A Lazy Day on Loyal Heights

Dear Diary,

The last page got well into the evening of Monday, June 22, but I wasn't quite done.  There was one more place left named for Ballard.  And it was becoming clear that bus shelters would be terrible places to sleep on weeknights - in Ballard (and "NW" generally) they only seem to build shelters for routes that run 5 A.M. to 1 A.M.  So I needed to do as my peers do and sleep in parks, and Gemenskap Park was hardly a good choice for that.

So I crossed 65th and went on to the third set of parks.

Ballard Pool

Yes, all the pools are closed due to the pandemic, but that doesn't mean I should ignore them.  What if one had outdoor restrooms, like some community centres?

But Ballard Pool is even closeder than the others.  Turns out there was a general update to all the pools last year, and Ballard Pool drew the short straw for unexpected problems, pushing it into the coronavirus shutdown.

And no, not that I could see that well through the fences and whatnot, but it doesn't seem to have external restrooms (or water fountains) either.  It's on the Ballard High School grounds, on 67th St just east of 15th Ave, if you want to look for yourself.

Off to 9th Ave and 70th for

Kirke Park

This is a medium-small (just under an acre) park whose historical focus is even odder than Ballard Corners's thing about five-and-dimes.  Turns out it's on land that used to belong to a cult, only since this was long ago it was called a church instead.  They were into long hair and vegetarianism, but unlike the hippies, also celibacy, and like most celibate cults died out in the end.  The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation website says the things I liked best, the ridiculously perfect ruins decorating the area where park gardens shade into the P-Patch, really are the ruins of the cult's buildings.  Some pictures:

Before taking those, I slept in a park for the first time since I was newly homeless, back in 2012.  Which reminds me:  In general, I did not see my peers in the parks north of 65th described in this page.  I may well have been the only person sleeping in Kirke Park that night.  I felt relatively safe doing so; the park has unusually many trees shading it.

6th Ave NW Pocket Park

This tiny park is all playground in my memory, though the department website says (and shows, with photos) there's also a lot of grass.  The website and I prefer the same aspect of the park - its architecture - but they like its details, while I just thought it hung together beautifully.  That said, they have a version of the same shot I took to demonstrate:

Next a long hike, across 80th St I think, to

Loyal Heights Playfield and Community Center

Having lived eight years on "Capitol" Hill, I have a certain fondness for, shall we say, aspirational neighbourhood names, and I amused myself this day imagining a Disloyal Valley, or Mountain, somewhere else.  Alas, turns out the area was named for the developer's daughter, and he probably didn't name another the opposite.

Anyway, as already mentioned, the Community Center here has restrooms built in with external doors, similarly to the Ballard and Laurelhurst ones (the ones at Green Lake and Magnuson differ more).  Neither Ballard nor Loyal Heights takes advantage of this setup to offer hot water as Laurelhurst does, however.  The restrooms at Loyal Heights do have lockable doors, but lack dryers.  Now, it occurred to me that because I once wrongly said Ravenna Park's upper restrooms lacked dryers, you, dear Diary, might not believe me about all these "NW" parks' restrooms, so I took a video to try to show you:

Like many parks, the playfield here is on two levels.  The upper one has the main community centre doors, a box painted blue with "Police Box" written on it but actually holding a free library, a playground, and a water fountain near that last, not running.  The lower part has the baseball diamonds and the restrooms, with a water fountain near each, not running.

From there it was just a couple of blocks south on 20th Ave to 

Salmon Bay Park

where I arrived around 8 A.M. to find the restrooms closed.  I called at 8:13 to find out whether they were supposed to be, and despite some confusion occasioned by the park's name (it's nowhere near Salmon Bay) eventually learned that the doors should be open.  So I found a shaded bench, and waited.

This was not the quick service I'd seen at Northacres Park.  Someone arrived at 9:24, opened the men's room, and started cleaning it.  Presumably they then repeated this at the women's room, but I'd already used the restrooms at the Community Center, I'd eaten calories for breakfast, and it must have been pretty close to then that I fell asleep.

This is why I had to correct my mistake about my shopping on the 22nd.  See, I started this trip on the 21st with most of a box of my usual weekend cream cookies, a day behind schedule.  So I had no business buying calories on Monday the 22nd.  But when I walked into the Safeway near downtown Ballard that day, I saw ads for a sale on their house brand of ice cream.  They used to sell a few flavours in this brand really cheaply, and for the first few years of my homelessness I bought one carton per summer, to give myself lazy days.  Then they got fancier with their house brand, more than doubling the price, so I've only had ice cream since then if I got to a Fred Meyer in the summer.  But this sale was for the old price.  So I bought a flavour they'd never offered at that price, close to my favourite, but as it turned out not close enough, and I didn't finish the carton.  Anyway, for some reason the lazy day was offset by one.

So I slept there on nothing but cream cookies, well past the bench's becoming sunny, waking around noon.  Of course I needed the restroom again, and of course it offered neither a dryer nor privacy, so I took a picture:

I'd already taken pictures of neat stuff.  The neatest thing about Salmon Bay Park is its rolling landscape, on which practically all the paths are paved.  This photo probably doesn't do it justice:

I also liked some tiles in the playground, although as I traveled on I kept seeing the same ones, which somewhat dampened the liking:

Finally I set off down 70th St towards

Webster Park

This small park is on 68th St near, but east of, 32nd Ave.  I'm pretty sure this is the park I vaguely remember only being able to approach from the west (i.e. 32nd) thanks to construction.  It's dominated by a playground, but I do remember it having grass, benches, etc., and resting for a time there.  EDIT JULY 3:  It has a water fountain too, which was running that day, but only in a trickle.

All the art is carefully separated from the playground so as to not to endanger the kids with it; it consists of a sundial by Chuck Nafziger and a set of four bas-reliefs by Charles S. Bigger called "Crossings", three side by side with words I couldn't read apparently telling a connected story.  Scrunched together as they are, they rather get in the way of photography, but here are my best tries:

Next north on 32nd to

Sunset Hill Park

OK, so the parks department website shows benches, and I remember people lying on the grass, but I still think this park at the edge of the cliff on 34th Ave between 75th and 77th Streets is all about its views.  It expresses this by putting a fence along the top of the cliff, and having its only trail run mostly alongside that fence.  I wasn't there at sunset but here's what I could do:

At this point I realised I couldn't get to my next destination from where I was.  I needed to go back south, and find a path to tomorrow's topic, dear Diary, the Ballard seacoast.