“I want to circle ride the E line even though I have an apartment. Under fluorescent bus lighting I want to follow the circle riders as they sleep under thick coarse woolen blankets as they ride in the light and the warmth of the E Line to a hillside encampment, a Church run shelter or a Tiny House village”
Former names of Aurora Avenue, include names like Woodland Park Ave, 1915 - 1930, (Pacific Highway 1)/Highway 99, 1930 - 1969, even State Route 99.
I get on the E line at 3rd Avenue and Pike right outside from the McDonalds on the corner. This is perhaps one of Seattle's most racy bus stops. (That is until the recent shooting in which an innocent nice lady was killed and others were seriously hurt... now it has a formidable police presence…uh better late than....?) Activist, Comedian, Dick Gregory, in his many Youtube political talks would often assert that “ in order to change anything someone hasta die”. The 3rd and Pine shooting and the death of 50-year-old Tanya Jackson from a gunshot wound to the torso clearly illustrates the validity of his assertion.
But before the tragic shooting and SPD face-lift, the last time I was there,a young scruffy bearded Hispanic man was crouched in the doorway of an apartment building, moaning in agony over trying to mix his heroin with the water in the cooker, heat it up, suck it up into the needle and effectively shoot it in his vein all while the wind cold and rain are rushing about him in the busy pace of 3rd Avenue. I've never mainlined but watching him in crisis and distress made me feel fortunate that all though I have my addictions and assorted self-medications none of them are delivered via needle to the vein. I get the feeling you gotta do it just right or your dope gets wasted.
Facing this, the young man was very distressed about sucking it into the needle from the cooker in the rushing wind and rain without spilling it on the sidewalk pavement. As he crouched there fiddling and adjusting his apparatus and cursing the world the rain and himself his arm was bleeding in about 4 places where he had poked himself un-effectively.
At one point a legitimate visitor needed to occupy the small apartment doorway to ring the entry buzzer, in vain and ignored the visiting man had to reach around and over the addict just to access the panel. The visitor politely pleaded to be excused but the addict, focused on his needle, his arm and his cooker, barely budged an inch and remained intensely focused on his arm, his veins, his cooker and his needle and the operation of those tools to relieve his sickness.
An emaciated Black woman, with an angelic face sits in a borrowed Harborview Hospital wheelchair wearing blue and white striped hospital pj’s beneath a thick heavy blanket. She is almost always there 24 hours a day, with a lighter and piece of foil, either nodded out, smoking the heroin off the foil, or talking with other addicts about how to score some heroin. She is obviously very ill, in her self-medication there is a peace and resolve that conventional hospice settings just can’t offer. People have blankets and sleep at the bus stop despite it’s busy urban traffic. They slumber unaware and unconscious of all that surrounds them. Addicts share drugs and encourage and support one another, and I’m not talking about co-dependence I’m talking about support. Understand there is a comradery among street people,you do experience random acts of kindness, you do form real friendships, you do actually meet people you feel you can count on either as much or even more than the society of church folks, do gooders, and social service case managers. To the boosters, the junkies, the dealers, this street is either their home or workplace, we just happen to catch the bus there. As the formidable police mobile unit and biker presence has ramped up the regulars like the angelic heroin addict, the cute young earth shoe modern hippie white girl panhandler or the African discount cigarette salesman, these people gradually return and as they do the bikers standing nearby warn them “ keep moving you can’t hang out here”. But the police are ignored. This street is their home. It would be just like if just because someone was shot at your house you couldn’t stay there anymore. And every time you went home and put the key in the door, went inside and reclined in your lazy boy, a police officer came walking up in your living room and warned you: “ you can’t hang out here”. Well where can I go?
In this melting pot of Amazon employees, retail workers, street people, hustlers and the indigent everyone waits for the bus just as if none of all the activity that is going on around them is really happening.
Starting from this point, 3rd and Pine, you can look at the way someone is dressed, and by their clothing, race and accessories almost predict the stop they will get off at. The most exclusive and expense addresses tend to occur prior to crossing the Aurora Bridge. At the Galer and Lynn Street stops most of the well dressed urban professionals and higher level managers get off and head down the hill towards South Lake Union and their well appointed expensive condos or town homes.
On the other side of the bridge layed out beneath the eastern side of Lake Union we come to the North 46th Stop which services the Fremont neighborhood. The eclectic and trendy Fremont neighborhood with it’s hipster bars, eateries and music venues is so decidedly bourgeois liberal that in a central neighborhood community square the community hosts a giant statue of Lenin purchased from the former Soviet Union.
This is well established respectable people territory of liberal party tavern and bar goers in an artsy high end renters setting. At the Woodland Place N & N 65th St we are coming into the Phinney/Greenlake area also a traditional upper middle class homeowner type neighborhood and high end renters community. At North 65th Street we are coming to the end of the Greenlake area, which is another desirable address which just happens to be near Aurora Avenue, (a distinction all of these neighborhoods would rather not be associated with )
By Linden Ave N & N 72nd St we finish off with the Greenlake community so by now most all the folks with iphone 11's, and acr-teryx $500 down jackets have comfortably deboarded. From here on the bus gradually starts getting more brown, more homeless, more indigent, more poor white trash, and more criminal underclass. Seattle is a city that is divided up by class, irrespective of race. Liberal or conservative any normal white person would gladly accept a dinner invitation from Oprah!
