AS WE PAY OUR ANNUAL TRIBUTE to the city, we view it through the fresh lens of recent travel —and 3D glasses. I just returned from a tour of small towns in the Mississippi Delta, a place where the melancholy traces of the South’s rich culture and troubled history lie thick in the humid air. While Seattleites grieve nostalgically over the closing of Ballard’s Sunset Bowl, such cultural losses are multiplied many times over in the Delta. On a block of boarded-up storefronts a tiny blues museum clings hopefully to life. The Sun Records studio in Memphis, where visitors are treated to the sounds of young Elvis warbling a hillbilly song to his mama, feels frozen in the year 1954. Our own revolutionary record label Sub Pop, at age 20, not content to rest on its grungy laurels, still unleashes fresh, influential music on the rest of the country in the form of the Shins, Iron and Wine, and the Fleet Foxes.

In Clarksdale a folded tent card on the motel registration counter anticipated guests’ concerns: “Why is our water brown?” (Because the cyprus roots growing at the Mississippi’s edge discolor it.) It’s safe to drink, but eewww, gross. Around the corner from Memphis’s grand old Peabody Hotel at a touristy lunch spot, my coworker was so scandalized by the throwaway containers and plastic knives and forks she was put off her lunch. But here, we eco-geeks take our environmental conscientiousness as a given. Tap water flowing from our Cascade watersheds is so tasty and pristine the Coca-Cola Company is bottling and selling it. The UW law school has a pioneering environmental law clinic, a real-world training ground for future lawyers. We even use green methods to keep our lawns green—with natural fertilizers, natch.

I had gone to Memphis to attend the City and Regional Magazine Association annual conference, where Seattle Metropolitan won the organization’s highest honor, the Gold Medal for General Excellence. When the judges wrote, “_Seattle Metropolitan_ has quickly tapped into its namesake city’s confirmed ascent into the pantheon of America’s edgiest cities,” we took it as praise not just for the magazine but for our city, and as one more reason that this month, every month, we find ways to celebrate this place where possibility thrives, and where our own history is still unfolding before us.

Katherine Koberg

Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]