New history column debuts

By Lesley Guest

History is as vital as air to me. History sustains me; feeds me, inspires me.

I walk through the Alki breeze, watching for whales and sailboats, playing with my child and our friends, and spotting the yellow art studio. Instantly, I remember the old natatorium of the early 1930s which once stood in about the same location, where legions of Seattlites came to swim and to enjoy the sun.

I look. I pass by. I see what I need to see, and remember what I need to remember, and of course, nearly everything I know about history I know through the work of other writers, other voices, other tellers of stories. Often, I tell my son about what I see from the past, what I remember from the stories and voices of long ago as they surface into our cherished times together.

Now, thanks to Jack Mayne and the West Seattle Herald, I'll be learning our history brand new, as I seek out the voices which have not yet formed our awareness of West Seattle's history. I agree with Andrea Mercado, director of the Log House Museum when she says, "We give a lot of value to those who are more vocal about their history, and they are amazing carriers of their history, but they are still a small fraction of the people in this community. There are other people who carry history, and sometimes they minimize their importance to the greater picture."

Balance in all things is important, and this column seeks balance in scribing the way the history of our region is told. I welcome your comments, and your participation.

A little about me: after a childhood in Texas and Southern California, I fell in love with West Seattle. The amount of water surrounding Seattle reminds me of Venice, Italy, and with a father as a sailor and eight years of growing up on a warm Californian beach, I am eternally attracted to water and large sky.

I love the smell of the sea breeze which floats off Puget Sound, and the rush of seeing Mt. Rainier and the Olympics on a clear morning. The forests here are striking to me, a calm reminder of the power, presence and order of nature.

When I moved here in 1982, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were singing with voices which seemed to call me, as the expression of these men felt so honest. I already liked Seattle because it was the home of Frances Farmer, a woman I wrote a biography about because I was inspired by the strength of her beautiful spirit.

I have worked in almost all the newsrooms in and around Seattle, including the Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tacoma News Tribune and Bellevue's Journal American, where Jack Mayne gave me my first job.

Often in my work, I was graced with an assignment to write about an older person, or to interview a family after an older person had died. Because I'd known such presence and happiness with my own grandparents, especially my mom's healthy matriarchal family tree, I enjoyed these assignments very much. I became fascinated by stories, and by the voices that told them, recognizing pretty early that the only truth we know is our own point of view.

I lived in several places in Seattle with a man I'd met while backpacking in Ireland. He loved Seattle, too, and had grown up here since age 1. Eventually, we moved to a sea house on Beach Drive, and then another on Brace Point. There, I gave birth to our son. We married, and then divorced, and now I am working again in earnest as a writer, saturated by the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and the growing challenges we face as dwellers of a large city. On the sea, I began to research the water and the sea life, which came naturally after eight years living on the ocean.

To be a young reporter in such a vital, stunningly beautiful city was a dream to me, and many mentors came my way to

teach me the ways of the past, and to open up a more positive tomorrow. West Seattle's Native American past informs my quest here; I find such peace in the words of Chief Sealth - such as no one owns the birds; no one owns the sky - even while knowing scholars now say he didn't write or say these words at all.

Today, I create books. magazine articles and plays and spend all the time I can with my son SamAngelo, who is my greatest teacher and such a source of ever-renewing love.

We chose my son's school, Pathfinder, for its emphasis on Native American studies. I tutor middle school students there,

helping as they make they way into the world as writers and learners. I've also taught English to high school drop-outs at South Seattle Community College, and adapted my dance and movement studies into the classroom.

In all my work in newsrooms, writing features and reporting on the daily events of birth, death and celebration, and in my

work writing for magazines, I began to realize that no one else can tell the story of our lives - only we can.

I welcome the opportunity to tell your life story of West Seattle. I've enjoyed friendships with some of the elders here,

including a 99 year-old woman named Sally White who died not long ago. She lived next door to me on Beach Drive in a 124 year-old house with her 24 year-old cat. Her house is now a tall condominium. She told me and Matt stories about a minister who rowed in from one of the islands - probably Blake - and conducted marriage and birth ceremonies on her patio before she moved in. Her basement was an old log cabin, and she and her husband found certificates stored in between the wooden logs.

Recent history is history as well. As Mercado says: "History to me is yesterday. I am working on what kind of impression

will people have of today 100 years from now?" She is also recording the immigrants' experience, as in the immigrants who are moving into our region now from far-spreading places on the globe.

From the point of view of a scholar, or a scribe like myself, history is a source of ever-renewing information. History

changes constantly, as more and more voices speak, as more information rises, in exact divine right timing, to the surface. I learned from my own work researching a biography that in ways, that stories weight as much as fact when measuring the impact of history. Yes, we can say when someone was born, when someone died, and when they moved or signed up for school or began courting a major love or first held their grandchild or when they first met their neighbor or took their first job, but all the rest of it is story, and perhaps story is what matters most.

It's the sound of that voice which sifts through the facts like sand falling within an hour glass, collecting at the bottom at a

point of stillness and completion. I hope you'll enjoy our travels together here. May we speak to each other in a place of respect and even reverence for the extraordinary variety of life on earth, and the ever-unfolding wisdom within every story, and every voice.

Lesley Guest is a West Seattle freelance writer and may be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com