Mukilteo Musings

Everybody in Seattle is from someplace else!! It is common to ask at parties, "So where are you from?" Rare is the person over 40 who was actually born here. I enjoy going to events and listening to people speak and guessing their home of origin--even if people have been here over 20 years, a faint accent usually remains. I'm pretty good at it--maybe that is why my son is majoring in linguistics. Recently, I was at a birthday party for a friend and this man joined in a conversation; a slight something still there--yep, New York, I thought to myself. Sure enough within a couple of minutes his wife said something about her husband's family in New York. These people have lived here over 30 years.

Even though I am not originally from here just like everybody else, in a way, I feel entitled. There is actually a negative attitude toward more recent arrivals particularly from certain states but it seems if you reach the 20 year residency mark, you are considered practically native. Anyway, I feel entitled because in the beginning of the last century (the early 1900's) my grandfather made it here from England escaping the Dickens workhouses. He skipped out of properly checking in at Ellis Island so I believe he was (gasp) illegal. He and his brother managed to make their way across this country to Stevens Pass near here in the Cascade Mountains. My grandpa was the quintessential Washington pioneer. He tried to get land to farm; he tried to find gold; he worked for the railroad; he cooked; he was a fur trapper; he finally taught himself to be an electrician for the railroad and that took him to Montana. But he lived for 10 years up on Stevens Pass in various cabins where in the winter it snows 10 feet and where he was witness to an avalanche in 1910 that killed 100 people. My grandmother also escaped the workhouses of Victorian England and joined my grandpa up there in the wilderness--and she was not an outdoor girl. They were tough tough people and they too suffered discrimination for being English. They were married in Wenatchee, Washington. So somehow, I feel like I belong here.