By the time I reached Pike Place Market, one of Seattle’s oldest farmer’s markets, overlooking the Puget Sound, it had been closed for two hours. It was my own fault. I’d been in Vancouver earlier in the day, up the Pacific coast, and held up in long queues at the US border. Now the market stalls were shuttered and the vendors had moved on. The fishmongers I’d been told to look out for, men in white aprons who lob about the day’s catch in a kind of market theatre, had long clocked off. It was 8pm on a Tuesday night, and the market had the feel of a neatly abandoned film set.
Nearby I found a Mexican restaurant named El Borracho and ordered a burrito at the bar. It came fat and heavy, loaded with soft, shredded pork. Ahead of me a basketball game was showing on a TV. A man plucking at tacos asked me who was playing.
“I’ve no idea,” I said.
It didn’t matter. The question was an icebreaker. He knew exactly who was playing: two college teams in an end-of-season tournament. An hour later we were still discussing the state of American sports. I learned about Seattle’s pro teams – the NFL powerhouse about to start the season, the middling MLB minnow – and its amateur college sides. I learned the names of players to follow and of those to ignore. In two hours I received zero sightseeing tipsand gleaned little about Seattle other than it rains here – really rains – and that the city’s inhabitants seem gripped by the state of its sports teams, which turned out to be learning a lot about Seattle. By the time I left, everybody at the bar was chipping in to the conversation. Discussion was becoming debate.
Sport is a popular topic of conversation in every north American city but in Seattle it’s different. Rosters, results, form, jersey colours – they make up the city’s identity as much as Starbucks, or grunge, or the walkable glass-and-steel downtown, or the city’s gobsmackingly beautiful lakes and bays and inlets. A city-wide fandom coloured my experience of Seattle until I flew home a couple of days later – though nobody could explain exactly why.
The morning after the burrito, I went for breakfast at Bakery Nouveau in Capitol Hill, a neighbourhood east of Seattle’s downtown whose streets are lined by cherry trees. On a tip, I bought a twice-baked almond croissant that turned out to be so deliciously, delicately flaky, the only way to eat it effectively was to chomp down quickly. For an hour, the bakery provided sporting respite. Outside, the fervour continued. Decals covered cars. Flags billowed from balconies. A large group in a local park all wore Seattle Mariners baseball jerseys, despite not playing baseball.
Capitol Hill was “cool”, friends had told me, and it’s true. In the 1990s, grunge had emerged not far away. The neighbourhood still has all the hallmarks of a trending locale: restaurants with clever organic menus, bars that stock natural wines, music venues with the right kind of dim light, a popular organic donut shop called Mighty-O. (Down the road from Bakery Nouveau was a cafe that dealt almost exclusively in hummus.) But “cool” in Seattle doesn’t exempt you from sports fanaticism.
And it wasn’t just Capitol Hill. Later, on my way to Pioneer Square, the centre of Seattle’s old town, where it all began for the city in the 1800s, I had to move out of the way of two men tossing a football across the street. (I escaped into The London Plane, a cafe and “floral workshop”, and bought a cappuccino.) Not far away, I passed an upmarket bakery that sold cakes emblazoned with team logos. Up the street at Pike Place Market – this time it was the middle of the day, and the market was heaving – I saw a girl in her 20s wearing a Seattle Seahawks backpack that was actually hand-knitted (it’s astonishing the spectrum of clothing locals will decorate with sporting badges.) And at the ferry terminal, which is within walking distance of two major sports arenas, I spotted a dad of two kitted out in the official merchandise of not one team but three.
I was on my way to Bainbridge Island, on the other side of Elliott Bay, to the west of the city. A few years ago it was named one of the best places to live in the US, for its views across the Puget Sound, its spits and bluffs and lagoons, its artisan wineries and its access to local hikes. Try the Waterfront Trail, which takes you along Eagle Harbor, the bay into which visitors arrive from Seattle by boat.
Did it offer an escape from sport? Almost, though not quite. In a local homewares store a young cashier told me of his deep-seated hatred for the Washington Huskies. He was a Washington State Cougars fan. The pair were local college rivals, and he was to enrol at Washington State next year, his partisan devotion pre-installed. I bought a gift for my wife and quickly moved on.
I’d been told to make the Bainbridge Island crossing mostly for the views it provides of Seattle from the water. On the return leg, sunlight illuminated sections of the city’s downtown, but mostly the white-capped mountains beyond it. (September is a good time to visit Seattle; the rain is rarer then than at most other times of the year.)
A barista at Elm Coffee Roasters, where I later stopped for another coffee (it’s good here), told me it was this dichotomy that he loved about Seattle. The city, for the market, the food, its liveable urban centre. And the mountains, never far away in most directions, for days-long hikes and the snow. He’d moved to Seattle from down the coast. That was a couple of years ago, as soon as he’d finished college, and still he wasn’t a sports fan. That might change.
Way to go
Virgin Atlantic flies from Heathrow to Seattle daily. Washington State Department of Transportation runs regular ferries between Seattle and Bainbridge Island. Tickets are $8.35 for a return (wsdot.wa.gov)
