Originally published Saturday, July 11, 1998

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Truck headlights make long streaks in the predawn where Interstates 5 and 405 flow together near the Green River, and Southcenter Mall is a dimly lit ghost town built on what once was fertile bottom land. A droning set of headlights does a strange circle dance, like a water beetle on a darkened pond, humming across the surface of the huge complex of empty parking lots.

Harris Riach puffs calmly on his pipe, swinging the Ford 350 Tymco sweeper this way and that, foraging for the flotsam and jetsam dumped overboard by shoppers. The white truck's big Wisconsin-driven vacuum drowns out even the noise of the occasional red-eye flights at the airport, but Harris doesn't much hear the cacophony of jets and vacuums and trucks as he cranks up some good country music on the radio.

Every predawn -- or the five straight he's worked every week for the past nine-plus years -- Harris drives a 20-mile meandering circuit across the acres of empty parking lot, spiffing it up like a homemaker getting ready for the family to come down for breakfast. Knowing, of course, that it's going to be a mess again after they leave.

Occasionally, like a bee returning to a hive, Harris stops his circling and makes straight lines back to a big green dump bin at the west edge of the parking lot, beneath the north-bound off ramp of I-5. "I dump at least a couple times each night, and always at the end of the shift," he says.

"My dad was a boilermaker at Todd's (shipyard), and he used to buy fresh sweet corn from another worker who farmed right up there," Harris says, pointing toward the northwest corner of the mall. His driving pattern stays pretty much the same each of the five nights he works. "It might take a little longer after a weekend day, when there have been more shoppers here and there's more stuff on the ground," he says. Christmas holiday nights and those near Mother's Day and other big shopping days also make for tighter driving circles and more dumping of the big vacuum bin.

The potentially boring routine of endless circles at 10 to 15 miles per hour is broken by the occasional flat tire -- "at least once a week, or more, because of drywall construction screws or nails," and even an occasional truck breakdown. "She shows about 86,000 (on the odometer), but that's the equivalent of about 400,000 highway miles. I think she's about ready to be replaced," he says.

More often, he puts the white truck in park and steps out with a corn broom and long-handled dust pan to clean an area where the truck's revolving brooms and vacuum cannot reach, or to retrieve broken bottle glass. Or something that glints suspiciously in the headlight glare. "Oh, an occasional set of car keys, once in awhile a purse or a package, but mostly just garbage," he says.

For almost four decades, this 69-year-old Seattle native walked in circles as a downtown mailman, "in and around the Dexter Horton Building, the Artic Building and some others," he says, scratching his grayed temples where the wire-rim glasses poke up under the stained dark blue baseball cap.

"I worked awhile as an agent for a newly started shipping and trucking firm, but they went belly-up," he says. "That's when I went to work up at Crystal (Mountain ski area). . . . Had a cabin up there, and I worked about five years driving buses an maintenance vehicles."

This veteran skier -- he's been skiing more than 50 years -- also wanted to spend more time with his daughter so that she, too, could learn to ski as a youngster. "Later on, when she got older and into things like soccer and baseball back here, I left so's I could spend more time at her games," he says. Harris works this job mostly so he can put money aside for his daughter's continuing college education.

"But I couldn't sit still anyway," he explains. "And the hours ain't bad. I get here from West Seattle, about 20 miles, in very little time. At that hour, you might see six sets of headlights as far as you can look behind you, and maybe six sets of taillights as far as you can see ahead. And I switch the radio from country to KOMO during the morning rush so I know if I have to take the back roads home."

Slightly damp pavement conditions -- not uncommon hereabouts -- makes for an easy shift "because it holds everything down. When it's dry, things like napkins and plastic bags sorta float up over the brushes and vacuum," and have to be chased down, often on foot, Harris says.

And there are leftovers, such as broken taillights, shards of glass from broken car windows, tailpipes, old car batteries, tires and wheel rims that have to be retrieved on foot. Thankfully, not many messy items, "like one big plastic bag full of paint cans leaking all over the parking lot," he recalls.

He doesn't mind the vast emptiness of the spread-out parking lots. There's only the occasional security patrols or the infrequent long-haul trucker sleeping in his rig. "It gets a little hairier on towards 6 (a.m.), when the early people start filtering in, and I have to watch my mirrors," even though he rarely backs up for fear of harming the vacuum deck and brushes.

Nothing much keeps this former mailman from his appointed rounds, although a heavy dump of snow might curtail his driving until plows clean the lots. Once in a while, the old Ford poops out, "and then I get one of the mall's pickups and we do it by hand, with a broom," he says.

But there's no bodies in bullet-riddled car trunks, no gang wars or shoot-outs in the dimly lit lots, not much of anything he can't handle. "Except one time, several years back, someone dumped a pool table in the northeast lot. Pretty good one, by the looks of it. I called security, and they got it out somehow."

Not that he's looking for any excitement. Nice slow dawns put him in the mood to drive in relatively straight lines back to West Seattle, where he can putter around in his garden or help some neighbors with home projects. He can't even shop conveniently at Southcenter because it's pretty much deserted when he's there.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.