I ONCE HEARD a story about a quirky psychiatrist who, no matter what perturbation afflicted his clients, always had the same prescription: Imagine floating above yourself, watching your life and all that upsets you transpiring below. From that perspective, your troubles seem transient, manageable or just not that important.
 

	Seattle loves parties, and Seafair is one of its abiding favorites. It's a noisy, all-purpose summer fling featuring hydroplane races that draw a festive flotilla to Lake Washington for the annual run on the water and show in the air, courtesy of the Navy's Blue Angels.

Goodness knows, Seattle could have used a dose of that advice as the millennium turned. Three years ago, it was at the top of the world. For more than two decades, everyone everywhere else had been telling us how beautiful, civilized, wild or wonderful our city was.

From Ecotopia and Eddie Bauer in the '70s to espresso and Microserf chic in the '80s to grunge rock, house-price sticker shock and 22-year-old cyber-millionaires in the '90s, Seattle set the pace. It was the city that could do no wrong, a capital of refined but conscientious lifestyle, progressive but sensible politics, future-forward technology and postindustrial prosperity. We who'd lived here long enough to remember when houses were cheap and freeways rarely jammed viewed this glamorous boom uneasily. It was like discovering your high-school sweetie was now the most glamorous model on the fashion runways: a sort of distinction, certainly, but hardly a comforting one.

And then, fast as the December night falls in these high latitudes, the bottom fell out and the top blew off. It began with what was supposed to be a crowning triumph — a huge, historic gathering for the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization, touted as launching a new world economic order — to this ever-so-international capital of the new world economy. But another, even larger contingent showed up: 50,000 protesters. For five days our cozy town felt like another city — Beirut, perhaps.
 

Changing Visions A region shaped by adventurers and innovators is once again undergoing great change. In an upcoming series, Pacific Northwest magazine will explore the forces of that change and its significance to our future as a community. Look for the first of these occasional installments next month.

A month later, just as we were about to celebrate the new millennium with a grand party under the Space Needle, a would-be terrorist was caught with a trunk full of high explosives. Our mayor, Paul Schell, prudently canceled the party. We never forgave him. (One thing to know about Seattleites: We may not seem like party animals, but we take our festivities seriously. Our calendar is chock-a-block with festivals and fairs and one-of-a-kind events like Bumbershoot.)

But party time was over. A federal court moved to break up Microsoft, the anchor of Seattle's new economy. The high-tech and dot-com stock balloon popped.

The next February, the annual Fat Tuesday revel in the antique Pioneer Square district turned into a riot. A wayward truck smashed the ornate pergola that covered Pioneer Square itself. An earthquake shook the town like a dog shakes a rat. Boeing, the state's biggest business, announced in March it was moving its headquarters to flatland Chicago. By fall of 2001, Washington had the highest unemployment in the nation.

If ever a town needed a trip to the psychiatrist's couch, surely Seattle did then. Rise up, that quirky psychiatrist would have whispered. Rise up and see how things look from up there. And, whaddaya know, we did.

The year 2001 was given to reflection anyway. It marked the 150th anniversary of the first European-American settlement here where other tribes had lived for millennia. We looked back on the other upheavals of a roller-coaster history: the Native uprising that boded to annihilate the village in 1855; the fire that leveled the city in 1889; the earthquakes; the panics, depressions and failed railroad schemes that threatened to starve it. We realized we'd been here before and come through it just fine; this is a town that falls fast and rises even faster.

In 1935, the Lake Union plant of the Seattle Gas Co. was a going concern. But the old coal-gasification operation raised concerns about pollution and became obsolete. New topsoil was spread over the toxic residues and Gas Works Park was created. Now it's a mecca for picnickers, kite flyers and Fourth of July fireworks fans.

 

	In 1935 as now, Yesler Way and "Skid Road" descend past the Smith Tower (left, rear) and Pioneer Square to the waterfront. The Alaskan Way Viaduct (Highway 99) severed downtown from the waterfront, and now there's talk of tearing down the old roadway and reuniting the city with its shoreline.

PERSPECTIVE COMES naturally in Seattle. In the most literal sense, you rise above it all almost every day in our town. However you cross the city, you are confronted by its sheer verticality. Even on land, you find yourself soaring on top of the world — or toiling up a Sisyphean hill to get there. When the last glaciers tail-dragged their way through here at the end of the last Ice Age, they gouged out the terrain that marks off our lives today — the long trenches of Puget Sound and the Lake Washington basin and the shorter ridges and valleys along which, around which, and sometimes through which the city has grown. We should thank these natural bulldozers for hemming us in between two walls of water; in cityscapes as in art, limitation is inspiration and confinement nurtures creation. Look what freedom gets you: Dallas. From Hong Kong to Rio, the most beautiful cities are those that must nip, tuck, squeeze and stretch to fit into tortured landforms.

Maybe it was the hills, or the looming trees, that made the early Seattleites look upward. Maybe it was the jagged Cascades and Olympics. Or maybe it was outrageously outsized Tahomah, with more net gain in height than any other peak in 48 states, that drove them to it. Confronted by so much upward-climbing nature, Seattle's early overachievers hatched a fixed determination to knock nature down to size.

First they cut the trees. Once they'd scalped the hills, they considered how much easier it would be to build streetcars, skyscrapers and grand boulevards without them. And they embarked on what may have been the greatest bout of earth-flattening human hands have ever undertaken. Hills were sluiced into Elliott Bay and tidelands were filled. Then the canal-cutters joined Lake Washington to Lake Union and Lake Union to the Sound, with a pair of locks to ease the transition.

Seattle, it's been written, is a city that prizes modesty and restraint — a supposed legacy of the stolid Scandinavians who came west to cut the trees and build the town. But in their office buildings and other showpieces, Seattle's movers and shakers have always cut loose with the flamboyance, even hubris, befitting a New York of the West. They threw up buildings with all the abandon of their tree-felling predecessors, and decorated them like wedding cakes.

Up and down, and up again. For individuals, character may, as Thomas Hardy said, be fate. But for cities, topography is. So what fate has this landscape consigned us to? I suspect it's given us a special tolerance for risk and a capacity for dealing with complexity: A terrain that so intricately interweaves land and water and high ground and low is rife with complications and rich with possibilities.
 

In 1851, the women of the pioneering Denny Party wept in dismay when they stepped into the February drizzle at Alki Point. Today the West Seattle beach where European-American settlement began draws summertime strollers, sunbathers and skateboarders as well as diners and occasional drag racers.

In the late '80s and '90s the city became an ungodly mecca, drawing more pilgrims than ever: greenies seeking Ecotopia, rockers seeking the next hot sound, computer whizzes seeking the Next Big Thing, entrepreneurs seeking the next big score — and tourists seeking that picturesque market where the fishmongers throw the fish.

"Seattle" took on a very different meaning in the international argot following the WTO collisions, as a buzzword for Luddite resistance to the march of global capitalism. That rap harkened back to a conspicuous current in Seattle's history; this region has incubated an outsize share of radical reformers. This was the stronghold of the labor movement's most revolutionary vanguard, the Industrial Workers of the World.

At the same time, another current runs through Seattle's history: capitalism in its fullest flower. Perhaps it is the abiding sense of endless possibilities unleashed by our sea and mountain vistas. Maybe it's a certain type of dreamer drawn, along with all the rogues and screwballs, to the upper-left corner of the map. Again and again, fledgling Seattle businesses have revolutionized the way goods are made and, especially, sold worldwide. It was here that the founders of Costco and Amazon.com transformed the warehouse and online retail trades, that Bill Boeing's and Bill Gates' little start-ups turned esoteric technologies into commercial empires, and Starbucks stamped its brand on the cup of coffee the way Microsoft did on software. But in true Seattle fashion, we view our homegrown corporate giants with a certain ambivalence. We forever complained about Boeing's strong-arm legislative style, the boom-and-bust economy that the cyclical jet market brings. But oh, we howled when the Lazy B announced it would move.
 

			Seattle, it's been said, is a city that prizes reticence and restraint — a supposed legacy of the stolid Scandinavians who settled here. Until recent years, Seattle homes tended to suit that tone, even among the monied. Old wealth tucked itself away in tree-shrouded, gated enclaves such as The Highlands, home to Boeings and many other Seattle grandees.

For all our futuristic enthusiasms, Seattle is often obsessed with preservation. We can be downright zealous about recycling, of everything from landmarks to toxic dumps to garden scraps. Nevertheless, I've seen one landmark after another bite the wrecking ball with scarcely a whimper: the ornate Music Hall and dignified Seattle Concert Theater; the imposing Temple de Hirsch. . .

SEATTLE IS A YOUNG city with more than its share of ghosts. There are the ghosts of vanished communities: Japantown, along the south slope of First Hill, shattered by wartime relocation; Garlic Gulch, the Rainier Valley's Little Italy, fractured by an interstate highway and dispersed by assimilation. And there are the innumerable souls who fished and sang and made art along these shores and had no inkling of cities.

There is Chief Seattle himself, who while he lived gave voice to all the wraiths. He left behind a ghost story like no other — one of the most eloquent prophecies ever recorded. The words may be those of "Doc" Henry Smith, who set them into English and onto paper, but the hard-won wisdom is that of a chief who'd watched the newcomers overwhelm and subsume the place he cherished and the people he led: "And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth of the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe . . . At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone."

So tread lightly and treat the land softly. You never know who might be watching — from above, or even nearer.