by Megan Burbank
Last week, as I was driving home on Broad Street after a run along the waterfront, I came to an abrupt stop: A woman using a wheelchair had pushed herself into the roadway and wasn’t moving. It was a dangerous situation: The intersection is a busy one, and drivers in Belltown are often fast and inattentive. A man stood next to her, clearly a bystander, trying to talk to her. As I slowed to a complete stop beside them, straddling two lanes to give them space on the busy arterial, I rolled down my window.
“Are you OK? Do you need help?” I asked.
The man said yes.
I couldn’t linger in the roadway, but when I got home, I weighed my options: I could call 911, and risk sending cops into an already-tenuous situation. Or I could do nothing. Neither seemed like a great option, but that complexity is something I’m used to. I live in a city.
And contrary to what the votes of eight out of nine City Councilmembers would have you think, that ambiguity is part of living in a city, where our lives constantly bump against others’ in community, whether we like it or not, and where people in crisis, unhoused folks, sex workers, and people who use drugs — people all targeted by this week’s passage of SOAP and SODA banishment laws — are our neighbors. They are part of our community. And when someone is in crisis — or you simply don’t understand why their life doesn’t look like yours — it is nasty work to treat them as a problem to be disappeared. But perhaps for some of us, that’s easier than wrestling with the complexity of our own complicity in what they’re going through, and our own responsibility to help.
As for me, I think about it all the time. And usually, as was the case with the woman on Broad Street, I am rarely the first person to notice and care, even if it means sitting with my own conflicted emotional response.
Almost always, someone else is already there.
I will always remember walking to the bus stop one evening from my office when I lived in Portland and worked in Old Town Chinatown, a neighborhood known as much for its concentration of social services as tourists lining up at Voodoo Doughnut. As I made my way along Southwest Second Avenue to catch the bus back across the river to my apartment, I saw a man lying motionless on the pavement.
This wasn’t unusual — I often saw folks nodding off on my route to and from work, and never felt unsafe because of it — but I was worried this man wasn’t just passed out but possibly dead. I stopped, and looked at his chest to see if it was rising and falling, and it was then that I realized another woman, older than me and professionally dressed, probably also heading home from her office, was doing the same thing. Slowly, we watched until we were sure the man was breathing. She and I made eye contact. “He’s not dead,” she said, her relief mirroring my own.
Months ago, I heard a local radio host describe a similar scenario as if it were unusual. But I don’t consider this kind of momentary shared concern for a stranger’s survival all that abnormal. I consider it part of living in a city.
Two weeks ago, a pair of military jets terrorized an entire Seattle neighborhood when they buzzed a coffee shop and homes in Fremont en route to a planned flyover at the Huskies game.
I was sitting outside at that coffee shop when the planes flew over with such thunderous proximity that people near me dove under tables in fear. “I have PTSD!” one called out, explaining away his reaction. “Are you OK?” I asked. Someone else asked if he’d like a glass of water. We all looked at each other, some frustrated and some fearful, a moment of bumping against each other in community, united by an improbable situation made more tolerable by each other’s presence. It’s not always a bad thing.
In fact, in my experience, caring about other people you share space with never is, even if the context is jarring.
Last year, driving home from the Bremerton ferry after a reporting trip on the Olympic Peninsula, I saw a car stopped in the right lane on Alaskan Way. When I passed it I saw that there was a person in the roadway who’d been hit. I immediately pulled over.
I realized then that the car had been stopped in the roadway strategically, to keep the person who’d been hit safe. A bystander was already tending to them, and an ambulance was coming, its sirens already blaring into the quiet Seattle night.
When I drive up and down Aurora to go to Home Depot or my parents’ house or my preferred on-ramp to I-5, I often see sex workers walking the track, and especially when it’s one of those Pacific Northwest winter days, when the air is saturated with soft but persistent mist, and it feels like midnight at 4 p.m., I am grateful to mutual aid groups like the Green Light Project, who I know are out distributing hand warmers and snacks and peer support to human beings at work in a part of the city where sex workers have always labored visibly, their trade made more dangerous when it’s pushed into the shadows.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week, knowing that Gary Ridgway, who murdered 49 women, many of them sex workers who worked on highways in and around Seattle, had been temporarily transferred back to King County Jail in Seattle.
Years ago, when I was an intern at The Stranger, I was sent out to cover breaking news in the murder case against Ridgway. At a press conference, Dan Satterberg, then King County prosecuting attorney, explained that a new set of remains had been found and identified as those of Rebecca Marrero, who had been involved in sex work. It had made her more vulnerable to predators like Ridgway, who targeted women in the sex trade because they were already marginalized.
There is a reason it took almost 20 years for that case to be solved, and it’s not because Ridgway was a criminal mastermind.
The same dynamic was what allowed Laughn Elliott Doescher, the subject of the 2022 documentary Sweetheart Deal, to drug and sexually assault sex workers on Aurora, all while offering a facade of support as the self-styled mayor of the strip.
The discourse around SOAP and SODA has done very little to acknowledge this reality: that pushing sex workers out of sight doesn’t protect them at all. It makes them less safe, and, if you believe, as I do, that everyone’s safety matters in a community, then that makes the rest of us less safe, too.
As I listened to proponents of the laws talk about sex work, it became very clear to me that even if the bill’s supporters truly want to help sex workers, they don’t actually know where to start.
Because here is the infuriating thing about trying to help people: You can’t do it if you don’t know what they need. And you won’t know what they need if you don’t talk to them. Navigating that ambiguity isn’t easy. It’s incredibly stressful. It’s much easier to just ignore something, to wish it away, to assume that if you can’t see it, it’s not your problem anymore. But a politics of eviction and ignorance is doomed to fail: Because when we fail our neighbors and privilege a veneer of safety over true community, we also fail ourselves.
But maybe that’s all City Council feels up to. Maybe actually looking at the real root of what they consider a problem would require more courage than they can muster.
And I get it. It’s hard. Bumping against other people’s lives in unexpected ways often is. But that’s also what it means to live in a city.
And choosing ignorance will never end well, no matter how hard it is to truly look at another human being and acknowledge your own limitations in how much you can help or understand them, in admitting you actually don’t know what to do.
I have often felt that edge living in cities. I felt it again the night I witnessed the woman stopped in the roadway on my way home. I didn’t know what she needed. I didn’t know if intervening would help or hurt. In the end, I did call 911. I told the dispatcher to send a mental health care team, not the cops. I don’t know if this is a concern she noted. I still don’t know if I did the right thing. But I’d rather live with that complexity than pretend it doesn’t exist.
Editors’ Note: This article was updated with additions from the author.
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Megan Burbank is a writer and editor based in Seattle. Before going full-time freelance, she worked as an editor and reporter at the Portland Mercury and The Seattle Times. She specializes in enterprise reporting on reproductive health policy, and stories at the nexus of gender, politics, and culture.
