Cal Anderson Park and Its Closure

Dear Diary,

Yesterday I finally got south to shower and wash my masks.  (I didn't get permission from the gods of the parks, though.  I've been cheating, sleeping much closer to Safeway and University Village and relying on their plumbing.  Stay tuned to find out whether the gods of the parks punish me.)

Anyway, my storage is one block east of Cal Anderson Park, while my other destinations are west of it.  So I walked several times along the park's northern edge.  Knowing restrooms to be in short supply downtown and on Capitol Hill, I didn't drink or eat much, and on an unrelated errand passed through Denny Park, which now, surprise, not only has a water fountain, but one that's actually running, where I filled my bottles.  So I didn't go further south in Cal Anderson Park.

Back when I was housed in Seattle, I didn't pay much attention to Cal Anderson Park, too close to my place and too simple.  To the extent that I focused on parks at all, it was on mysteries like Freeway, Volunteer and Peace Parks.  But in the two years I spent homeless in that area, Cal Anderson Park became much more important to me.  I liked the water fountain, and although I didn't like the restroom, it was sometimes open late on summer nights when nothing else was, sometimes sweetened by the reason for the lateness, a co-ed soccer game I could watch.

Yesterday, however, was one week after the park was closed through a pre-dawn storming by police.  Apparently it's still closed for cleanup, but when I saw the big signs reading "Temporarily Closed" all over the place, I thought it was probably closed so as to deny protesters all that space in their further struggles with the East Precinct of the Seattle Police.

This would, of course, be completely reasonable.  People have made all sorts of strange complaints about these police.  For example, they complain about "flash-bang" grenades.  Now, in a year when public fireworks have been cancelled, the police provide private fireworks to small groups of protesters, and then people criticise them for it.

Similarly, there have been lots of complaints about "tear gas".  In a year when we have so many pandemic deaths to mourn, and in a movement dedicated to mourning deaths at the hands of the police, I should think anything that assisted crying would be an unalloyed good.  But no, people are really mad about this one.

In particular, they complain about it violating the Geneva Conventions.  But this is seeing things backwards.  The Geneva Conventions restrict what our big, strong men can do to other countries' big, strong men.  They were never intended to protect puny weaklings, women, and other such types who protest.  Honestly, why don't people understand things like this?

Police have every reason to deploy such weapons against protesters.  Without them, they'd only have guns, armor, and millions of dollars' worth of other equipment.  It would be far too close to a fair fight.

Also, the protesters are just wrong.  Our wonderful mayor agrees with them that black lives matter.  And our wonderful mayor understands that we don't need to do anything concrete on the basis of black lives mattering.  (See, yet again, "Two Hours and Two Hours" on how declaring an emergency eliminates the need for action.)  The sooner the protesters get this through their thick heads, the sooner they can all go home.

Anyway, yesterday the closure was just as porous as the closures at 8 P.M. of various big or famous parks.  (In fact, Cal Anderson Park is one of these, and the parks department website claims this is the park's only closure, in a post updated today.  That post also says, not 8 but 9:30 P.M.)  Capitol Hill is a pretty white neighbourhood, so I wasn't too surprised that most of the people I saw entering the park were white, but I did wonder whether, in particular, black people would encounter a different sort of closure.  Many of these people also had an excellent signifier of a temporary visit, a leashed dog.  And most looked housed.

This helps explain the claim that police had slashed homeless people's tents.  At first glance this looks like reckless cruelty, but in reality, the police were depriving these homeless people of tents because tents are great big signifiers of homelessness, and those police knew such things wouldn't help those people enter the park while it was officially closed.

And they've had reason to re-enter the park.  During the trip south in June on which I changed my cart's wheels, I also visited both the street water fountain on Broadway just north of John, and the fountain in Cal Anderson Park.  Both were working when I started writing you, dear Diary.  However, in June I found a very different situation:  the street fountain had stopped, while Cal Anderson Park's had been replaced by a fancy new all-year triple fountain, as if deliberately to make up for the loss of the all-year street one - and yes, it was running.  Also, the Capitol Hill Seattle blog post linked to above seems to say that Cal Anderson Park's restrooms had finally opened.

So maybe the real reason the park remained closed for a week was to begin to redress the imbalance between all the running water fountains in central Seattle and the paucity of them in North Seattle.  Speaking of which, I still haven't told you, dear Diary, about one more running water fountain around here.  Now that I'm somewhat more presentable, I hope to re-visit that one tomorrow, and then tell you all about it.