0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 5/12)

Yet it was hard not to see that my customers at Microsoft were destined for wealth and success beyond the reach and imagination of your basic English major, and I felt sorely tempted again and again to apply for work there. I could see that it would be the end of the financial struggles that dogged my half-hearted business venture. Microsoft editorial jobs consisted mostly of checking grammar and punctuation in extremely straightforward prose—not a daunting task, except for the risk of death by boredom—and the payoff was potentially immense. I was always trying to talk myself into being interested, asking myself why I had such an adverse reaction to the idea of working there, gradually coming to suspect that my fear of the place stemmed from more than just wanting to spend time with my family. The thematically useless idea that Microsoft had no interest in hiring me has never occurred to me.

Erin had a way of timing her pronouncements to coincide in eerie ways with my preoccupations. I was sitting around the house one day, inwardly moaning about having to go out to Microsoft and all it represented, when she popped in, stood staring intently at me, and intoned: “Erin looked concernedly at her daddy. ‘You must go into the Dark Phoebus,’ she said.”

I was pondering my ambivalence with particular frenzy one day when I came walking out of the Microsoft building and fell prey to one of those timely memories that always occur to people who inhabit memoirs. I found myself recalling Doc Maynard, the hesitantly legendary settler here who gave Seattle both its name and its collective consciousness.

In 1850, unhappily married and mired in debt, Dr. David Maynard set off for California and its fabled gold rush. His wife Lydia and their two children stayed behind. On the way west, he fell in with a family headed for Puget Sound. The group was decimated by a cholera epidemic, and Maynard fell in love with one of the survivors—Catherine Broshears, who was widowed by the epidemic—and followed her to her brother’s home on south Puget Sound. The brother ran Maynard off when he learned he was married, and Maynard eventually made his way down to California. A friend there told him the real money to be made was back up in the Pacific Northwest, where a man could get rich cutting down trees and shipping the lumber to San Francisco, which was undergoing a massive construction boom. After returning to the Northwest, Maynard settled in Olympia—near the Broshears’ settlement—and promptly went broke trying to run a store. His habit of extending unlimited credit and selling goods at cost made him too popular with customers and too unpopular with competitors, one of whom finally persuaded him that he would do better up at New York-Alki.

The short story about Maynard from then on is that he laid claim to 640 acres of land that eventually would be worth $100 million, and frittered away all of it, dying more or less in poverty. The long story—told with mythic power and poignancy by Murray Morgan in Skid Road, was that Maynard was an epic dreamer undone by visionary tendencies, insufficient greed, ambition for everyone but himself, and drink. On the one hand, Maynard had great instincts: he changed the name New York-Alki to Seattle, rather than Duwamps, as the territorial legislature tried to do, because Seattle would sound more alluring to potential commercial developers; he gave some of his best waterfront land away to newcomer Henry Yesler so that Yesler could build the region’s first steam-powered lumber mill there—a move, Maynard knew, that would vault Seattle ahead of the other settlements of equal size along Puget Sound in the race to become the region’s leading city. He sold land and a fully equipped building for $10.00 to an itinerant blacksmith so that Seattle would have a resident one. He was the first settler to establish commercial ties with San Francisco and its money. Maynard dreamed big dreams for Seattle, and lived to see them more than realized largely because of the moves he made in the settlement’s early years.