Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Past hikes of North Seattle parks in these pages

Dear Diary,

On December 18, 2024, I decided to update this page, which I originally wrote in you on September 3, 2024.  The original page follows, until the obvious heading announces the update.

Dear Diary,

Ever since I signed up for job-hunting sites, you've been much more popular than you had been in the years when you were actually relevant to people's lives.  So I don't have a clue who reads you any more, and to what extent they're familiar with what I've actually done in the past.

Part of this is my own doing.  I compiled a publication history, 85K of text, put it onto Google Drive, and link to it in some of my resumes and in my LinkedIn profile.  Some of your pages, dear Diary, to which it refers, get visited pretty often.

But with regard to the hikes of North Seattle parks which I resumed yesterday, that history is incomplete.  So here goes.

One reason for this page to exist, besides completeness, is to clarify my terms for these hikes.  Those are, from most to fewest total places visited:  everything hike (trying to visit every park or park-like area); water fountain hike (visiting a list of parks with water fountains); restroom hike (visiting a list of parks with restrooms).

Finding plumbing - a series of 2020 hikes

As you remember, dear Diary, when I started writing you, it was because Seattle's then-mayor, Jenny Durkan, had advised homeless people like me (then) to use the parks' restrooms and water fountains to meet our needs during the lockdowns, but I'd found that the restrooms were often closed, and most of the water fountains weren't running.  Initially I focused on the most obvious parks near where I slept in Laurelhurst, and on Magnuson Park (which isn't near anywhere, but is anyway not utterly distant from there).  However, I eventually became curious:  Was what I was experiencing typical, or was my area an outlier?

At that time, I hadn't gathered many sources of information on Seattle parks.  It didn't take long to become acquainted with the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's website, which I mined intensively and then critiqued.  But I acquired other sources largely as a result of these hikes.  Also, I quickly found that the website wasn't entirely reliable as to which parks had restrooms or water fountains.  So my goal, in these hikes, became to find absolutely every park in the areas I was hiking, find out whether they had plumbing, and write about them, possibly with photographs.  As a result, many North Seattle parks without plumbing are only documented in your pages, dear Diary, in the pages devoted to these hikes.

When I set out, I hoped to find a border to the "Durkan Drought" quickly, but I never did.  So I ended up hiking all of North Seattle.  By the time I finished that, I sort of had an explanation for the drought, so didn't need to go further.  As it turned out, the area I started from pretty much had a monopoly on closed restrooms, but nearly all the water fountains across North Seattle were shut off.  Strangely, the exceptions, the working water fountains, were geographically clustered.

Before I got all the initial hikes written into your pages, dear Diary, someone stole my phone, with all the remaining photos I hadn't yet shown you.  As a result, I had to re-visit a lot of parks.  Also, as I learnt more, I wanted to re-visit other parks, and added topics (including waterways, street ends, and park shelters).  So the list of pages devoted to this series of hikes is basically a great big mess, which is why I left most of it out of that publication history.  But here it is:

This is not the last time I set out on an "everything hike", but it's the last everything hike I've so far completed.

Checking a plumbing map - January 2021

In December 2020 I became aware of a City of Seattle Department of Human Services map professing to show which restrooms would be open in winter 2020-2021.  I decided to see how accurate it was.  It proved to be a substantially less reliable guide than the list of restrooms the parks department had promised to keep open in winter 2019-2020; in other words, the parks department did nothing differently because of the lockdowns, when it came to winter restrooms.  The pages in you, dear Diary, about these hikes, culminate in "How to Lie to the Homeless", a page with three parts.

This was basically a restroom hike, except that the map also mapped locations where charities had open restrooms, and locations where there wasn't a restroom, but was a "sanican", so the total areas I visited were more numerous than in a normal restroom hike.

All the pages are listed in the publication history.

Regional hikes - May 2021

This was the first series of hikes I tackled while housed.  Hiking housed has both advantages and disadvantages, as compared to hiking homeless.  It's much easier to take buses when I'm not smelly, for example; but it's much harder to get much done, having to go home each night.  When it's raining, it's much harder to set my satchels down and rest, but whether or not it's raining, steering a cart, which does enable rest under most circumstances (because it props my satchels up above the wet pavement), is too annoying.  (The kind of cart I used has endless wheel malfunctions, basically planned obsolescence, near as I can tell.)

So I decided to play to the strengths of housed hiking and do a series of regional everything hikes, visiting most City of Seattle properties, not just parks.  I soon expanded that to park-like places shown, primarily, on Open Street Map.  In May 2021 I more or less finished three regions, the ones headed in the map below with the numbers 43, 32 and 49 (which represent total areas visited).

One ancillary purpose of this series of hikes was to provide at least one photograph of most things, and especially of the many parks of which I hadn't previously shown you, dear Diary, any photographs at all.  So basically, for parks without plumbing, this series is best if the park's region is covered, otherwise the 2020 series above.

Finally, I'd gotten tired of the boring page titles I'd used for the January 2021 hikes, and tried some from a poem.  Those fell spectacularly flat, so I went back to boring titles, and have stayed there ever since, for the most part. 

But it quickly became clear that we were in another year of Durkan Drought (as I would've known if I'd still been homeless), so I switched gears.

The region headed 43

The region headed 32

The region headed 49

Water fountains, year 2 - May 2021

As I said, after three regions it was obvious that there was a new Durkan Drought going on, and it was rather more evil than the previous one.  In 2020, they'd had three plumbers working on turning water fountains on when the lockdowns began, and they just left on the fountains those plumbers had gotten to before stopping.  But by 2021, they'd figured out that homeless people were camping in or near parks in order to get access to the plumbing.  So they carefully turned water fountains on only in parks that didn't have open restrooms.

Late in my work on writing these hikes up I found out the rationale for the droughts.  Durkan's administration had willfully misread the CDC's advice on keeping water fountains clean.  The CDC had explicitly said water fountains should be washed once per day, but someone in Durkan's administration chose to believe that that really meant once per user, and explained (as if it needed explaining) that that was impossible.  No Seattle mayor is friendly to the homeless, but Jenny Durkan really went way out of her way to be hostile to homeless people, and this is just one of many examples.

Quite a few of the pages listed above under the regional hikes contributed to this set of hikes' concern with water fountains, but I don't have time this week to re-read and figure out which ones.

There was a coda to this.  That summer got really hot, and Durkan finally had to back down from her two-year attempt to cure Seattleites of water addiction.

"Foolish mortal" in the title is how I signal that a page corrects mistakes of mine.

Regional hikes redux - October 2022

I tackled two more regions from the eleven mapped above in autumn 2022.  I quickly gave up on the one headed 21 on the map, the far northwest of Seattle, because it was too hard to get there, and because that region had too many green areas on Open Street Map which turned out to be hard and time-consuming to find.  So basically I could get one OSM green area done per day, and that seemed excessive attention to a region that has almost no parks department plumbing.

On the other hand, I did a lot, but not quite all, of the other region, the U-District writ large, the one headed 33 on the map above.  Walking around there made me aware of changes at the UW that seemed to me to add up to an attempt to ensure that people like me, homeless people who'd basically spent our waking hours there before the pandemic, couldn't possibly do that again.  So when I got to campus, I started another series about UW buildings, and completed it for the West Campus, basically west of 15th Avenue NE.  However, this discouraged me considerably, and took so long that the autumn quarter ended, and I'd have to go photograph building hours all over again in January.

So the part of this region that I didn't cover is basically UW's Central and South campuses.  (The East Campus is in the region headed 23, instead.)

Restroom hikes, February to March 2023

On my days off from my last job to date, as a tax preparer, I hiked; and when tax season was over, I wrote the hikes up.  I didn't succeed in visiting all the parks with restrooms before the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation started opening the closed restrooms back up.

And that's the last hiking I did for you, dear Diary, until Monday, Labor Day, except for what's told here:  Seattle Parks Is Trying to Tell the Truth. Will I Survive the Shock?.  I hope to tell you about Monday's hike tomorrow.  Until then, good night and good day.

Water fountains, September 2024

Well, I wrote up Monday's hike and one more.  But, possibly because I'd chosen mystifying titles, nobody was reading those.  So it was easy to transfer the time I'd intended to devote to them to the page I'd planned about the buses.  And I've had basically no interest, this month, in finding out what's happening to park restrooms this winter.  I'm sorry, dear Diary, but not actually sorry enough to go hiking in the rain.  As other pages in you from earlier this year mention, I'm now in school, trying to put ever more distance between myself and homelessness, and this right now is my last long break before August.

Perhaps then, I'll do what I tried to do this past September:  find what I called then and still would call a "baseline".  Find out how the parks are operating in summer, so that if that winter I hike them again, I'll be able to tell what's different.  For that matter, locating water fountains (which are rather more mobile than restrooms) while the weather is nice.  If I can get that done next August and September, I can in turn realistically do winter hikes, after I graduate, next December.

Anyway.  Here are the two pages:

The first covers most of the parks in NW, the second a couple of parks in far north Seattle.

And while you've probably figured out the point, dear Diary, in case those titles confuse any more readers, you might as well tell them that after my happening on Thyme Patch Park on the first hike, I decided to call the rest of the pages after parks without plumbing that I hadn't visited for way too long.  The second page's title hammers on something I've mentioned to you before, that Seattle actually has parks (those exact two), not that far away, built on reservoir land, but without their own plumbing.

Well, good night, and good days and nights until we meet again, dear Diary.


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