Lost at Kent

I wrote this story recently as an exploration of my time at work. I won't give my place of employment. The events in this story are mostly true, though time in Kent, Washington has a way of shifting the mind, of shifting reality. Enjoy.

Kent, Washington: May 27^th, 2014.

I came here for a simple enough task: pick up some paper from some place, deliver some other paper to another, take whatever I have at the end of the day back to the warehouse that I'm stationed at. I'll admit that I wasn't exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of a long day in the Seattle area; it seems like every time that I come out this way on my deliveries I end up spending the better part of an entire day here. Once, the traffic outside of Everett on my return trip was so bad that I didn't get back to Bellingham until around 8pm. A twelve hour work day is hellish, but at least I was close enough to nature.

I'm not exactly the most outdoorsy type of guy. I mean, I can appreciate a good tree or hike or camping trip, but I don't exactly spend all of my time out of doors. Still, I enjoy at least seeing them nearby. The leaves piled up in the fall, the warmth of spring, the budding trees as prelude to summer. These are comforting reminders of nature, but they're not enough to be dangerous or overwhelming. Growing up in Alaska, I had to be vigilant often against bears, moose, or wolves, even within the vast city limits of Anchorage. In Bellingham, the most you'll see is the wayward deer, loping over a fence in an impressive bound. It's comfortable, it's safe, it's almost homely and interesting the way nature and civilization interact in that small town.

Which is why Kent—and similar suburban or commercial regions—distort me so greatly. There is a decent amount of grass, trees, air, but it is all so artificial; transplanted and cultivated as an afterthought, as beautification. As a way to try and make the resident forget where they are: in a vast sea, an seemingly endless flatland desert of corrugated metal.

I drive down 108^th Street. At least, I think that's what it is. Even the numbering of streets defies ordinary logic. 108^th Street shouldn't cross 58^th Street. At least make one an Avenue or a Boulevard or something to differentiate this absurd naming scheme. Instead of a means of tracking, a way to orientate yourself north/south or east/west or in any sort of reasonable direction, this has the effect of circulacity (is that a word??). You feel yourself being pulled deeper, deeper into this chasm of middle-industry.

Near the end of this road is my destination. Some bindery or envelope manufacturer or any number of similar commercial factories that have similar names and seem to serve similar purposes but are very very different I can assure you of that. It's miles down this street, maybe about 10 miles, on a street that has a 40 mph speed limit and a weird amount of traffic for 3:15pm and turn lanes that come out of nowhere and two left turn lanes into two different Taco Bells within seemingly minutes of each other. I've listened to at least three or four different songs and I couldn't even tell you how far I've gone in that time. The trees are all the same transplanted maples with the same green foliage and green fertilized grass surrounding it. They try to obfuscate the apparently more organic growth behind their green leaves: Taco Bells, Starbucks, Amcos and AM/PMs, the occasional McDonalds or Wendy's or Wal-Mart (all of which are surprisingly less common than the Taco Bells, at least in my memory), and the even more sparse small service business: an acupuncturist, tax assessor, or independent coffee shop to help you feel better about not supporting a massive coffee conglomerate.

All these service businesses have popped up to support the true resident of this wasteland: the commercial businesses. The Starbucks and the Taco Bell are like palm trees or cacti, they might help guide your way for a time and they are friendly reminders of other places, that there might be a way out after all, though you might offer them little regard, or even mild disdain, in any other setting outside of the vast desert of the commercial industry.

It is easy to get lost here. The real irony is that my saving grace: SIRI and the GPS on my phone, I would never escape this unnavigable plains, yet they are made in vast factory complexes much like these. Perhaps a comparison of a rocky hillock to the commercial steppe: both different sorts of inhospitable wastelands. Perhaps one has a little bit more flavor, however.

Somehow, I manage to make my way to a place called Seattle Envelope. The oddity that Seattle Envelope is located in what is officially a different place is not lost on me. I have envelopes for them, of course. It was made clear by my superiors that it is of the utmost urgency that three boxes, each containing different sorts of envelopes needs to get there with all due haste, so that they might receive their proper headings and be bound and folded in the proper ways. The thought that we might have the capital to do this in our own facilities does not even enter my head; something about these asphalt and concrete monuments to man's hubris has a way of browbeating such inane questions from one's mind. I have thought about offering my own contributions to the company: maybe I could give a fresh perspective, maybe I could try and offer improvements, learn from my superiors, try and get invested in my workplace and help nurture it, develop it, foster it into a company where we can coexist with one another and support one another and create a happy and long lasting relationship?

After all, isn't that what we're supposed to be all about here in America?

But fretfully, life isn't exactly that way. I know that I'm not the first to uncover this and I certainly won't be the other part of this cliché, so it's not exactly surprising. It doesn't really matter anyways. The company doesn't care about me, I don't really care about it, we both know that we're in it for the short term and only want what the other will be willing to relinquish. There is a certain comfort in this mutual animosity. You know what to expect.

I don't exactly know what to expect with Seattle Envelope. Well, okay, that's a lie. Every delivery is more or less the same, just with mild variations on the theme, a little spice to make sure I don't become a complete automaton. I show up, awkwardly wander around like some idiot who doesn't know what he's doing (this is only partially accurate. Most of the time I don't, but sometimes there is a certain safety in playing the fool in an unfamiliar situation. I learn the most about others by taking a step back and trying to see if they will take my hand in guidance or let me go in my faux-drift into the roil), eventually find someone to offer my delivery to, help unload it for them, get their signature (a process that requires their presence or effort not at all. Indeed, it would be much easier were I to simply forge it, leave the package, and move on with my life. It is well known that any pretenses about it getting to who it belongs to and employees knowing what belongs where is quantifiably and certifiably false. I suppose I'm only in it for the satisfying ritual of the tearing of the two pages from their staple, the punctuation that notes the end of our transaction.), and then proceed onto my next stop. Here and there a forklift has to be involved, as it will on my next stop when I must pick up some paper I had dropped at some other commercial sand grain earlier this very week. In any case, I give Seattle Envelope their boxes. I note that they are located directly down the hill from a federal detention center. There is a certain irony to this that I find particularly juicy, a little nugget of cactus fruit I extract a morsel of water from, to give me a half-smile of nourishment before I continue my expedition.

At around 4 o' clock I arrive to some other place to keep doing this same crap I've been doing all day. It's supposed to be my final stop before I battle the rush hour commute along I-405 and the exodus from Boeing and Microsoft along I-5 and make my long journey back to the office so I can offload all this junk and go home, fall into bed (possibly literally) and eat pizza and generally feel sorry for myself.¹ Well, it still is my final stop but I discover something else: They have another Thing that was originally scheduled to be picked up tomorrow, but it'll be ready in about a half hour if I don't mind waiting. I call my boss to confirm that this is cool, I mean of course I want to go home but hell what am I supposed to say? With my new orders, I ready myself for the long wait. The man I'm dealing with is friendly, at least. He says he's regretful that they don't really have anything to help me pass the time, but I'll make my own way. I go take a shit and use a bit of my phone's incredibly precious battery power.

I've found that my phone is probably the only thing that has kept me from quitting or driving off a bridge throughout my time working my current job. It's also possibly my most precious and watched resource during my work day. I have to have the music while I drive (seemingly every radio is broken in our vehicles) and I would be utterly lost without the GPS anyways. These are the precious droplets of water that keep me alive while in this desert. On the other hand, there are foes that steal my water away from me while I work: namely, the all-too-frequently calls from my boss qualifying some inane thing or another. Don't ask me why I need an update about how things have been getting out of the shipping department when I'm not even in the city; I couldn't explain you his logic even if I tried.

I take a bit of extra time to wash my hands and have a sip of water. That was about ten or fifteen minutes down, now what? I head back to the van and climb into the back. There's already one pallet we've loaded inside, but it's still a good fifteen minutes until the other, new one will be ready. I take a seat on the bed, sitting on some cardboard, and square myself into the doorframe. It's surprisingly comfortable, though perhaps it's just the notion that I'm getting paid my paltry wage for doing nothing at all in this moment. It wasn't as satisfying as when I was in the can, however.

There is a funny notion in the workplace of taking satisfaction out of doing nothing and getting paid for it. There are only a few variances on this that I understand, but for the most part it makes no sense to me. For example, using the bathroom on company time, especially if you're gonna be in there a while, is pretty awesome (aside from shitty toilet paper but whatever). It's something that's gotta be done, fuck them if they complain about it, and they usually won't. However, as in the above case, where I'm just stuck in some foreign city being idle, I'm effectively a prisoner. Sure, I get paid to sit and doze in the company van instead of doing real work, but sitting around and half-sleeping out in goddamn Kent isn't exactly what I would normally be doing at 5pm on a Thursday, so I don't see the appeal. I'd rather get my work done faster so I can come home and do the goofing off that I'd rather be doing, or at least be away from the concrete jungle and into the realm of electronic viewscreens of my own home.

After a while the guy comes out and tells me that this other paper is ready and we load it up into the truck and I finally take off for home. It feels like it's been an eternity since I left for Seattle when in actuality it's been a paltry six or seven hours. I turn on the newest episode of my favorite podcast, since it's Friday, and take the fight to the I-405 commuter traffic. This is the other trait about these commercial deserts that fascinates me. Even the most poor workers—namely, those at the Taco Tree and StarOasis—here must commute into the wasteland, and most drive their own vehicles into it; they are nomads riding their Buicks and Kias across the steppe to where their corrugated flock has been driven to. The hunting grounds. The commercial pastures.

Maybe my delay at that one place was a secret blessing: the traffic on the way back isn't terribly bad. I cruise out of Lynwood, Mill Creek, Everett at a decent 50mph until I'm finally able to reach lower traffic and go to 75mph. I make it back just about when the podcast is over. On my way back, I think about how I was very nearly trapped there, lost in the waves, the sand, the metal. Even SIRI is not infallible in that place. Once, she led me on a wild ride through several different streets after I accidentally turned too soon. Instead of telling me to turn my dumb ass around and make the correct turn, I got led for blocks and blocks to a whole separate complex, right next to my original destination. Of course, they were divided by a long out of use railroad track without road to connect them, so I was led to a parking lot where I could see my target, just out of my desperate reach. Of course, I didn't realize my folly until I was far too late, otherwise I would have told the machine to shut up and figured it out on my own. I have not quite been totally Enveloped by the layers of cogs and machines in that god-forsaken place.

I unload the stuff I picked up, I go home, I get a pizza, I lay in bed and watch Netflix and go to bed early. The process begins again the next day, though thankfully I'm not sent out to Seattle. These excursions into Kent are mercifully infrequent. Heaven forbid what my life were to become if I had to spend every day there.

That all being said, I would imagine that there is a special kind of person that might be able to navigate and chart the Kent Wastelands, much as the Bedouin Nomads in the Egyptian deserts. Brave men and women have successfully survived, even thrived, in the shifting sands. It is likely that it is much the same in this case as well. Tens of thousands of people live and work in that region, perhaps some even happily. There is an appreciable challenge to be found that life, of finding the hidden paths and discovering how best to move and survive in that realm, to the secret treasures that lay buried there.

I am planning on moving to Seattle this fall and need a job very badly. I'm hoping to try out new careers and explore new opportunities and options. Perhaps I will try my hand at the Kent Wasteland. Perhaps it will be my only option. Or perhaps there is actually a wealth of opportunity there that I have not fully considered.

I'd rather work in Fremont, though.

1If ever there was a purgatory manifest in real-life, it would be I-405 on a Friday afternoon. Should the reader ever consider an excursion to the concrete wasteland, consider a firearm or poison of some kind. Whether it should be used on either yourself or your fellow drivers, I leave that to your own interpretation.