On Release

Dear Diary,

Now that I'm fully vaccinated, in principle it's simple.

People still in masks might be vaccine-hesitant, for which they might have good reasons; or they might be vaccinated but scared anyway, for which they might have good reasons.  I worry about how long those people will feel the need to mask up, but in any event, it's common courtesy to continue to stay away from these people.

People unmasked like me might be fully vaccinated like me, or might be Trumpian never-maskers, never-vaxxers.  The former are unlikely to catch COVID-19 from me and the latter deserve to.  So I shouldn't need any of what's now called social distancing (I used to call it hygiene discipline as I practised it at UW when homeless and smelly) with these people.

But it's all kinds of more complicated than that in practise.

I never seriously considered staying masked on my hikes.  (Except when walking into the restrooms, or running hike-unrelated errands.)  I currently own three pairs of glasses.  I think I had two pairs when I came to Seattle in 2006.  One was broken sometime beyond memory, one lens split into two, so although I still have it, it really can't be worn.  The other, also broken but only in the frame, was stolen in mid-2014, as narrated in  "Stealing from the Homeless".  As also narrated there, this resulted in Sound Eye and Laser giving me a pair, the second pair I now own.  In late 2016, I went to one of the giant United Way-sponsored medical events at Seattle Center, and got a pair of bifocals, which came in a wonderfully sturdy glasses case.  The bifocals encountered an angry drunk fairly early in 2017, and can only hold together with tape.  So the 2012 pair went into the sturdy glasses case, and became my default glasses, until in late 2020 they encountered an angry mask.  By this point I'd forgotten that glasses have to be taped, so when Superglue failed, I just stuck them into the sturdy glasses case only to be removed on special occasions.

Anyway, though, in February I was in a carpeted motel room, and I experimented.  Both of my broken but whole pairs fogged up when worn with masks.  On top of that, one was broken by a mask, so I really don't trust masks with my glasses.  But I did re-learn how to tape glasses.

Since I value eyesight, then, I was never going to stay masked outside once the vaccine released me.

But it turns out I often have to get my glasses out of the way when taking photos on my phone.

And I have to mask up when going into restrooms, let alone when running errands, or taking buses at the beginning or end of the hike.  Which means handling the mask every freaking time.  And I also need to eat and drink while on those hikes.  I'm just choosing to ignore it, to assume that the outside of my current mask is not actually a foetid midden but an ordinary piece of cloth.  But what if I'm wrong?

And then there's the whole social distancing thing.  Avoid the masked, but not the unmasked?  But what if a masked woman stands three feet from the path I must take at Golden Gardens Park, as happened last night?  Should I have felt differently, as I in fact did, when I noticed that she is pregnant?  Unmasked people like me can block the masked in the same exact way, be it noted; this is an equal-opportunity way for people to inconvenience each other.

Also, while my principles may say I shouldn't socially distance myself from the unmasked, years of enforcing hygiene discipline on myself makes that a notion not much honoured in the breach.  It will take me a lot longer to get over this than to get over masks.  I find myself stepping into the street to avoid not only the masked but also the unmasked, much more than I did when I was masked.

There's a kick to this.  It turns out my vaccine, the Johnson and Johnson one, is only 2/3 effective at preventing COVID-19 infection.  Should I in fact not only continue social distancing, but resume masking?  Should I, at a time when India needs something like twenty billion vaccine doses, try to do better with a more efficacious vaccine?

This is not entirely off-topic, dear Diary, and not just on-topic in the sense that you are, after all, a Primary Source of the COVID Era.  Four days ago, I wrote:

| I've been comfortable, over the years, attributing a lot of 

| damage to water fountains to "vandalism".  Something 

| striking I've noticed today is that many of the "fountains" 

| I've mapped are really fountain locations, with two or as 

| many as four actual fountains either attached to one pillar, 

| in the majority case of free-standing fountains, or to one 

| building, in the minority case of attached fountains.  I 

| would think that both "vandalism" and wear and tear would 

| differentially affect these multiple fountains, but in reality, 

| the entire time I've been hiking for you, dear Diary, I've 

| never found one fountain working at a location, another not, 

| except to the minimal extent that flow differences might 

| make one harder to use than the other.  This makes it hard 

| for me to attribute the red list even primarily to user 

| misbehaviour. 

Well, there's a first time for everything, or to put it another way, in Bitter Lake Playfield yesterday I encountered the exception that proves the rule.  This is what it looks like when "vandalism" - actually, in this case, I'm pretty sure, metal thievery - differentially affects multiple fountains:

 

Not only is the spout missing, but so are the pipes one would expect to see through the hole it left.  Metal thievery is the most economical hypothesis.

But this is actually fairly uncommon, damage in this way to the spout, which allows access to the pipes.  I've much more often seen damage to the controls, so often that, considering the controls don't easily offer access to the pipes, I've come to doubt that it's really vandalism I'm seeing, as against deliberate disabling of the fountains by staffers of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation.  Few examples are as extreme as the fountain at Green Lake Park that I noticed for my first time yesterday:

But even this could be a staffer's work, and I like to look on the bright side when I can; it's a help against depression.

So what will release mean to the parks department?  Will they bring the fountains back all at once, as they did last year when demanded by Public Health?  That seems a lot of work.  And remember, all those controls-damaged fountains in Woodland Park didn't come back last year.  Almost every fountain in Green Lake ran, but only two in all of Woodland.

The parks department has two maintenance crews in North Seattle, Northeast and Northwest.  Northeast is responsible for the parks from Gas Works Park to Woodland Park; Northwest is responsible for the parks from Green Lake Park north, including Northacres Park.

I've already looked, this month, at most of the water fountain locations for which Northwest has responsibility - 25 out of 32, at least assuming Northwest handles Sunset Place.  That and five others, six out of 25, are running.  Northwest has a head start on the end of the Durkan Drought.

I've looked at fewer than half of the locations Northeast is responsible for - 19 out of 44.  Only two of those 19 are running.  Also, Northeast has a lot of disabled controls in Woodland Park and elsewhere; Northwest has considerably fewer; so if I'm right that that's something the parks department will have to fix, Northeast has much more work ahead than Northwest.  Although all the people I've had friendly conversations with work for Northeast, their management seems to expect the Durkan Drought to continue.

And why shouldn't it?  The mayor has already shown willing to turn the fountains off; why shouldn't she keep them off until she's out of office?  It's not like she plans to answer to the voters.  Presumably once the governor releases us from the state of emergency, she'll feel free to sweep all the campers foolish enough to remain in the parks.  Maybe then she'll turn the fountains back on, or maybe, for fear that some homeless person somewhere might get free water, she'll keep them off right up to the end of her term.  I just don't know.

It's been striking how, after initial fumbles, the restrooms have mostly been open, and "sanican"s sprouted up not only at the beginning of the pandemic, but continue to appear - I saw a bunch in Green Lake Park, near the Small Craft Center, last time I went there.  Our mayor doesn't want cholera, which isn't much of a respecter of persons.

But it's also striking how she's been happy to limit access to clean drinking water.  Hepatitis, giardia, shigella, cryptosporidium, the list goes on.  As long as the majority of victims are homeless, the more the merrier, it seems, the housed victims just collateral damage from the hatred.

Dear Diary, I don't use with you the words that can most economically express the image that comes to mind:  We, the homeless, have been allowed to excrete during the epidemic, but not to drink.  Or maybe just not water.  "Let them drink brandy" - is it that, dear Mayor?

So Seattle, like me, isn't as ready for release as we like to think.