Last weekend, my two daughters and I caught the light rail in Shoreline and rode it down into the belly of Seattle.

I love taking them through the city. The trains are crowded with every type of person and I always feel both protective and proud. I grew up in a rural part of northern California so country-bumpkin I’m embarrassed to say its name out loud, so maybe that’s why the city still dazzles me. I hardly talk to my girls when we’re tromping through it because selfishly, I want to take it all in on my own terms. I try to walk a few paces ahead, buzzing with the sights and sounds, hoping they’re soaking it up too.

We circled our way up from the underground tunnel to the tree line and onto the monorail. We wandered through Seattle Center in a burst of perfect early-fall sunlight. We stopped for a single photograph of the day: my ten-year-old in her dress, standing at the edge of the International Fountain. We hurried on to catch a matinee at Seattle Rep of The Play That Goes Wrong.

Then, like a total maniac, before the show, just as the lights went out, I found myself crying. Moms are so weird! But I was just happy to be there with everyone else (the show was sold out) crammed into those little padded seats to watch, in this case, a bunch of actors trip and fall, spit water all over each other, and flub lines while the set literally collapses around them. I managed, in the loosest sense of the word, to pull it together. Luckily it was dark, so I could laugh-cry through the whole thing, sneaking glances at my daughters to make sure the jokes were landing. They were.

As we slowly shuffled out of the theater, I thought about the artists who keep the city humming—the dancers, actors, comedians, musicians, set designers, painters, muralists. They’re also bartenders and baristas, Uber drivers and nurses, construction workers, fishmongers, administrators. People working double shifts and side gigs, still carving out time to create. They show up even when the work is unstable, the pay thin, and the future uncertain. That’s the thing about art: it’s essential. It’s how we know ourselves and each other.

For me, the pandemic made that truth impossible to ignore. I wouldn’t have gotten through those terrifying and surreal years without books, movies, podcasts, late-night comedy, and Spotify. Art steadies me. Or maybe it mirrors me. Whatever I’m feeling—or searching to feel—I can count on it being expressed somewhere in some form and all I have to do is find it.

But art is more than that. Even more than a pretty day spent laughing at a silly play. It’s resistance. Self-expression is the opposite of control. A song, a story, a mural. They push back against the idea that people can be neatly managed. That’s why art gets censored. It refuses to behave.

Seattle knows this. When KOMO (owned by Sinclair) refused to air Jimmy Kimmel’s return to late night, Seattleites showed up outside the station in protest. And Cascade PBS just ended its written journalism, laying off 17 people and closing down Crosscut’s newsroom after Congress cut $3.5 million in federal funding. An 18-year run of thoughtful, deeply reported stories is gone.

On our way out of the city, we realized the northbound tunnel downtown had been shut down by a ventilation malfunction. About a hundred people were already gathered on the street waiting for shuttles that kept not arriving. A few said they’d been there forty minutes already. What a hassle. It was also quite hot out. We slipped away from the crowd and grabbed an Uber to the Northgate station, where light rail picked back up.

Norie Sato’s Unfurling a Gesture (The Nature of Persistence) on the Union Street Pedestrian Bridge is a steel fern layered with imagery of wings and ferns.

Photo courtesy of Friends of Waterfront Park

I stared at my reflection in the train window and noticed how my face has changed with age. I thought about how the city wears us down, changes us with its delays and detours, and how it lifts us up too. Art is part of that lift. It’s everywhere if you look—murals in transit tunnels, installations at Seattle Center, even the new waterfront overhaul comes with a flood of public art. On First Thursdays, people fill Pioneer Square not just for the art but to show off their own style. Festivals like WALK DONT RUN carry that same spirit across downtown.

I wanted to remember the day: the fountain, the covert crying, the laughter, the way everyone crowds to the front of the chubby little monorail for a 2-minute ride, the crush of people. A single trip into the city offers these fleeting, unplanned moments, our lives overlapping and blurring together in the big, glossy windows of public transportation.

Life is a sweaty, unpredictable reroute. The whole thing can fall down around us at any minute. Our footing is laughably unsteady. And art is how we hold on to our humanity, and to our democracy, in a world that too often tries to strip both away.