- A housed young woman overheard at Golden Gardens Park the night of October 16.
Dear Diary,
You may find this hard to believe, considering that we met the day I went on a long, rainy hike, but actually, I'm a pretty sedentary person. I do like to pace, especially when reading a book, but still, I spend much more of each normal day sitting than I'm told is good for me.
Unfortunately for me this part of this year, Seattle doesn't much believe in sheltered seating. Granted, the most concise English word for "place shaded from sun no matter the date and time, and sheltered from rain no matter the wind" is "inside", and inside is where we unsheltered homeless must not be this year, or everyone in the country would die of COVID-19, or equity, or something. But Seattle does have lots of outdoor seating, and lots of reasonably sheltered outdoor spaces (such as the doorways I've slept in, these past eight years). What it has a shortage of is sheltered outdoor seating.
Why does it matter? Aren't we just as waterproof as the young lady I quoted? No. We aren't. Every year, hypothermia - freezing to death - is a leading cause of death for homeless people, both nationwide and right here in Seattle. And nothing one is likely to encounter in daily life chills one faster than water. Some water we can't avoid: fog, no matter how pretty, is always risky, for example. But rain is usually fairly easy to avoid, unless one is doing something so obviously lunatic as hiking.
The problem is to avoid the rain in some posture other than standing. Sitting or lying on pavement is problematic because concrete is also a pretty efficient equaliser of temperatures. (Seattle's sit-lie ordinances aren't meant for our good, and don't apply at the most dangerous time, night, but still have probably prevented some deaths.) Metal, such as Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation currently prefers to make park furniture from, is even worse.
I spent much of September and October evaluating my options around UW, and although the search led me for the first time in eight years seriously to consider a tent, today am at the best option, admittedly a concrete bench but with a thick blanket folded under me. But it seemed to me there had to be some relationship between this search and the parks. And there is! Sure, it took me days to think of it, but for most people smarter than snails the answer is obvious: parks have sheltered benches in shelters, don't they?
In fact the department has a convenient list of the shelters it thinks people will pay it to reserve. (That list links to maps of the relevant parks, probably a majority of the parks in North Seattle for which official maps are available.) This year, because the department thinks it's unhealthy, or sinful, or something to have picnics during a pandemic, it isn't accepting that pay. So many of the shelters are available for our use. I used my October hikes to photograph all the rentable shelters, as well as a couple so small the department doesn't even try to rent them.
I'm quite sure there's only one picnic shelter among the many parks near the U District, in the part of Ravenna Park near the "upper" restrooms, and it doesn't shelter any actual seating, as we'll see. But a disproportionate number are near the UW for looser values of "near": View Ridge Playfield, Meridian Playground, Gas Works Park, and although Magnuson Park isn't actually "near" anything at all, it too is in the southeastern quarter of North Seattle. So the next page, which I hope to write today, is about those shelters. Another disproportionate number are in Woodland Park, which will again get a page of its own, and the fourth and last page will cover the leftovers -Meadowbrook Playfield and Carkeek, Golden Gardens and Maple Leaf Reservoir Parks.
All for now, dear Diary, but hopefully not for today.
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