Tag Archives: rei

Environment, News, Transportation

Willie Weir on the Benefits of Extra-Cycling Perception

Willie Weir, noted Seattleite, columnist for Adventure Cyclist magazine, and KUOW commentator, gave a high-energy, hilarious, and ultimately moving presentation at REI tonight, reminding a group of several dozen Cascade Bike Club attendees why he loves the tastes, smells, sounds, touches, and sights of bicycle travel, even after 60,000 miles in the saddle.

Weir’s friend Larry Murante, a remarkable Seattle singer-songwriter, opened and closed the presentation with a live performance of a pair of original songs.

Weir, who has cycled around every corner of God’s green earth, is a triple threat: a trained actor, skilled photographer, and talented writer who has now published two volumes of cycling memoirs. A slim man, not particularly tall, he had the crowd in stitches recounting, in his “Why I love the tastes of bicycling” section, his tale of gorging for five hours at a $5 all-you-can-eat buffet somewhere in Wisconsin, then hoisting his distended belly back into the saddle, and—a few hours later—inveigling his way into more free food at a big family-reunion picnic he came across in a park.

When it came to the sights of bicycling, he shared a dazzling photograph he took of himself, his partner, and their bikes, reflected in the eyes of a smiling boy he met in Latin America. And he impressed many with the biggest life lesson he’s learned from bicycle travel: the importance of slowing down so that a fleeting touch can become embrace; how simply stopping to ask a stranger directions can turn into a week-long encounter, with memories that last a lifetime.

Travel can be local, too: Weir has a blog about “Life in Seattle without a car“–here he is rating the new Mountains-to-Sound Trail, which, incredibly, after Brian Fairbrother’s death, offers cyclists the choice of a downhill sidewalk that feeds to a set of stairs.

Bicycling is not only the most energy-efficient form of transportation yet devisedit focuses the senses, as Weir describes, in a way that offers a great lift to the human spirit. That may sound grandiose, but any seasoned bike traveler will say the equivalent. And although it’s easy for bike travelogues to deal in clichés or stoop to bathos, Weir, who’s an old pro at storytelling, managed to remind everyone in the room why they love riding a bike.

Many thanks to Cascade Bike Club and to REI for offering the 2011/12 Cascade Presentations series, guaranteed to whet any Seattle cyclist’s appetite for adventure and the thrill of the open road.

News, Politics

Home of REI, Seattle Wrestles With Urban Tent Cities

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Slightlynorth found this encampment under the West Seattle Bridge, and dropped it into our Flickr pool.

Seattle-based outdoor outfitter REI has a logo that includes two mountain peaks that could also double as tents, pitched on top of its logotype. Camping outdoors is a symbol of autonomy, self-sufficiency, living close to nature.

But camping outdoors in Seattle is a civic headache that’s become chronic as the recession’s effects drag on. The longer it takes the city’s leaders to decide how best to help the homeless families who aren’t well-served by shelters, or homeless adults who bridle at shelter rules and regulations they have little input on, the more entrenched a nomadic tent-city lifestyle becomes.

Last week, just as Mayor McGinn and City Council members Nick Licata and Mike O’Brien announced one practical and one policy fix–proposing the ongoing use of the Lake City’s old Fire Station 39 structure as a shelter, and passing an ordinance to let churches host encampments on their own recognizance, as it were, “while providing standards and guidelines for hosts and peace of mind for neighbors”–Nickelsville moved back to West Seattle, saying they were tired of being strung along by the city. From their site:

Last May, 2010 we were advised to give the new Mayor a chance. Last August the Mayor’s Encampment Panel got started and recommended giving us a permanent site. 7 months ago we were told that the Sunny Jim site would be ready in 5 months. Now Council President Conlin says he’ll decide what to do by the fall. We think this fall Council President Conlin will say maybe something will be ready next spring.

You can sympathize with the residents of Nickelsville–they were promised a semi-permanent location south of downtown (SoDo). Because of mild industrial-use contamination at the site, though, readying the location for human habitation was going to cost money, and the City Council (not unwisely) stopped to reflect whether the money might be better spent on, perhaps, rental vouchers, rather than a homeless campground.

On the other hand, this is a stunningly obvious solution, and yet Nickelsville has been tramping around since fall of 2008. So some part of this is not that simple. At issue is the homeless activism behind Nickelsville’s existence–you get the sense that in their view, they are a community looking for a home, whereas government sees a social ill that needs to be ended. (It should be noted that while Nickelsville is a tent city, not all tent cities argue Nickelsville’s brand of self-determination.)

There’s public resistance to “institutionalizing homelessness” if the city or county creates a permanent encampment (which has lead to linguistic contortions such as a “semi-permanent home”)–or even rents housing.

But the homeless know that programs end, whether or not homelessness has, so the alternative is to institutionalize urban nomadism, which, in the absence of productive reasons to move, can become the self-fulfilling purpose of tent city life. Instead of a barren plain of joblessness and homelessness stretching into the future, the view is broken up by quarterly relocations that give everyone something to do. This is the most important facet of a tent city–its self-organization is evidence that its inhabitants are capable of looking after themselves in ways that many other homeless people are not.

It’s a fact of history that Seattle’s Hoovervilles (which sprang up during the Depression in the SoDo area, ironically enough) were difficult as a blackberry patch to get rid off, even when the economy began to improve. The shacks were burnt down, and popped back up, just as today “homeless sweeps” often raze illegal encampments, trashing tents and belongings.

Seattle’s largest Hooverville took up nine acres and lasted ten years, until 1941, when it was doused with kerosene and burnt to the ground. There was a war on, and the land was needed. There are many things you can learn from that history, but one salient lesson is that permanence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, not in city limits, anyway.

It’s a trying situation, but Seattle can’t tell Nickelsville what to do, really, until the group has something they don’t want to lose: a home. So far the city has been unwilling to risk making that offer, even if that would provide the foundation for future negotiations. Maybe the word “home” is simply too fraught with associations and expectations. A previous era generated the term “residence hotel,” which strains to sound posh. How about, after REI, a residence cooperative?