Seattle serves as the arrival point for a poetry-reading trip to Vancouver, placing the narrator between the familiar rituals of travel—an airport, a car, and a border queue—and the newly strange prospect of being paid to read his work. The stop is brief, but it makes visible the gap between his long experience of low-paid labor and his reluctant entry into the literary circuit.

Arrival and the reading arrangement

The Vancouver engagement is privately sponsored by Bart Mcintosh and pays $500, with airfare and lodging included. The plan is for the narrator to fly to Seattle, meet Mcintosh there, and drive across the border; afterward, he will fly from Vancouver to Los Angeles. The arrangement is presented as something the narrator does not entirely understand, though he agrees to go.

He arrives carrying a small suitcase with extra shirts, underwear, stockings, three or four books of poems, and typescripts of ten or twelve new poems, along with a toothbrush and toothpaste. The packed poems make the purpose of the journey tangible, while the compact, practical list keeps it far from the glamour of a literary tour.

Meeting Mcintosh and crossing the border

Mcintosh meets him in Seattle, and they set off in Mcintosh’s car. The drive is pleasant partly because neither man says much. The narrator prefers a privately sponsored reading to a university-sponsored one: he sees universities as wary of poets from outside respectable literary circles, even as their curiosity draws them to such writers.

At the border, about a hundred cars wait while guards take their time. They occasionally pull an old car out of line, but usually ask only one or two questions before waving travelers through. Mcintosh is anxious about the crossing; the narrator cannot understand why. When they get through, Mcintosh’s relieved response marks the end of the delay and clears the way to Vancouver.

Work, drink, and literary identity

The narrator drinks a double vodka-7 on the flight and places himself among salesmen and businessmen. The contrast sharpens his disbelief at the trip: after working like a mule for years at meaningless, low-paid jobs, he is now traveling to be paid for reading poetry. He calls the change ridiculous and says he has never been able to stop feeling how silly it seems. The journey is therefore not simply a professional opportunity; it confronts him with a new public role that he can accept without feeling at home in it.

That ambivalence is consistent with his broader self-description. He is drawn to drinking and to people outside conventional respectability, and he wants a soft, hazy existence in which he can be left alone; when drunk, however, he can become loud and uncontrolled. The paid reading itinerary does not resolve that division. Seattle is a passage into public literary work, while the narrator continues to regard the role with amused disbelief and to carry drink alongside his poems.

Narrative significance

Seattle’s importance lies in its function as a threshold rather than a destination. The city is where the narrator’s private bundle of poems meets the practical demands of sponsorship, travel, and border inspection. The quiet drive with Mcintosh contrasts with the long, slow queue, and both stand against the narrator’s more sweeping sense of the absurdity of being turned, late in a life of low-paid work, into a traveling poet. The crossing succeeds; the deeper unease about the role remains.