Tacoma never won many beauty contests. My first memory of the place involves a nasty stench. The Tacoma Aroma wafted through my family’s car as we drove past the port with it’s smokestacks spewing the stench of I don’t know what. The smell rolled out from any number of smelters. It probably damaged my growing lungs.
Tacoma
oozed with factories and shipping lanes ever since the Europeans came to the area. The EPA targeted Commencement Bay and surrounding ares as Super Fund Sites, meaning they needed extra dollars to clean up the mess we’ve made here in past decades.
Later I remember the shootings on the Hill Top and the fear of going downtown at all. Even today, I’ll get glimpses of those old days with tightness in my chest as I wonder if someone might shoot me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gangs still roam here, and I see the sadness of poverty on the streets in the people bent over, blankets held over their heads.
But over the past few years I have found a strange emotion filling me whenever I drive into the city on my morning commute or to go to the zoo with my children. It feels like looking at a loved one with all of her wrinkles and flaws and not caring one whit about them. It feels like being married to someone and, even though he sometimes drives me crazy by putting things in the wrong place or telling the same story for the hundred millionth time, loving the very essence of his being. I didn’t ever expect to feel this way about a place. And certainly not about Tacoma. But I do.
Growing up I couldn’t wait to leave my home. I longed for adventure in other cities and countries. I went on a mission trip to Ciudad Juarez, lived in San Francisco for a summer, worked in Germany in a hotel and taught English for a time in China. I loved to travel and still feel the thrill of the airport even with all of its lines and security. But every time I go, I think of what I am missing at home. A part of me feels empty and sad without my ‘place.’
Maybe this has to do with all the people I’ve loved in Tacoma even in the city’s dark times.
My father grew up in Tacoma on Ash Street off of 19th and Sprague. I can’t see a place in Tacoma without thinking of something I did with him or some story he told me like playing hookey when he was 10 and having the News Tribune take his picture at Hoodlum Lake – a place I lived across the street from as an adult. Here’s the picture of him and his friends on their raft. The newspaper photographer caught them, and the boys got in trouble for skipping school.
As I grew up, we visited my grandparents’ home in North Tacoma, taking the Union Avenue exit off of Highway 16 for as long as I can remember. What’s not to love about a city where I played in a house with a candy dish full of M&M’s, a basement with slide-worthy stairs, a laundry chute and a toy chest?
For 17 years I have worked at Bates Technical College in Tacoma. Most of those years I worked downtown next to the city jail, county courthouse and local food bank. I’ve certainly learned more about Tacoma’s wrinkles from my morning commute and from the night classes I’ve taught in the neighborhood. But I’ve also met students at this school that live in my memory and colleagues that sometimes feel closer than family. One teacher held my hand just before my son was born and brought me the baby shower gifts I had missed at work because my oldest decided to be born early.
And while I’ve been busy living my life, Tacoma has been busy reinventing itself. Museums sprouted downtown and the LeMay museum grew up next to the Tacoma Dome. The Sounder brought commuters and everywhere I look, art springs up. Even on the sides of old houses like this:
Many of the old smokestacks came down. They’ve cleaned up the arsenic in the soil of Ruston and places like the Children’s Museum make Tacoma an attraction rather than repelling visitors. Even the stench is gone. It lives the memories of we middle aged locals, but no one holds their noses while passing on I-5 any more.
It surprises me to feel this love of place. I always saw myself as a wanderer but maybe that was never true. I spent years thinking I needed to travel to find myself. Instead, when I sunk my roots in the earth of my home, I found myself.
I still want to travel. My soul loved all the places I’ve been and longs for more. But I don’t want to leave this home with all of her wrinkles and crazy stories, either. I count myself lucky to live here, to have students from all over the world and to travel now and then, knowing The City of Destiny waits for me when I get back. And sometimes, like last June, I go to the car museum at night, and I see her beauty reflecting my love back.
