Hike 4B: Mid-Northwest

Dear Diary,

Pushing my damaged cart, I proceeded on my hike.  I finally confirmed through Google Maps that I'd screwed up, misremembering NW 65th St rather than NW 85th St as the address of Golden Gardens Park.  This, of course, meant that the damage to the cart described in the previous page need never have happened.  The mistake, however, did enable me to cut a big chunk out of the Ballard hike.  So off I went.

Salmon Bay Park

This is a smallish, pleasant park, nowhere near Salmon Bay, which I first told you, dear Diary, about June 28 in "A Lazy Day on Loyal Heights", and have only discussed since then on December 16 in "The Water Fountains of Ballard, mid-October 2020".

This park's restrooms were not on last year's list of restrooms to keep open, and also weren't and still aren't on this year's map of open restrooms, the map I was hiking around North Seattle to check.  So in other words, the expected outcome was that these restrooms would be closed, and in contrast to all the surprises I'd found in and north of Woodland Park, that's exactly what I found.

The restroom building:

The closed doors:

I parked the cart by a bench to take those photos, and then ate breakfast there.  This gave me time to think.  I'd consciously skipped Ballard Pool, but if I really went on without it, I'd have to go much further north on the Ballard hike.  And Salmon Bay Park seemed pretty quiet and safe.  So I left my cart there and hurried back southeast.

Ballard Pool

This, being a building whose restrooms all open to the inside, wasn't on last year's list, and since it's a building that has yet to re-open, it isn't on this year's map either.  Well, it wasn't open, but there was something weird about that...

I'd introduced this to you, dear Diary, in "A Lazy Day", as the one pool which, when all the pools got renovated in winter 2019-2020, got delayed.  I found it in June still surrounded by construction fences.  So the visit last month was my first chance to look at its doors.

The postcard shot:

The closed door:

At Ballard Pool, in other words, COVID-19 hasn't happened yet.  It's stuck in a time warp.  Or more prosaically, nobody's thought to go update the signage.

Anyway, its doors were locked.

So I went back to Salmon Bay Park, retrieved my cart, and proceeded to 

Loyal Heights Community Center

This community center is in a playfield of the same name, and has restrooms whose doors open to the outdoors.  I told you about these places in the same pages, dear Diary, as Salmon Bay Park.  Now, Loyal Heights Community Center's restrooms were on last year's list, and at the time I visited were also on this year's map.  Yes, I know, dear Diary, if you look at the map today, it isn't there.  But it was.

So I was extremely surprised by what I found.

The postcard shot:

The closed doors:

The running water fountain:

I was in Topsy-Turvy Land.  I believe, however, that the water fountain has been shut off.  Now, this is an attached fountain, and on November 12 in "To a Land of Water and Honey" I suggested leaving it on, in the expectation that the building it's attached to would remain heated.  This is actually still the case, here, even though the restrooms are closed.  But notwithstanding the boasts of a Jackson Park employee in the page in question, one of the secrets to keeping outdoor water fountains running in winter is to know when to fold them, and although I was pleased to find that fountain running January 10, it has no business being on in the weather now expected for the next week.

As for the restrooms.  Only two restroom pairs in North Seattle are closed this winter that were on last year's list.  The Woodland Park pair called Rio has signs indicating vandalism as the reason, and a substitute nearby, the Cloverleaf rooms.  But the Loyal Heights signs just say "Seasonal Closure" as if this happened every year, and the obvious nearby substitute, Salmon Bay, is closed.

My best guess is that Topsy-Turvy Land was created for the benefit of people working on the playfield.  There's a major operation going on to replace artificial turf at a bunch of fields, mostly in North Seattle; we saw part of it at Magnuson Park, dear Diary, more is at Woodland Park, and one piece is at Loyal Heights.  Anyway, if the workers had keys to the restrooms, it would all make sense.  With the rooms locked, they'd get fewer annoying intruders; with the water fountain on, they'd get convenience.  This is, however, only my guess.

At any rate, these were the only park restrooms on the Northwest street grid open last winter, and this year they're closed.  Whatever the reason, it should be a good one.

Golden Gardens Park

Dear Diary, I've had four carts in the past three years, and they've all been gifts from the same person, who'd been keeping late hours in early January.  When this person had bought the damaged cart (#3), it turned out that two carts were almost the same price as one.  So there was a method to my madness, traipsing about northwest Seattle instead of hieing to my storage to lighten my load.  I was waiting until it was late enough to call and ask for cart #4.

While I waited for it, of course I took the photos of Golden Gardens Park.  Here there was another surprise.  Both pairs of restrooms in that park were on last year's list, and both were then on this year's map.  But the upper pair, the one near the off-leash area for dogs, was locked:

There was no sign, as there had been at Salmon Bay Park and Loyal Heights Community Center, and it dawned on me that it was a Sunday.  So on January 13 I went back, and found them open.

Now, dear Diary, I notify people who work on the map of what I find, by e-mail, before telling you about it.  This is so I can tell you as much as I want, but provide them the same information in a less wordy form.  I think those e-mails are why Sandel Playground and Loyal Heights Community Center have been removed from the map.  I greatly fear, however, that by telling the above story in an e-mail, I may have greatly inconvenienced a lot of dogs' people, because for some reason the upper restrooms at Golden Gardens Park have also been removed from the map.

Anyway, here's the restroom building:

I'm relieved to report that there were no surprises at the lower, beach, restrooms there.  The building (I had to back up almost to the water to get it all in):

The open doors:

The "sanican"s, just as indicated on the map:

Now, dear Diary, you may remember that January 10 was the day an atmospheric river began drenching us.  My plan was to wait it out in Carkeek Park's palatial shelter 2.  It took a while for my friend to bring cart #4, and then of course it had to be assembled, and, well, the days were a good deal shorter a month ago than they are now.  So I dropped one park after another from my itinerary, discarded cart #3 (a move I would later regret), and headed for shelter.

I need to take some more photos to write the next page, dear Diary, and also need to do things about my shelter today, so it'll probably be a few days before you hear from me again.  May they be happy ones.

A Lazy Day on Loyal Heights

Dear Diary,

The last page got well into the evening of Monday, June 22, but I wasn't quite done.  There was one more place left named for Ballard.  And it was becoming clear that bus shelters would be terrible places to sleep on weeknights - in Ballard (and "NW" generally) they only seem to build shelters for routes that run 5 A.M. to 1 A.M.  So I needed to do as my peers do and sleep in parks, and Gemenskap Park was hardly a good choice for that.

So I crossed 65th and went on to the third set of parks.

Ballard Pool

Yes, all the pools are closed due to the pandemic, but that doesn't mean I should ignore them.  What if one had outdoor restrooms, like some community centres?

But Ballard Pool is even closeder than the others.  Turns out there was a general update to all the pools last year, and Ballard Pool drew the short straw for unexpected problems, pushing it into the coronavirus shutdown.

And no, not that I could see that well through the fences and whatnot, but it doesn't seem to have external restrooms (or water fountains) either.  It's on the Ballard High School grounds, on 67th St just east of 15th Ave, if you want to look for yourself.

Off to 9th Ave and 70th for

Kirke Park

This is a medium-small (just under an acre) park whose historical focus is even odder than Ballard Corners's thing about five-and-dimes.  Turns out it's on land that used to belong to a cult, only since this was long ago it was called a church instead.  They were into long hair and vegetarianism, but unlike the hippies, also celibacy, and like most celibate cults died out in the end.  The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation website says the things I liked best, the ridiculously perfect ruins decorating the area where park gardens shade into the P-Patch, really are the ruins of the cult's buildings.  Some pictures:

Before taking those, I slept in a park for the first time since I was newly homeless, back in 2012.  Which reminds me:  In general, I did not see my peers in the parks north of 65th described in this page.  I may well have been the only person sleeping in Kirke Park that night.  I felt relatively safe doing so; the park has unusually many trees shading it.

6th Ave NW Pocket Park

This tiny park is all playground in my memory, though the department website says (and shows, with photos) there's also a lot of grass.  The website and I prefer the same aspect of the park - its architecture - but they like its details, while I just thought it hung together beautifully.  That said, they have a version of the same shot I took to demonstrate:

Next a long hike, across 80th St I think, to

Loyal Heights Playfield and Community Center

Having lived eight years on "Capitol" Hill, I have a certain fondness for, shall we say, aspirational neighbourhood names, and I amused myself this day imagining a Disloyal Valley, or Mountain, somewhere else.  Alas, turns out the area was named for the developer's daughter, and he probably didn't name another the opposite.

Anyway, as already mentioned, the Community Center here has restrooms built in with external doors, similarly to the Ballard and Laurelhurst ones (the ones at Green Lake and Magnuson differ more).  Neither Ballard nor Loyal Heights takes advantage of this setup to offer hot water as Laurelhurst does, however.  The restrooms at Loyal Heights do have lockable doors, but lack dryers.  Now, it occurred to me that because I once wrongly said Ravenna Park's upper restrooms lacked dryers, you, dear Diary, might not believe me about all these "NW" parks' restrooms, so I took a video to try to show you:

Like many parks, the playfield here is on two levels.  The upper one has the main community centre doors, a box painted blue with "Police Box" written on it but actually holding a free library, a playground, and a water fountain near that last, not running.  The lower part has the baseball diamonds and the restrooms, with a water fountain near each, not running.

From there it was just a couple of blocks south on 20th Ave to 

Salmon Bay Park

where I arrived around 8 A.M. to find the restrooms closed.  I called at 8:13 to find out whether they were supposed to be, and despite some confusion occasioned by the park's name (it's nowhere near Salmon Bay) eventually learned that the doors should be open.  So I found a shaded bench, and waited.

This was not the quick service I'd seen at Northacres Park.  Someone arrived at 9:24, opened the men's room, and started cleaning it.  Presumably they then repeated this at the women's room, but I'd already used the restrooms at the Community Center, I'd eaten calories for breakfast, and it must have been pretty close to then that I fell asleep.

This is why I had to correct my mistake about my shopping on the 22nd.  See, I started this trip on the 21st with most of a box of my usual weekend cream cookies, a day behind schedule.  So I had no business buying calories on Monday the 22nd.  But when I walked into the Safeway near downtown Ballard that day, I saw ads for a sale on their house brand of ice cream.  They used to sell a few flavours in this brand really cheaply, and for the first few years of my homelessness I bought one carton per summer, to give myself lazy days.  Then they got fancier with their house brand, more than doubling the price, so I've only had ice cream since then if I got to a Fred Meyer in the summer.  But this sale was for the old price.  So I bought a flavour they'd never offered at that price, close to my favourite, but as it turned out not close enough, and I didn't finish the carton.  Anyway, for some reason the lazy day was offset by one.

So I slept there on nothing but cream cookies, well past the bench's becoming sunny, waking around noon.  Of course I needed the restroom again, and of course it offered neither a dryer nor privacy, so I took a picture:

I'd already taken pictures of neat stuff.  The neatest thing about Salmon Bay Park is its rolling landscape, on which practically all the paths are paved.  This photo probably doesn't do it justice:

I also liked some tiles in the playground, although as I traveled on I kept seeing the same ones, which somewhat dampened the liking:

Finally I set off down 70th St towards

Webster Park

This small park is on 68th St near, but east of, 32nd Ave.  I'm pretty sure this is the park I vaguely remember only being able to approach from the west (i.e. 32nd) thanks to construction.  It's dominated by a playground, but I do remember it having grass, benches, etc., and resting for a time there.  EDIT JULY 3:  It has a water fountain too, which was running that day, but only in a trickle.

All the art is carefully separated from the playground so as to not to endanger the kids with it; it consists of a sundial by Chuck Nafziger and a set of four bas-reliefs by Charles S. Bigger called "Crossings", three side by side with words I couldn't read apparently telling a connected story.  Scrunched together as they are, they rather get in the way of photography, but here are my best tries:

Next north on 32nd to

Sunset Hill Park

OK, so the parks department website shows benches, and I remember people lying on the grass, but I still think this park at the edge of the cliff on 34th Ave between 75th and 77th Streets is all about its views.  It expresses this by putting a fence along the top of the cliff, and having its only trail run mostly alongside that fence.  I wasn't there at sunset but here's what I could do:

At this point I realised I couldn't get to my next destination from where I was.  I needed to go back south, and find a path to tomorrow's topic, dear Diary, the Ballard seacoast.