Dear Diary,
I hope you had a good holiday. I did, in a way - I listened to music I'm fond of, and was able to do so sitting down, because the day before, I got renewed access to University Wi-Fi. So you might ask, why is this the first you're hearing when I've had connection at my fingertips for two days? Well, I spent the first charging stuff, and the second was the holiday. But now, with all the shelters out of the way, I can carry on with the story of my early-October long hike for you, dear Diary, specifically continuing on October 11 from where I left it in "Lake City Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us".
You may remember way back to "To a Land of Water and Honey" that I went from Lake City to Northgate via Pinehurst Playground, which is covered in the latter page. It took me a while to get over my conviction that leaving Pinehurst should be easy and actually consult a map, which of course showed it would be easy if I just knew which turns to make. At any rate, although the hike to Northgate wasn't prolonged that much by this, the sun was setting by the time it ended.
I had meant to take the astonishing wealth I'd gotten, and told you about in "To a Land of Water and Honey", and splurge at Target. I was also looking forward to Target because I badly needed to do Number One. So of course the elevators weren't working, and a disturbing individual was standing near them, so I didn't even consider leaving my cart to take the stairs. Also, after I'd instead done Number One into some bushes in Hubbard Homestead, I found that I'd done a terrible job of scouting for places to sleep.
Now, I had to climb Maple Leaf Hill again, to photograph the shelter the last page discussed, to check on the same park's water fountain, and to visit a new park (not one of the "last seven" I'd visited in June). I just hadn't figured out how to fit it into the hike. So why not make lemonade out of this situation, and climb the hill just then? I bought a flashlight first, just in case.
Maple Leaf Reservoir Park
Introduced May 29 in "South to and from Northgate".
The climb up Roosevelt was uneventful, and I checked places along the way to sleep if the shelter didn't pan out. Of course I didn't actually need the flashlight. The shelter was easy to find, but was, as you know, dear Diary, from the previous page, totally unsuitable for sleeping. Nevertheless it was useful, for two reasons I forgot to mention.
First, it had rained that day, from about the time I left Little Brook Park for at least half an hour. Not a very big deal, but I had to dry my stuff.
Second, given its location on the southwest slope of a tall hill, this park gets amazing winds. So its shelter, while therefore even worse for sleeping in, was a great place to dry that stuff, as long as I could keep it all from blowing away.
So I set up the drying, and then opened the foil packet the generous woman near Jackson Park had given me. It was indeed steak, and I happily started to eat.
While I did so, a young man, probably not over 30, approached. He looked and sounded East African. He told me, again and again, "You have to leave." He said I could finish eating first. Then when I had finished and had started packing up my stuff, he asked me if I had any money. "I sure do!", I replied. He asked for some. I figured the last thing I should do that day was be greedy, so I reached into my pocket.
It turned out the $500 I'd been given had sunk to the bottom of that pocket, churning everything else as it went. It took me forever to find a bill, and of course when I did it was a $20. Well, I didn't want to be greedy, so I handed it to him. He asked if I had any more; I evaded by pointing out how long it had taken me to find that one. He then claimed that $20 bills were weird, and he wanted something more conventional like a $1 or a $5. I refused to dig into my pocket again, he, I am not making this up, handed me back the $20, and I left.
I didn't sleep much that night, but what little sleep I did get was in a dry patch in a doorway a few blocks away. (It didn't help that the local 7-Eleven wasn't open when I went.) An old and fancy building seemed about to come down across the street, but in the morning it turned out to be well along to demolition, and swarming with workers, so I took no photos.
When I returned to the park in the morning, it was to find the baby shelter, to photograph both, to check the water fountain attached to the restroom building (not running, as mentioned a few posts back), and, once again, to do Number One. But of course my harasser returned and told me yet again, "You have to leave." By 7:35 I gave up on waiting for the restroom to open, and obeyed him.
My main impression of the upper part of this park is that it's acres and acres of wind. I took a couple of photos no doubt failing to evoke that.
I also took a photo to show that even though I hadn't actually entered it, the men's room really does have a dryer and a door.
So the question left is, who's the harasser? He was neither dressed nor equipped as any remotely competent homeless man would have been even then. He could be a local madman who's appointed himself protector of the park from all riffraff other than, um, himself. He could be a local resident with the same self-appointed mission, and returned the money either to make me think him crazy, to avoid a conflict of interest, or both. Or he could be in the employ of a local organisation who evidently haven't thought much about what homeless people want out of parks. Beats me.
Waldo Woods
Sacajawea Playground
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