heard of, companies who will not net $200 billion selling computer software this year.  Manufacturing facilities, cement plants, warehouses.  Difficult to identify what a lot of them are exactly.

I've been through and seen just little bits and pieces of the northernmost part of this 'region' south of Seattle.  Some of the buildings look abandoned, some of them are in use, but only maintained to a minimal, pragmatic degree.

It's hard to tell which are which.

Seattle has an underlying sense of oldness to it, a layer built up over many decades, elements of which were built even before the world wars.  Built up by men inspired by the ancient dream of getting rich, then forgotten as economies shifted and transformed.

People die, and what they build is forgotten, then recycled later as new waves follow.

As you go south, the old layers become more and more exposed.

Anyway, I don't mean to digress, but I think some of this might be a little hard to follow if you don't have kind of a mental image of the area.

I'd gone to apply for a job at a small sign and graphics shop, just on the south side of the freeway onramp, just at the beginning of this unfamiliar area I'm talking about.

Nice, casual place, the people seemed friendly and off-the-wall and I felt like I connected with them.  Goatees and tongue studs and they had evidently stolen a truckload of black sweaters;  plenty for all.

So I was going to Bob's party later and I realized it was south and west from here a few miles, so I decided to walk.  The party probably wouldn't be really going until 9 or 10, so I had to kill a few hours anyway.  I had taken the bus to get here, and it just wouldn't have been worth the trouble to go all the way home and back.  Plus, I just like long walks.

So I started out, bearing south and west.

There was moderate traffic and moderate activity at first.  Most of the places were finishing the day and closing up, it was Friday after all.  Forklifts carrying crates, people driving off with that distinct look of relief that only Friday creates.

And I'm playing this game in my head;  "what are these places?"

Like this one place I puzzled over.  An office, just this little shack.  The stains on the wood were probably paint, once, I guess.  A rusty, dilapidated fence which seemed to be defying several of my favorite laws of physics by not falling down.  A forklift, rusted head to toe.  And in this fence, the place is loaded, not an inch to spare, with various large unidentifiable metal objects, cast iron or something I guess, loaded in barrels, tubs, or just laying loose.  Like what I would imagine the insides of some gigantic machine would look like if you took it apart.  Unidentifiable shapes, thickly rusted.  And the barrels and tubs themselves, eaten by many years or decades of rust.  Loosely round holes in them where the rust had gone all the way through.  Barrels stacked on barrels three high the length and width of this yard, holding together despite the rust more by absentmindedness than by remaining tensile strength.  It was as if somebody had loaded this yard with all these tons of metal twenty years ago and then forgotten all about it;  now it was just locked tight, frozen in rust.  A lurking rust panther and rust ninjas in the corner shadows.

I imagined the place must be a rust farm.  I imagined the old rust farmer scraping the rust into a basket with a hoe at harvest time.

I covered several blocks, crossing to the west to get off the more heavily-travelled north-south arterials then south and west again in a zig-zag pattern.

It would be getting dark soon, the shadows were getting long.

I would pass people in the street infrequently.  They were lean, angular, walked quickly and glared at you a little if you looked at them.  If they moved they moved in swift reflexive jerking motions;  as if they had been hit by a cattle prod and the reflex had caused them to pull a cigarette from their pocket.  They wore flat caps and seemed to angle their heads so as to coincide with the shadows.

A gritty wind pressed my face.

Activity was getting sparse, and as I continued south, the streets lay more quiet and it became more difficult to understand what, if any, purpose the various buildings served.

A large, two or three story red brick building;  with several large recessed covered walkways leading in to doors.  Why not just put the doors on the outside?  Why the fifteen or twenty foot path leading in, like a tunnel?

The place must have covered nearly a block by itself, but I couldn't see a sign anywhere of any kind.  There were windows on the top floor of the building;  large four pane windows with a half-circle arch on top.  The windows were either painted over or so covered with dirt that they just showed white through the dust from the outside;  or maybe they had been boarded over or plastered over from the inside. The bricks as a whole were covered with a layer of dust and streaked with mold;  somehow it was impossible for me to imagine what the place would have looked like years ago when it had still seemed like a good idea.  Now that was an old memory in the mind of somebody who had long since moved on to richer neighborhoods,  or died;  and the place seemed like a hazy memory glimpsed through clouds.

The last sunlight was fading like a forgotten song.

It was pretty thoroughly dark now;  I hadn't seen anybody in quite a while.  I didn't have a watch on, but it seemed like a half hour or an hour.  Just as I was thinking this though I came around a corner and encountered a bar.

There was no parking lot but there were cars parked in the street adjoining the bar.  I crossed to the opposite side of the street as I passed.  From the outside it was like looking through a window into a long dark tunnel.  The neon signs for Budweiser, Schlitz, etc. in the window.  It was a place for regulars, sitting stolidly and tossing back beer, one after another;  by the glass, never the pitcher.  Firmly ensconced in the dark, as quiet and pointless as Richard Nixon's corpse.  Something undefinable but definitely bad in the mood of the place, something just threatening enough to maintain the silence.

The jukebox undoubtedly like the cars parked out front:  nothing later than 1974.

Creased faces whose lines speak a language you can't quite make sense out of, the language that crazy people in the street speak out loud.

It was dark in a solid way now.  The place was kind of eerie like this.  The streetlights were on, and they managed to create an emptiness beyond the emptiness of the streets and sidewalks;   somehow streetlights have a way of making all the corners and edges stand out, but making all the flat surfaces look like they are still dark but coated with fluorescent paint;  brightened but not illuminated.

I was out of sight of all the landmarks with which I had started the journey.  I couldn't see the freeway to the east of me, or not exactly.  I could see the rise of the land where it lay, but couldn't make out headlights.  It seemed strange, you could see the valley from the freeway, it seemed like you ought to be able to see the freeway from the valley.  It was a question of angles, I guess.  And I wasn't really sure how much of the valley you could see from the freeway, I had never thought about it that much before.  I could no longer hear the distant traffic from the freeway, in fact the only sound to be heard was the occasional rumble of a single car, a long way off.  Far enough away that the sound almost seemed like a trick of the wind.

And the cement plant to the north, I hadn't been able to see that for a while.

How long had I been walking?

Shit.  This was going to take longer than I thought.  I must have been walking a good two or three hours by now, to be out of sight of my original landmarks.

I didn't seem to have made much progress, or in any event it didn't seem like I had gotten beyond the industrial zone.  I was walking faster now, and the structures around me were uniform in their facelessness.  I couldn't attach a purpose or a name to any of them.  The slight flicker from the streetlight reflections reinforced the emptiness of the street.

A two-story brick building painted with a thick coat of drab off-white paint;  a door on runners, large enough for a car to go through, and another identical door, enigmatically, directly above it on the second floor.  A corrugated tin structure, the streetlight casting severe, sharp shadows from it's roof.  A squat fat building with heavy square windows, recessed a half a foot from the outside wall, looking like it could withstand a bomb blast.  A long, low building with a row of evenly-spaced windows;  maybe an assembly line inside.

I walked in the middle of the street now, I hadn't seen a car for hours.

The silence seemed tangible to me.  There was something about it that made me just a little nervous.  It just seemed like a place that ought to be noisy, this was a place that was designed for heavy trucks, heavy equipment, heavy activity.  The silence seemed erroneous, it felt like if I took one wrong, loud step all the noise that should have been here would be released and come crashing down on me.  The silence seemed to be waiting for something.  Driveways and alleys lay flat and white under the accusing eye of the sodium lights, humming impatiently.

I was walking at a pretty good clip now.  My feet were getting sore and felt sweaty.  This had been a bad idea.  The buildings were dark and volunteered nothing.  They seemed to vary in color only slightly within a few shades of nondescript grey.  I couldn't imagine that any of them were still in use, without exception they seemed to me to have been abandoned years or decades ago.  Locks rusted, windows broken or lost behind a thick coat of dirt.  Graffiti crawled triumphantly over the corpses;  speaking gibberish.

Some kind of large complex rose in front of me.  Surrounded completely by a fence, lit by orderly rows of sodium lights of it's own, a secretive complex of buildings, roads, parking lots, bus stops.

I walked along it's outside edge, it covered at least six or seven blocks.  The buildings inside were set well away from the fence, crouching to discourage examination by anyone who hadn't been funneled through the security gates and viewed carefully.

The complex stretched itself out beside me as I walked.  For a short while it covered nearly as far as I could see both in front of and behind me.  It was as if it could tear itself loose, rise up and swallow the sky.

The distinct pinkish-orange glow of the sodium lights receded behind me.  Somehow I felt relieved to be past it, it had made me feel exposed and out of place.  The people who weren't there seemed to cry out with their heels.

I had expected that the complex would be on the periphery of this region and getting past it I would start entering urban or residential streets, but if anything the streets were darker and more indistinguishable than before.  The buildings, one, two, three stories, seemed to crawl over one another like lizards, obeying some obscure geometry which resembled the spiky, lizard-like pseudo-language of the graffiti which crawled over their sides.

It all seemed to overlap in my peripheral vision as I walked past, like streams of overlapping waves.  I was beginning to feel light-headed and hypnotized.  It must have been past one or two in the morning.  I had walked myself to the point that my brain had shut off the pain in my feet, although at this point a sudden leg cramp started to become a possibility.

I went from walking to hiking.  I just wanted to get past this area.  I ceased to really notice the surrounding scenery, and I no longer thought about anything, my mind levitating in that kind of pleasant Zen cloud nine place where the line between thought and action disappeared.

Usually I find this a pleasant state to be in;  I feel full of potential, capable of anything.  Somehow though, now I felt like somebody had shouted in my ear and my ears were still ringing.

I found myself glancing nervously up at the windows of empty offices, lit with fluorescent lights, as if someone were darting away just as my head turned.

One lost in shadows, stark halogen lights slicing green parabolic patterns over a loading dock.  Dumpsters hiding in the dark off the road in a small poisonous-looking lot.  Inside a building, long dark tables with overhead lamps running parallel to their length, vaguely seen through a window almost opaque with layers of dust.

And everywhere, the alien lizard-writing of the gangs, always beginning precisely where the light ended, veering off into the alleys, to remind me that however alone I might be, I wasn't as alone as I would like to be.

Lines of what I guessed were train tracks hunched in the background, seeming to describe alternate patterns, hidden behind the street's patterns, contradicting them and waging guerilla warfare on them.

The patterns of the rise and fall of the tops of the buildings, the patterns of the graffiti, the patterns of the alleys, the patterns of light and shadow;  seemed to progress around me like mythical sea serpents too large to see all at once.

I was starting to walk somewhat drunkenly - I was tired, my legs were sore, I had to sit for a little while.

There wasn't really anywhere that formed a seat, but a slight outcropping on one building let me take the weight off my feet by sort of semi-sitting.

God, that felt good.  Waves of pleasure ran through my legs, although I knew they would be sore or cramped when I got back up.

I had been walking a long time without a break.  How long?  Hours, four hours, maybe six.  It was definitely past midnight, probably several hours past.

It had to be close to dawn.  Dawn would be reassuring, even if I was still lost.  And it was very cold, as became even more apparent as I sat, hopefully when morning came things would warm up

I looked around me nervously, especially in the shadowy corners between buildings.  Between the gang-looking graffiti and the weird, basically scary-looking people I had seen before it got dark, I was very nervous about the possibility of encountering anyone here.  I knew it was not good to be sitting exposed like this, and so obviously vulnerable, but the idea of moving to somewhere darker and more hidden seemed even worse.  What I wouldn't have given for a nice warm bed somewhere safe.

My eyelids started wanting to close.  I thought of getting back up and walking, but my legs needed rest.  I had to fight it.  I was in too uncomfortable a position to fall asleep, anyway.

I would blink, and be asleep for a moment.  Crazy hyperactive dreams would flash through my mind, grinning faces competing desperately for my attention.  Then, snap, I'd be awake again.  The street seemed more sharply etched somehow when I woke;  painted in an oily liquid purple paint.  I'd scan the shadows, no movement.  Then out I'd fade again...

As this went on the line between dream and the street got hazy, and the street would seem fantastic and surreal, at least for a moment when I woke back up.  For a moment, the streets would seem to rock and pitch, and great faces seemed to form out of the windows, doors and alleys.

Finally my body decided it would balance itself and sleep in this position, uncomfortable or not, and one of my 'long blinks' became an extended nap.

I don't know how long I was out, but from the feeling in my legs when I woke back up it must have been at least a couple hours.  I got up, and of course instantly regretted it as long needles of pain shot through my legs.  The way I was sitting had put the weight on my thighs and my legs were 'asleep'.  Slowly I walked them out.  I felt better, rested.

It was still dark, but close to dawn.  It was tempting to wait a little while longer until the sun came up, but I felt strong for walking now, and anyway I didn't like the idea of staying any longer where I had spent so much time so vulnerable.

I was hungry now, as I walked.  Very thirsty.  I felt grubby.  I hoped some of these places had an early shift, seeing normal people doing normal things would be reassuring right now.  It would give me that nice morning-after-a-strange-night feeling, like when you've spent the night at the home of a woman you don't know very well and you're walking to get home the next morning.  I don't know why exactly but that is a very reassuring time to me.  The whole world seems somehow new and interesting, as if you'd never seen it before, especially if you have just a little bit of a hangover.

A very old black sedan drove by.  Not in good shape, like a car resurrected from a wrecking yard.  Streetlights glinted from glass and chrome.  Following some instinct I couldn't identity I hid in a deep-recessed doorway.  Four sullen faces stared forwards from within the car, looking silent and on-edge.  Late teens.  I was glad I had hid.  The reflection of a streetlight crawled swiftly and smoothly up the back of the car as it disappeared up the street.

I covered ten blocks, then twenty.  I didn't seem to be getting out of this area and it didn't seem to be getting lighter.  Was I going in circles?  I started reading the street signs but they weren't much help.  "McCormick Street"?  "Pickover Street"?  There were no numbers.  The signs hung sullen and hard to read under the sharp angles of the streetlights.

It should be fucking morning by now, I thought to myself.  It should be fucking morning by now.

There was the shadow of somebody, projected against a large building side.  It was tall, about eighteen feet tall, I estimated.  He walked, until his shadow was centered on the side of the building , then stopped.  He folded his arms in front of him.   After a minute or two, he unfolded his arms and walked away.

All the time the shadow was in view, I looked around, trying to find the source of it.  There didn't seem to be any lights at the right angle to project such a shadow, or anyone in view on the street.

It seemed like, if a six foot man were halfway between the light and the building, and the light were at about half his height, he would cast a twelve foot shadow.  I wasn't all that sure of my geometry, though.

It seemed like the light would have to be very low, anyway.  I just couldn't figure it out.  I didn't like the thought of it, that this guy just seemed to stop, look at me, then walk away.  What was his point?  On the other hand, it was hard to tell what he was doing, just from looking at his shadow.

I covered another ten blocks.  It wasn't getting lighter, if anything it seemed to be getting darker.  I decided my sense of time must have become skewed because of all the walking.  It must still be late last night.  I had to just keep going.

I felt somehow emotionally numb now.

I saw more of the shadows.  This time, there was one on the front of what I guessed was a warehouse, across the street from me.  Like the last one, his arms were folded in front of him, and the shadow was very large, maybe eighteen feet or so.  A second one walked up to the first;  stopped, and folded his arms.

I watched them, they remained motionless.

After several minutes, they both walked away.

I was hungry and thirsty.  I needed to relieve myself badly.  I hid myself the best I could behind a building and amid some large shrubs.  I cleaned up afterwards using my underwear, which I then threw away.

I must be going crazy, I must be becoming mentally unhinged, I thought to myself.  I was frightened at how easy this thought was to believe, but it was the only thing which could explain my utter lack of time-sense.  I felt like I had been walking all day since my nap, but it was still pitch-black, and nothing had opened.  Across the street was a building with a fairly nice office upstairs, wood-panelled walls, clean-looking;  lit by long overhead bulbs.  Somehow it filled me with the most painful sense of loneliness I had ever experienced.  I even started to cry, a little.  I wanted to be in there, I wanted to be somewhere nice, I wanted to be somewhere human.

I sat there a while, just looking in.  There was nobody there.

When I walked on, the streetlight seemed as sharp as knives.  Cruel, the way losing an arm in a machine would be cruel.  Cruelty without a villain.

There was an old wooden building in very poor shape.  Searching around it I found a hinged window which didn't look quite closed.  Pushing it, it eventually gave, with a terrifyingly loud shriek, and opened.  I wrestled my way over the windowsill and inside.

My eyes slowly began to pick up details in the darkness inside.  There was a dirt floor, and a large machine inside.  A printing press, I think.  The thing was thickly cased in rust.  No electrical power to it.  There were crates along the wall of this shack.

At first I felt relieved, protected, to be out of the street.  But then I started to wonder;  there were other doors in the place, what if someone else were in here?  In that sense I felt even more exposed than in the street.

But I was very tired.  I really felt like I had been walking all day since the nap.  My time-sense was obviously fucked.  I would sleep in here, and when I woke up it would be morning and my brain would be back to normal.

I curled in as close to the crates as possible, for concealment, and pulled my arms inside my jacket to use it as sort of a blanket.  I tried to get my head at an angle where my shoulder would more or less support it.

Looking around one last time for signs that I wasn't alone, I pursued sleep.  I imagined myself to be sinking into an endless lake of breathable water, floating and sinking without friction or weight.  Soon, I was out.

I slept fitfully, dreaming angry shouting dreams;  waking up in a haze periodically because of the cold or the hardness of the ground;  then I very definitely slipped into the deeper phases of sleep.

I woke up disoriented and confused.  The first thing I noticed was that I had definitely gotten a full sleep.  I was bruised, stiff and cold on the ground side, but my brain had definitely gotten whatever it is that brains get from a full night of sleep.  The next thing I noticed was the lurid angle of the streetlight from the street-side window, and the pitch-black night outside.

For a minute I just wanted to cry.  Do you remember, when you were a child, seven or eight years old, how when something really bad happened or you got lost or you did something you knew you were going to be punished for, it really did feel like the world was going to come to an end, like life was a kind of hell and would only get worse?  It just doesn't happen when you get older, you grow out of it.  But now that was how I felt;  I had grown back into it.  It was still night.  Time did not seem to be passing.  I had slept through the night and awoken to the night.  Something was broken, something I didn't understand.

I walked back into the dark street, utterly bereft of purpose.

For a moment I thought I could look for the moon, and get some kind of bearings from it's angle in the sky.  So I looked up.  I find it difficult to explain what happened next.

Imagine you look up in the sky, and there is a hawk the size of a jet airplane swooping down on you.  It felt like that.  I was filled instantly with an indescribable panic.  I sat down on the sidewalk, covered my head with my arms and tried not to even think about looking up.  I could feel the sky roaring down at me.  Where do you hide from the sky?

Across the street, a shadow eighteen feet tall walked to the center of the building across for me, then stopped and folded it's arms.  A second one joined it, slightly to the left of the first.  After a minute or so, they unfolded their arms and walked away again.

I've been walking for days now, you see.  I've stopped trying to look up, and the shadows appear more often.

I don't understand this at all.

© 1999 Joe Cosby
dedicated to the homeless everywhere