Introduction to my hikes of the U-District and Ravenna

Dear Diary,

Whoopee!  I'm almost ready to tell you about my hikes of one week ago.  Within a few days I hope to be completely ready; as things stand, I'm ready for the first three parts, anyway.

I liked the scale of the maps I made for downtown so much that I decided to standardise on that scale.  It's proving useful for North Seattle as well, but inconveniently, I don't yet know enough to make maps on that scale as large enough as I want them.

So these hikes are going to be narrated with more than one map per page.  Here's an overview:

"Three Hikes in Ravenna" will be illustrated by maps A, B and D.  I intend to begin writing the three parts of this page I plan tonight.

"Three Hikes in University Heights" will be illustrated by maps A and C.  I intend to begin writing the one part of this page I plan tomorrow.

"Four [or more] Hikes in Brooklyn" will be illustrated by map E.  I hope to begin writing it on Tuesday, October 18.

And whenever I can, which will probably be months from now, "Many Hikes on Campus" will be illustrated by maps E, F and G.

Spoiler:  There's very little news.  The water fountain in "lower" Ravenna Park has completely stopped working, possibly because of vandalism; however, its water is running non-stop, so it's as wasteful as it can reasonably be.  Otherwise, the park water fountains in this area - "upper" Ravenna Park, Cowen Park, University Playground and Christie Park - all work fine.  The shell of the street fountain that used to be in front of the University Temple is still behind the fence of that vacant lot.  The restrooms in "upper" Ravenna Park and the women's room in "lower" Ravenna Park are all open; the men's room in "lower" Ravenna Park and both restrooms at each of Cowen Park and University Playground are not open.  (Come winter, the only open park restroom in this area will be the women's room in "lower" Ravenna, if that.)  Oh, and most of North Passage Point is fenced off because concrete chips are falling from the bottom of the I-5 bridge.

There is, however, one very little bit of big news, which I hope to tell you about in detail before months from now, dear Diary.  The University of Washington's Seattle campus, to quote someone to whom I described you yesterday, "is becoming a locked campus".  So for the time being, while I can't photograph any of the popular parks on campus because they're thronged all day long, I'm visiting the buildings instead, and observing their hours.  Just in the few days I've been doing this, I've seen several hours changes, but in broad outline, the quote is true.  Concretely, I spent my days at the UW mostly in five buildings, at least fourteen hours inside per day.  If I become homeless again in the near future, one of those buildings will be closed to me, and the other four's hours have been cut very much.  I've already found a few examples of other buildings becoming more accessible, but none in ways that would actually make a difference.  So I'd certainly have to spend holidays outside, and weekends during breaks outside, and probably could spend no more than twelve hours per day inside during regular quarters, and no more than eight in summer quarter and breaks.

Between this, the park restrooms' closures, and the closure of the Urban Rest Stop's U-District branch, it's become immensely harder to be homeless in the U-District lately.  No doubt if I were to ask anyone who made the relevant decisions about this, they'd say it was all a coincidence.  They'd mention COVID-19, the difficulty of hiring anyone (people are so hard to find right now that I've managed to stay unemployed for seven months!), and budget tightness.  But, well, to whatever extent I'm a journalist at all, I'm not the kind of journalist who asks people like that questions like that.  I'm just going to document what I can of the facts I observe, and leave your readers to decide what they mean.

This problem is much bigger than the libraries, but I hope anyway to tell you, dear Diary, about the public university libraries - meaning the major state schools, mainly UW but also Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington State University in Vancouver, Evergreen State College (which now offers some masters' degrees, so I'm counting it as a university), and also the campuses without libraries of Central Washington University and Western Washington University in Everett and Eastern Washington University in Sammamish.  Tuesday, October 18.

As a reminder, here's the key I'm using:

To unpack:

Open land (without concern for how easy it is to walk through) is green if it's represented by the City of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  It's blue if it's owned by any other governmental unit.  And it's black if it's privately owned.

Open land is also olive green if it's owned by the Seattle parks department, if it's closed to the public in some way (usually a fence, for open land).  Similarly, it's whatever that different bluish colour is called if it's owned by some other governmental unit, and dark gray if it's privately owned.

Buildings are the same colours but only in outline.  (Usually, closed buildings are just locked.)

Restrooms are shown as small rectangular outlines.  There are four cases:  Are they on open land, or somewhere else?  And are they open to the public (at least some of the time) or are they closed?  In practise, I needn't have worried quite so much.  Essentially all buildings open to the public have working restrooms, though not all such buildings have public working restrooms.  A restroom that isn't working or isn't public is red.  (The careful reader will notice that this is a change from the key.  Sorry, but I'd rather spend time writing up the results of the hikes than updating that key.)  A public restroom that is working is the colour of the owner, or if it's on open or closed land (which is usually the case), it's white.

Water fountains are shown as small round outlines.  They have the same colour pattern as restrooms.

All for now, dear Diary.  Let me try to get at least part of "Three Hikes in Ravenna" written up tonight.  But if not, have a good night, and I should manage to write the first part by tomorrow morning.