Escaping Green Lake Park, part II

Dear Diary,

I've put off writing this page and the next one as long as I can, because they tell a story that was no fun to live through, and is no fun to remember.  I have no photos to illustrate either page, for reasons that will become obvious.

I should clarify, though.  The first "Escaping Green Lake Park" page has the immediate political purpose of shaming the parks department into providing a real sidewalk on part of Aurora Ave N for which it's responsible.  The page "Escaping Carkeek Park" has the long-range political purpose of getting consideration for pedestrians built into the next plan for repairing NW Carkeek Park Drive.  But this page doesn't have any such purpose; I don't actually want to live in a world that would prevent stories like this one from happening.  I just also don't want to live through that story again.

The last page about my January hikes ended with me pushing my new cart through the rain to Webster Park.  Webster Park is near NW 65th St, but I knew from quite recent experience that I didn't want to approach Green Lake, or Woodland, Parks from that direction.  So I trudged back to NW 85th St and walked to Green Lake Park from there.

I entered via Winona Ave N and Stone Ave N, and on arriving at the Bath House restrooms found them locked.  I'm not really sure what time it was, but it was certainly late enough that they well should have been locked.  From there I started around the loop path clockwise, against the current rule, but I certainly didn't want to deal with the long distance counter-clockwise to the Shellhouse restrooms.

You must imagine, dear Diary, every few feet a giant pool, as I went along the trail.  The wading pool restrooms, I missed entirely in the dark and the rain.  Now, you understand, I hadn't actually entered a restroom since mid-day, and it was pretty late.  So I was relieved to find the Community Center restrooms still open.  The toilets were both disgusting for some reason, so I settled for a urinal, which didn't flush properly, and then soaped my hands ...

Only to find that the water was shut off.  Hence the problems with toilets and urinal.  The open doors were a macabre joke on anyone fool enough to be outside in the weather.

It turns out that even fairly intense rain isn't good at rinsing even fairly lame soap from one's hands.  I finally had to rub my hands across a bunch of bushes' leaves to remove the soap.

Wow, did I want to escape.  Well, there's quite a path right next to the Community Center, so I started up it, only to find myself wading.  This didn't make any sense to me - I was going uphill, after all - so I ignored it until it was far too late to turn back.  At its deepest, the water reached my knees, which was also quite deep enough to soak all my bedding.

That's why this page has no photos.  I still can't make sense of the lake I found there.  Nor is it any more plausible as a river:  there was a lot of rain in Seattle that night, but I don't think there was enough near there to maintain a flow that deep for any length of time.  Since I don't understand the phenomenon, I can't see under what circumstances it might recur, so I could photograph it.

Anyway, eventually I escaped the Green Lake Basketball Court Lake and reached, well, wet ground, anyway.  Now, dear Diary, although your presently most popular page talks about shivering, it doesn't go into my classification of shivers, which is necessary here.

Shivers are primarily involuntary, but can sometimes be partly controlled, or even voluntarily so.  When I can control my shivers, I usually focus them in my hands, and either wave them back and forth in an arm imitation of walking, or rub them between my knees if I'm sitting down.  Early in my homelessness - say, 2013 - I was doing the latter, covered by a blanket, on a since-removed bench in front of the Capitol Hill branch library, when a rather younger, but still professional, man walked by, and jeered at me for masturbating, despite my denial.  He walked on, as pleased at having scored off a stranger as a teenager, and I didn't realise until recently, thinking about this page, that by suggesting I could do that with my hands at my knees he was actually complimenting me.

Well, that may be a bad joke, but it's all the comic relief this page offers, because as I walked away from Green Lake Park, I wasn't doing (this is the classification) "little", controllable, shivers like that, but "big", uncontrollable, shivers.  Very big, rather like convulsions.

I needed food, and although I had some, I needed to get it without opening my cart's coverings.  The first restaurant I passed that was open is called O'Ginger's, and is apparently some sort of Chinese fusion place.  I remembered liking Thai cashew chicken, so ordered their version of that.  It turned out to be an enormous dish, which I ate in a sheltered alcove in the same building, just out of sight of the restaurant.  I also tried to write an e-mail, but water had gotten into the phone, and I had to stop.

After the hot meal, the shivers subsided somewhat.  I actually managed to reach several more restroom pairs that night, and then set about finding shelter for the night.  This is when I was deranged enough to figure out the route that allows pedestrians to walk Aurora, but when I finally returned to Aurora, didn't recognise it, and had to walk Linden Ave N for several blocks before I'd believe that the next street was Aurora.

Shivers were starting to come back by the time I passed the fenced-off Everspring Inn.  Fortunately, soon after I saw a name I recognised.  Nobody had ever told me there was a nationally franchised business among the universally reviled Aurora Ave motels, but there it was, a Travelodge.  What's more, it had a vacancy, and allowed me to check in.

I stayed there the rest of that night (it was 2 A.M. by that time) and two more.  You already know, dear Diary, that on January 13 I returned to Golden Gardens Park and Sandel Playground.  But what else I did there is for the next two pages.