À propos de Bothell

I HAVE no life
I HAVE NO HOME
That sux
NO HOPE
GET A LIFE
- graffiti exchange on bus stop at Bothell Park & Ride, December 2005

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Bothell, for a day or a lifetime.
- former Bothell city motto

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“Bothell’s been displaced.” That’s what a friend of mine observed Saturday night, while we attended a birthday party. He was noting how so many of our friends had moved from Bothell - the suburb where we had all grown up. Many have moved about 15 miles southwest along the shore of Lake Washington to Seattle’s University District, where the party was at.

It’s true - Bothell has been displaced. Of all my friends from high school, not a single one lives in Bothell any longer, if not all in the U District. But I think this is because Bothell is permanently displaced. People live in Bothell - 30,150 people says the 2000 census - but they hardly spend their lives there with any sense of place. It’s the kind of place you want to be free of, really. Even my mother, whose lived in the town for nearly thirty years, talks of plans to move elsewhere someday. Only her church, I think, keeps my parents in town.

Bothell may be famous for a sequence in the film Hype! - a documentary about the Seattle Grunge scene that I’ve only been told about - in which a former Bothell resident recalls how he and his teenage buds would deface Bothell’s official city sign to read: “Welcome to ___hell, for a day or a lifetime.” It’s an apt slogan, but to me, Bothell will always be known more for displacement, not defacement.

Bothell might also be recognizable as a reference in the song “Holding onto Water,” by one of Bothell’s many self-styled bards, Rocky Votolato: “Bothell is beautiful in the fall/ Days of my youth were not so long ago/ I learned things here that some men never see/ The lucky ones know exactly what I mean.”

Maybe I’m not one of the lucky ones, ‘cuz I’m not quite sure what Rocky’s getting at. When I think about my hometown, I don’t think of the seasons. I’m more stuck to the metaphor of Interstate 405 - the highway corridor that nearly every Bothell resident must commute to work on. In my own Bothell origin story, I imagine the Sammamish River as the I-405 of the 19th century. As the river steamboated lumberjacks from the mountains to Seattle and back again, Bothell was born as a place for room and board, beer and - here I’m simply speculating - Bothell brothels.

Then the suburb was born. White flight from urban-centers followed World War II, thanks to a new interstate highway system that connected places like Bothell, via commute, to where the jobs were at: the cities. Since US immigration laws were loosened up in the mid-1960s, Bothell’s demographic whiteness has been slowly shaded with a few faces of color.

But it still remains politically white, as white as the shocked face of Bothell High School’s Activities Coordinator when Michael Dixon told our school that Martin Luther King - whose birthday we were assembled to commemorate - had been assassinated with the help of the US government. Despite the controversy - or perhaps because of it - Dixon’s speech was probably the most concentrated truth I ever heard in high school.

I bring up this last anecdote because I think it bespeaks a certain attitude of the Bothellite towards the city of Seattle - the “urban” that exists so Bothell can be “suburban.” My guess is Dixon, a counselor at a Seattle highs school, had probably been chosen to represent the “urban” or “intercity” experience - which, in his case, included years as a Black Panther alongside his brother Aaron. Like Bothell High’s Activities Coordinator, I too projected a great deal onto Seattle, if in a different way - thinking so highly of myself and my political daring for taking weekly trips to give out free food (Food Not Bombs) or monthly trips to ride my bike (Critical Mass).

I’m reminded now of the same friend who made the comment about Bothell’s displacement at the party on Saturday night. He has long had a practice of pointing out with pride the very University District apartment he believes he was conceived in (though now he apparently has reason to believe the deed might have taken place in the hot-tub/private sex-den/spa “Tubs,” just down the street). I always thought this symbolized the desire we (former) suburbanites for the city, because it meant he was literally born from the City, not the ‘burbs.

We lived in Bothell “for a day,” and knowing what its like, we could never stand “a lifetime” there. Even the Bothell we once knew is disappearing - always new stores being built, new business parks, new condos, new everything. Even the sign reading “for a day or a lifetime,” forever the target of righteous vandals, has been torn down. In Bothell, nothing remains familiar. Suddenly flight runs in an opposite direction as young people head back to the cities.

The problem is, as we move back to the cities in hopes of finding what our hometowns lack - a culture we feel connected to and apart of - we risk bringing the evils of Bothell with us: high property values, politically white spaces, disinterest in our neighbors. Bothell has been displaced, but its a voluntary displacement. We move away because Bothell is boring, and not, for example, because our low-income housing is being razed.

Bothell is always on my mind because I must know where I come from to know where I’m going. And I’m not alone - wouldn’t you know, my friend-possibly-conceived-at-Tubs actually has a fascination with our hometown similar to my own. He even talks about getting “BOTHELL” tattooed on the inside of his lower lip.

He could be joking, but then he might be serious. To me, it’s both: it is funny how often I think about Bothell, because Bothell doesn’t deserve so much thought and consideration. Yet, I think of Bothell for valid reasons - namely, the need to be serious about my privileged origins and do what I can to struggle against the society that gives them to me and denies them to others.

So maybe Rocky’s right after all. Bothell is beautiful in the fall …