Abandoned Pages, part III: Topography

Dear Diary,

Let's get started, shall we?

I think a format is best, so I don't get carried away and leave stuff out.

So:

Why?

I was looking for something I could write without venturing out into the rain, in December 2020.  (This is the only one of these abandoned pages which I started while still homeless, but that's still a recurring pattern in this page.)  And as I said at the time, I really wanted a useful topography, to plan hikes better.  I'd downloaded some topographic maps, and noticed a pattern that clearly meant valleys.

What?

Basically, I was trying to render the 2020 U.S. Geological Survey topographical map of Seattle North into words.

Why not?

I knew the parts were badly written even at the time.  And the numbers reported by Blogspot, as compared with the numbers for, say, "North Seattle Street Ends", showed my then-readers agreed.

So when Jenny Durkan's Seattle government gave us the gift of a map pretending to tell the homeless where they could find restrooms, but pervaded in oh, so many ways by lies, I ventured out into the rain anyway, in January 2021, and that was that.

What now?

Well, I still wanted a topography of North Seattle, but it gradually dawned on me that I didn't know enough to write it yet.  When I found a good book about the Ship Canal, and added a modicum of research to it, that became one of your most popular pages, dear Diary.

But there is, near as I can tell, no good book about the topography of North Seattle.  So I'd allowed those parts to devolve into lists of valleys.  They were supposed to be about "Land and Water" but I'd let the water win, and made neither the land nor the water worth reading about.

This summer, I finally downloaded a free physical geography textbook and started reading; I'll finish pretty soon.  It's not a very good book - no equations, few chemical symbols, and no attempt to present a coherent field.  But it isn't worthless, and I decided to give physical geography another try.  I probably won't finish that, which I was able to download for free at Suzzallo Library, very soon.  It still doesn't have equations, and not many more chemical symbols, but it does begin with a chapter about physical geography as a discipline.

Anyway, the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library has introductions to geology and to pedology ("Soil Science").  I haven't found any for hydrology yet.  But once I'm fully introduced, I'll have to apply all this knowledge to a lot more kinds of maps, and then use those maps to, yes, venture out in the rain and take photos.

(And I'm taking an introduction to digital photography class this fall, so maybe by then, I'll know how to photograph creeks.)

Given school and work, of these abandoned pages, this first one is likely to be nearly the last of those I try to revive, but it isn't forgotten, dear Diary, and because I'm so interested, it's pretty sure to be revived.