Many people, even some university academics, fail to see the connection between a cracked peppermill turkey breast, pepper jack cheese, crispy bacon, red and green pepper, plum tomato, garlic pesto sough dough sandwich and the playwright William Shakespeare.
Also known as a Space Needle Special this delicacy is available from the hands of the Korean manager of the Alki Urban Market; a small and easily missed grocery store, itself sandwiched between residential property and the All The Best pet care centre.
It’s an almost perfect American deli in miniature; a central aisle of wines from around the world with plenty from the U.S.A, a wall of glass fronted cooling units stocked with beers Alaskan to Mexican, fruit juices and smoothies, a rack of assorted useful items ranging from playing cards to nail files, a candy and chocolate section, a freezer of gourmet ice cream flavours (including peanut butter) and a coffee station that also offers brownies.
There is even stool seating at the window that allows you to gorge yourself as you watch the unfolding sunset and they sell homemade Ginger Lemonade!
Now, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not only Shakespeare’s shortest play but also one that has a part for a dog.
It would be perfect if the dog’s name were Sam as this morning, like most mornings here in Seattle, I was woken by the neighbour’s mutt - Sam- who starts the day early with a yelp in the communal yard.
It would also have been perfect if the writer had managed to reduce the cast to two in keeping with the title. However, the play’s theme is FRIENDSHIP and INFIDELITY and although there is neither room in today’s tale for the fact that it was the first of his plays to include a cross-dressing woman nor canine irritation (despite All The Best), we should see two guys, friendship and some sort of betrayal in here somewhere.
A hundred yards at most, west of the Alki Deli, just across the road from the Cactus Restaurant – that serves excellent “flavours of Mexico and the Southwest” – you will find a plaque on the wall honouring two men, most probably friends, who built a log cabin at Alki Point two and a half hundred years after Shakespeare’s play first came to light.
Of course it wasn’t Alki Point at the time, the local Duwamish tribe knew it as Prairie Point, though this of course is a translation from the language that they used – Lusthootseed. The two “gentlemen” were David Denny and his friend (at least I suppose that they liked each other) Lee Terry.
David stopped hammering long enough to send a letter to his brother Arthur A. Denny, later to become Seattle’s first postmaster, who was kicking his heels down the coast in Portland having been enticed west by the Donation Claim Act of 1850 that offered 320 acres to any man prepared to settle (twice as much to a married couple).
The letter told his brother to hurry so with his wife and children and four other families booked passage on the good ship Exact, and on the 13th November 1851 the settlers disembarked.
Thus began modern day Seattle.
What the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes and their Chief – Seattle – thought about that is probably best left unsaid though according to the monument that marks the spot in this part of West Seattle (across the road from the aforementioned plaque) the local tribes helped them through the first year, though they were well betrayed later on for this aid. Not least by the unfulfilled promise of a substantial reservation and the naming of the city after the local Chief in return for abandoning their aboriginal rights to the land which eventually constituted the city of Seattle across the bay.
The settlers quickly realised that if their dream of a metropolis was to be achieved then they would have to relocate to the east side where the water was deep enough to park bigger boats and so they moved out six months later and joined settlers on the eastern shore.
Alki was a word the settlers had added to their original intended name, New York - in honour of the east coast city and the hope they held that one day their settlement would grow just as crazy. The word was Pacific Northwest trader jargon, itself based on a local dialect, that meant ‘eventually” or “by and by”.
Today Alki Beach is; houses and shops, a few cars, rollerblades and skateboards, pushchair joggers, pedestrians, sand and beach volley ball, washed up logs, dried seaweed-stones-feathers and bark, sand, stones, sand again, seaweed and sea - in that order.
It’s a place to sit and watch the sunset, walk at low tide looking for crabs, sit at the restaurant terrace, buy an ice cream, sit in a bar or swim in the icy water.
You can reserve a picnic table, light a barbeque, listen to a busker meditate and of course eat a cracked peppermill turkey breast, pepper jack cheese, crispy bacon, red and green pepper, plum tomato, garlic pesto sough dough sandwich.
All this is compressed in a half-mile strip and accessible from downtown by a car or bus ride across west seattle Bridge or better still by taking the water taxi from the downtown ferry terminal and then walking.
The original native inhabitants lived from Salmon they hunted in the Puget Sound, Clams and berries that they harvested. They built shelters out of Cattail and used the bark of cedar trees for just about everything. All that remains of this today are the clams for sale in one of the two fish restaurants, the Salmon that still thrive in the water and the fresh pressed blackberry juice on sale in the Alki Urban Market.
The oldest remaining structure dates from 1904, now a log cabin restaurant.
On the same side street you will find the Log Cabin Museum, dating from a similar time.
It is the smallest museum I have visited but has 100 labelled items pertaining to the history of the area, not least a copy of David Denny’s letter that seems to have set in motion an uncontrollable alteration of what was once a beautiful part of the world. They will also give you a printed guide to the Alki History Trail, a 7 mile tour of the area which even take you to the Spirit Boulder that the natives avoided looking at as it could twist their bodies into knots.
Though it was those two gentlemen - David and Lee - that really messed things up for them in the end.
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