How did I come up with the idea of Secure, Washington?

Hoo boy, this might take some time! I think you’d first have to go back a few decades. Back to when Amy and I would make somewhat infrequent trips either to the Aberdeen/Hoquiam area to visit with family, or else to the Oregon beaches, where we’d pass Elma before turning south at Montesano to meet up with US 101. We’d look over at those two abandoned cooling towers and quip to each other, “That’s where they should put the criminals.”

I hired on with the phone company in 1978 (Amy also found a job there a few months after I did), and we both worked out of the downtown headquarters building. My job took me to places away from Seattle (Bellevue and then Renton) while Amy stayed put, but we both spent close to two decades working in the downtown core of the city. During lunch, we could walk about the area with few worries. To save money on parking, we parked for free at a business that my brother worked at several blocks away. Again, we never encountered anyone who was threatening to us, and we never had to navigate sidewalks filled with homeless encampments.

Fast forward to the spring and summer of 2018, when I first discovered that I had a cancerous tumor growing in my left upper leg. We were making numerous trips to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance clinic in the South Lake Union part of town, staying at their special “cancer hotel” about a mile away. One of our stays lasted for over a month while I was undergoing daily radiation treatments at the University of Washington Medical Center. What a zoo! We wouldn’t even venture out on foot to a restaurant about five blocks away. Nothing but homeless people, aggressive panhandlers, and crazy people everywhere you went. In other words, not the Downtown Seattle that we had worked in for so many years.

Then the local ABC affiliate KOMO News 4 put out an hour-long special titled Seattle is Dying in March of 2019. They followed up with a 90-minute special in late 2020 called The Fight for the Soul of Seattle. Both specials only reinforced what Amy and I had experienced firsthand.

After I had finished with my three-volume book about our big travel adventure in late September of 2022, I found myself looking for another project I could do during the winter months while I awaited spring and our daily yardwork activities. Anyway, it was during this slack time where my mind wandered a bit. I had the kernel of an idea of advocating for a “quarantine” type of city where the misfits would live, but I’m not an “activist.” Our car doesn’t have a single bumper sticker, our yard never hosts an election sign, and I never hang out at City Hall trying my hardest to have my opinion heard.

Plus, I’m over 70 years old and a sarcoma stage-four cancer survivor to boot! Never knowing whether this disease will make a curtain call in the future, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to take on writing my first fiction novel. But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Maybe I will never run for an elected spot or wave signs at passing cars, but if I could articulate my thoughts and ideas in a book, and if that book somehow caught on, then that would be my contribution to making our society a better one. Perhaps someone younger and with more of their future at stake than me would read what I wrote and run with my ideas. That’s why I included that snippet from Ten Years After’s I’d Love to Change the World song. I don’t know what to do, so I’ll leave it up to you. That is, I don’t know how to go about implementing what I am proposing in my book, so I’ll let someone else figure it out.