By Morf Morford, Tacoma Daily Index
Love, hate, denial or pure obfuscation: if you are from Tacoma, you know the feeling.
Tacoma is the kind of place you need to explain to outsiders. Even though you know you never could.
Most places, from New York City to Los Angeles, even Seattle, have a popularly agreed upon backstory and identity.
Not Tacoma.
If you are from Tacoma and happen to travel overseas, or even just across the country, the simple, near universal question, “Where are you from?” is, like everything related to Tacoma, a bit more complicated than usual.
We might find ourselves struggling to find any reference point the other person might know or relate to.
Describing ourselves as being from the “Seattle-area” is usually a good enough answer. And it’s half-true. But it doesn’t say anything.
Very few, if any, neighborhoods in or around Tacoma bear any resemblance to the densely-packed highways with strip malls, look-alike chain stores and massive apartment blocks on each side that seem to define most of King County outside of Seattle.
Tacoma, for better or worse, has many clearly defined (or even borderline isolated) neighborhoods.
Hills, ravines and freeways slice and dice our literal landscape and keep us from any kind of civic unity or identity.
Most cities have a semi-regular shape; something approximating a circle or square – usually with a city center at its central core. Even Seattle, with its irregular shoreline, is approximately rectangular with an urban core at its center. Not Tacoma.
A map of Tacoma looks more like a Rorschach Inkblot reject. Or like a massive spilled outpouring of volcanic goop – which is essentially what it is.
You had to be there…
Tacoma’s social atmosphere suits its physical landscape.
Tacoma is kind of like a continuous, complicated inside joke – one you either have to explain in excruciating detail or is dense with meaning that not everyone understands.
In a community on the scale of Tacoma, one is likely to know, grow up with, work with or live alongside people of all kinds of backgrounds, beliefs and interests.
Among my friends for example, I have large-game bow-hunters, vigilant vegans, evangelists, neo-pagans, tech nerds and phobics, political liberals, conservatives, anarchists, agnostics and abstainers.
Tacoma as a state of mind
What defines Tacoma best might be that it is a state of mind.
You may have heard of Billy Joel’s song “New York state of mind”. It could be described as something like a nostalgic, even idyllic love song to “The Big Apple”.
But it’s a bit ambiguous. There’s a shade of being anonymous, even lost in the crowd in that song.
And that’s kind of what a love song to Tacoma would sound like – ambiguous, almost haunted and wistful with something like a sigh of resignation – with an edge of the unpredictable, quasi-impossible/unbelievable.
New York may hold a Chinatown or a Riverside or even a Broadway and Manhattan, but Tacoma has something else.
As always, it’s difficult to define or explain.
Pick almost any language and you are likely to see it somewhere in or around Tacoma.
From Korean to German to Spanish to Ukrainian to Cambodian to Thai to a dozen more, you can see characters, symbols and phrases (not to mention menu items) in almost any language – sometimes on the same store front.
Tacoma has a few “centers” or districts that are loosely defined, but for the most part, Tacoma was designed, and apparently intended for, cars and traffic.
But to really experience Tacoma, you need to get out of your car. Passing by won’t tell you anything about what is available. Tacoma is dense with places that deserve a closer look.
You might think you know a place if you have driven by it more times than you could count. But Tacoma is one of those places where first impressions might be deceiving.
And some places are an acquired taste, with a tone or attitude or menu that you won’t find anywhere else. Walking, I am convinced, is the best way to get to know the pulse and personality of a place.
But walking in Tacoma is a precarious venture for almost any of us. In almost any area. At almost any time.
Alter-egos and prophets
Tacoma has more than its share of those with a message or a platform that they seem to be making up as they go along.
From Beautiful Angle (beautifulangle.com) posters, to Monkeyshines to yarn-bombers, we have unofficial, if not anonymous (and a bit eccentric) voices contributing to our civic discourse.
Other cities might feature established, even formal theater or art districts, and Tacoma has that.
But we also have an art scene off and running free in various corners and unexpected places.
Spontaneous, event or cause-centered groups can emerge, act and evaporate in ways that standard civic organizations never could.
Tacoma, with its many large homes, industrial warehouses, fairly isolated neighborhoods and uneven terrain, lends itself to independent, improvisational acts of expression, creativity, and sometimes, defiance.
In many ways, Tacoma is like those unassuming storefronts that hold wonders beyond description. You’ll never know what is there until you take a second look.
