More details of yesterday's hike

Dear Diary,

Now that I can write in you from my laptop again, it turns out I already told you everything that mattered from Saturday's hike in "NE" and elsewhere.

My plan for yesterday's hike was actually more ambitious than just for "NW", but, well, I haven't hiked for you in summer before, dear Diary, and as I should've remembered from long summer hikes in years past, I don't move as fast when it's hot out.

Anyway, there are some things worth mentioning from the parks of southern "NW".

I'm sure you remember, dear Diary, but perhaps people who read you need to know that all the photos of running (or not) water fountains and open (or closed) restroom doors are in a public Google Drive folder.  All these photos are dated partly by including the relevant day's newspaper, and photos of those newspapers' front pages, for comparison, are in a sub-folder titled, um, "Front pages".

Golden Gardens Park

The park's hours are being cut, lumped in with Alki as a violent beach (apparently for good reason).  Before the pandemic, the park was open the usual schedule, 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M.  During the lockdowns, it was one of the parks whose closing time changed every few months.  And now that that's apparently over, it isn't going back to normal, but to the less common standard schedule, 6 A.M. to 10 P.M.:

In more pleasant news, the external water supply that enables showering has definitely been turned on.  I saw the lower spigot used, and the amount of wet pavement, plus an actual puddle (not shown in this photo), near the spigots makes it plain:

The only water fountain I found that I couldn't elicit water from yesterday was here.  I'm pretty sure it wasn't running, and it had a hole in it that suggests it was disabled, but based on a previous photo, it has an unusual control:

Yesterday I didn't notice that control:

Okay, looks like I didn't ignore that dial, but rather it was actually missing.  The thing intruding into the lower photo's bottom is one of the earpieces on my glasses.

Loyal Heights Community Center and Playfield

At the Community Center, child care is still the main thing going on.  As a result, during summer at least, the entire upper half of the Playfield, which was a construction site when I last visited, has replaced construction's metal fences with orange plastic fences.  Nobody showed hostility to my photographing the water fountain.  But remember, children are still ineligible to get vaccinated, so for them, the pandemic is still in full swing.  I saw a sign urging that park visitors mask up and keep distant, and couldn't justify photographing it as an oddity.  Anyone who visits upper Loyal Heights Playfield anytime soon should mask up and keep distant.

On the other hand, this sign still stuck to the fence of the playfield proper, lower down, is surely past its time:

Is anyone really going to try to close a park in Seattle this summer because it's busy?

The water fountain attached to the Community Center, but in the lower half of the Playfield, is running, but its drain seems to be clogged.  The bowl was full the entire time I was there:

Webster Park

The water fountain which only supplied a trickle of water all last year is now actually running properly:

Seattle Public Library, Ballard branch

This time, the door to the restrooms appeared to be locked, as on a previous visit, but the security guy was right next to the door, ready to let people in.  On the other hand, that won't last much longer:

Now, naively, this looks like bad news.  But the restrooms at Ballard Community Center are open, if not too reliably on Sundays.  Or if one specifically wants library restrooms, the Green Lake branch is open Mondays, and the Northeast and University branches are open Sundays.  And,y'know, the libraries have been expanding their hours every couple of weeks; it's possible, if somewhat unlikely, that by July 21st, the Ballard branch will actually be open seven days per week.

Or, of course, people could just discipline themselves not to need restrooms on Sundays and Mondays.  Isn't self-discipline what homeless people need most anyway?

Speaking of downtown Ballard and homeless self-discipline, during my visit to Ballard Commons yesterday, I didn't hear any yelling or arguments.  How unusual.

The Burke-Gilman Trail

In Seattle Public Utilities's pseudo-map of street water fountains, one is listed with an address of "6049 Seaview Ave."  Now, assuming this to mean Seaview Ave NW, it turns out 6049 is a real address, quite a few yards north of the NW 60th St Viewpoint:

It's private property.  I didn't see any water fountains, street-style or no, in any of the areas more or less publicly accessible, nor on the verge.  There is a street fountain on Seaview, but it's half a mile south, near the NW 57th St Street End, and also on the Burke-Gilman Trail, which in the relevant block is the sidewalk on the south side of Seaview.

Mind, SPU has done something rather impressive here.  That fountain had been knocked over and eviscerated by metal thieves.  It takes some guts to put another in the exact same place.  But I don't understand why they're advertising the wrong location for it.  Metal thieves are very unlikely to consult SPU press releases to find targets.

 

Anyway, the new fountain's water is good.

OK, that seems to be it for yesterday's hike.  Something different soon, dear Diary.  Until then, happy days and good nights.

Amazing Water Fountain News

Dear Diary,

You won't believe this, but as of yesterday, Wednesday, July 29,

all water fountains in Ravenna Park and Laurelhurst Playfield were RUNNING!

I saw Laurelhurst Playfield's unique fountain - the one near the tennis courts - turned on myself.  I did not see the nearer of the baseball diamond water fountains turned on, but it was on when I checked that morning, so it must have been turned on the day before (Tuesday, July 28) or earlier.

I had last checked the Laurelhurst Playfield fountains Tuesday, July 21, and the lower Ravenna Park fountain Sunday, July 26; at those days' ends, all were shut off.  I haven't actually verified that the upper Ravenna Park fountain is still running in the past 24 hours, but I last checked it Friday, July 24.  I also expect to get my water for today from it, since it's inconvenient for me to get to University Village today.

Most of the newly running fountains - the baseball pair at Laurelhurst plus lower Ravenna - are double fountains.  In each of these, one tap draws water relatively weakly, but the other overshoots the bowl.  So be wary.

Rachel Schulkin of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation told me some time ago that the water fountains were shut off to forestall the spread of COVID-19.  Evidently the department has been reading the news enough to know that metal objects outdoors are unlikely vectors.  Yay.

The only other fountain I know to be running in the area is the street fountain at 15th Ave south of 43rd St, which I did verify last night.

Surely it's just a coincidence that in my local area, the water's restoration came first to the parks with money around them, as reflected by their 6 A.M. to 10 P.M. schedules (as against the more usual 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M. ones).

I checked the following fountains after 7 P.M.  None was running when previously checked, and none was running tonight, either.

Bryant Playground
Burke-Gilman Playground Park (only recently shut off)
Christie Park (actually, park still not open)
Cowen Park
Ravenna-Eckstein Park
University Playground
View Ridge Playfield

I didn't check in the past 24 hours:

upper Ravenna Park (as noted above)
Magnuson Park (but something a park employee said in my hearing suggests that the fountain attached to the beach restrooms may now be running)
the street fountain on the Burke-Gilman Trail near 30th St.

I can't travel this much daily, but will see what I can tell y'all going forward.  Exciting times, dear Diary; you'll be at least as shocked by the news of restrooms I expect to write in you later today.

History and Parks, part I

Dear Diary,

Monday June 22 I went from Fremont, which treasures quirk, to Ballard, which treasures history.  Ballard used to be a separate city (for 18 years) until it agreed to annexation by Seattle, and it never lets the visitor to its parks forget it.  (To be fair, though, most of this insistence is in parks I don't get to until the next page.)

Anyway, I've been very liberal with photos this trip, and I was worried some would disappear, as they sometimes do when my camera gets crowded, so I tried to post that night.  Unfortunately, the Ballard public library turned out to treat internet access the way many public buildings treat electricity - free inside, but forbidden out.  So here I am at the Greenwood branch days later with a huge backlog, and I'll just have to see how far I can get.  I probably won't fully catch up for days to come.

After the Fremont Canal Park below, everything address-wise is "NW" for pages and days to come.  Other things I encountered less constantly, but still many times every day:  crows that disapproved of my existence, and would chase me for a block or two to tell me about it; and winds that disapproved of my taking notes on paper, and scattered those notes so many times that last night (June 24) my inseam split on my 854th retrieval dive.  Finally, until I say otherwise, you have to assume that I saw my peers, at and between many of the "NW" parks; it would be invidious to call out all the campers, so I only mention my fellow homeless when I have a point to make.

I EDITED this page Sunday June 28 on looking at my receipts and finding I'd misreported my grocery shopping.

I EDITED it again Monday June 29 on revisiting Sunset Place and probably Cascade Place.

First a leftover from Sunday night.

The Burke-Gilman Trail

It didn't occur to me until I experienced it that because the trail goes under bridges, it offers the chance to watch them split from below.  Not actually as impressive a sight as watching that mountain of bridge rise in front of you when you're on it, but maybe interesting still.

A. B. Ernst Park

This hasn't closed for its expansion construction yet, but the writing is literally on the wall:

The fence shown there doesn't block the trail yet, but it will - construction is planned for August.  The sign includes a map:

This makes it clear that the existing park's dubious main attraction, some Brutalist concrete benches, will not survive in its present form.  Now, I've never seen that thing as "neat stuff", but I have no objection to documenting something soon to go, so:

Apparently when they're done the trail will go all the way down, no stairs needed, so I'm altogether happy.

The non-Jurassic parts of Fremont Canal Park

Apparently they squeeze the Fremont Fair into here every year, so talking about this park is probably coals to Newcastle, but anyway there's something sort of neat.  There are four odd pieces of furniture along the park's length, at least one in the "NW" part.  Three of them, including the "NW" one, are surrounded by bushes, as if to disguise them as incipient topiary.

And one is a chess bench.  I have something of a soft spot for chess benches; one of my last student newspaper stories was about them.  More precisely, about what proved a successful attempt to destroy a chess community by splitting its benches up, so it's kind of perverse of me to highlight this solitary one, but anyway, a chess bench disguised as topiary:

Fremont Canal Park gives every sign of abandoning parkness for trailness well before its notional end at 3rd Ave NW, but if you stick it out that far, you can go straight up 3rd to:

Ross Park

This park is three blocks west of Fremont Peak Park, and probably about three blocks down from it.  It's the only park in this page that isn't open 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M.; Ross keeps the less common 6 A.M. to 10 P.M. schedule.  There's some dispute about the name.  The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation website calls it "Ross Playground".  The park's scoreboard calls it "Ross Playfield":

But I'm going with the park's main sign:

Anyway, this was my first stop with a restroom.  The water fountain wasn't working, of course, but the restroom worked fine.  (I won't be saying that about most "NW" park restrooms.)

One bit of neat stuff is in the playground, which sort of successfully carries through the spider theme suggested:

But there's something neater between the restrooms, a mosaic whose makers' names I haven't found:

From there I continued on 3rd to...

A small neighbourhood with four very small parks

The neighbourhood is one I'd glimpsed, because it's just west of Woodland Park Zoo.  The first park I reached is

Sunset Place

This is a triangle, a rather tall one with some benches at the top to take in whatever view can be had at 1st Ave and 52nd St.  My first reaction on seeing it was "What a good use of space!", and I stand by that.  But I didn't climb up to the benches, which was apparently foolish of me, because the parks department website seems to say there's a water fountain there.  Sorry!

EDIT June 29:  OK, now I have.  And there is indeed a water fountain up there, a bizarrely familiar elementary school model, but it RUNS!  This means all three working water fountains in "NW" are south of 60th St.  Sorry, I didn't taste the water.  But here's a picture of the fountain and the park:

The Mystery of Cascade Place

This time I'll actually quote the parks department website, which in a single sentence:

This turnaround island at the end of Palmer Court NW is in Ballard just west of NW Market St at NW 52nd St.

manages to get at most two things right.  This park was the subject of the first question I addressed to Rachel Schulkin, Communications Manager for the department.  (I'd tried to reach her before but never gotten an answer; this turned out to be because I hadn't asked specific questions.)  Anyway, she answered but didn't sound certain; going by her answer, it does exist, it is at an end of Palmer Court, and it is technically in Ballard.  It is not, however, a turnaround island, near 52nd St, or just west of Market St.  I took a bunch of pictures.  First, the situation.  Palmer Court is a short gravel street that heads southeast from 2nd Ave some feet south of 52nd St.  The address given by the department, not that those are always reliable, puts Cascade Place at the interior end, where there's no turnaround island, but is a bunch of greenery.  This is where Google Maps and Ms. Schulkin say it is.  Presumably it's a different part of this greenery from this one:

I also took pictures of both ends of Palmer Court:

and of 52nd St just west of Market St (specifically, Baker Ave and 52nd)

just to show the absence of traffic islands.

EDIT 6/29:  On the premise that the park, if it exists, must be at the interior end of Palmer Court, I took a video of that end today.  I think the likeliest candidate for parkhood is whatever is at the top of the low steps seen in the video, but given the "PRIVATE PROPERTY" sign and a loudly barking large dog nearby, I thought there was too much chance someone with a shotgun was what's at the top of those steps.  Anyway, the video:

Rainier Place

This triangle is where 53rd St intersects with 54th St, I am not making this up.  The department website gets only one thing wrong, calling it "grassy".  It is dominated by a conifer tree whose generic name I should but don't know, and the needles discourage grass from most of the space.

Greenwood Triangle

This triangle is at 3rd Ave and 55th St, strictly speaking across the street from the weirdly laid out small neighbourhood, and actually is grassy.

Next west on Market up to 9th Ave.

Gilman Playground

This extends from 54th past 53rd, but private houses fill half the second block; it runs one long block from 9th to 11th Avenues.  At 4 acres it's bigger than Ross (2.35) let alone the others.  So it has a restroom and water fountain, but here's what's strange:  both work!  I was so gobsmacked I took pictures to establish a chain of evidence.  Working water fountain:

That water fountain is near this restroom:

And that restroom is in Gilman Playground:

You see, I'd gone on a quest for the hypothetical western boundary of the dry park water fountain problem, and I'd found it!  Admittedly, at the westernmost park water fountain in that part of town, but you can't have everything.  (Remember, I hadn't yet found the water fountain at Sunset Place.)

The men's room has a lockable door, but no dryer.

By far the neatest thing I saw Monday at Gilman Playground was an absence.  There were a lot of tents in the park, and some visibly homeless people (including me) outside them.  There were also a lot of visibly housed people there.  And they were all minding their own business.  It was such a refreshing change from the usual park interactions within either group or between the groups.  I concluded that when Ballard Commons was swept not long ago, all the best-behaved of my peers had come to Gilman Playground, but I sure don't know why the housed were behaving so well.

I eventually decided to photograph some drums in the playground.  Plastic, they aren't loud, just audible enough to get across the acoustics lesson of differently sized instruments:

From Gilman Playground I went to the nearby Safeway and got the day's groceries, about which I'll talk more when posting about the 23rd.  But then I headed south for one more park, dear Diary, after which I have to stop writing you for a while, but I'll try to return today.  This is the 14th Ave NW Boat Ramp, and isn't close to any other parks.  Unlike the Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp, it had no "sanican" that day.  I took a picture of its seascape:

Then, having done Number One at both Ross and Gilman, I discovered an urgent need to do Number Two.  So I went to Fred Meyer, and paid for the use of their restroom (which also lacked drying capacity at the time) by buying a map of the Eastside there.

Next page, today, I hope, covers downtown Ballard.

Hours and Doors

Dear Diary,

In telling you at such great length about the parks of north-central Seattle the past two days, incredible though it may seem, I left something out.  As I've told you before, Seattle parks have two main schedules, open either 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M. or 6 A.M. to 10 P.M.  In the "NE" parks I covered earlier, the shorter 6 A.M. schedule is pretty common:

• Albert Davis Park
• Laurelhurst Playfield
• Matthews Beach
• Northacres Park
• Ravenna Park
• University Playground

This schedule is much less common in southern "N":

• Gas Works Park

Another schedule, unknown in "NE", is more common in "N":  parks open 24 hours.  This applies to:

• Green Lake Park
• Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp
• Wallingford Steps

And as in "NE" Jackson Park has a unique schedule, in "N" the Woodland Park Rose Garden does:  7 A.M. to 10 P.M.

Of course, most of Jackson Park is managed by a concessionaire.  This is also true of the rose garden, of the zoo and lawn bowling greens in Woodland Park, and of the golf course in Green Lake Park.

The coronavirus has wrought massive changes in these schedules.  Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp has gone from 24 to 0 hours; the Woodland Park Zoo and Rose Garden, both run by a single outfit, are also closed.  I'm not sure about the lawn bowling; the Green Lake Golf Course, like the Jackson Park one, seems to be modifying its methods but not its hours.

Also, however, there's the extremely soft new closing time, 8 P.M., for the big and popular parks.  In "NE" this applies only to Magnuson Park, where I don't remember seeing the signs recently, so I'd thought it was over with, but no, in "N" it's alive and well.  The following parks I've discussed in those two pages theoretically close at 8:

• Gas Works Park
• Green Lake Park
• Woodland Park

If you'll remember, dear Diary, I mentioned Green Lake Park restrooms as open or closed up to 10 P.M., and nobody bothered me.

Now that Green Lake Park has a closing time, it needs an opening time, but I haven't been able to find it.  Maybe it's now officially closed 24 hours, like the Sunnyside boat ramp.  (EDIT 10/19 - Nope.  Rachel Schulkin, communications manager for Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, told me long ago now that Green Lake Park, while not open 24 hours, opens at 4:30 A.M.)

To switch topics.  I was supposed to go south today; what happened?  I woke up, saw rain, and got lazy.  Rainy days I spend mostly in a place where there's nowhere to sit, so the previous days had been hard.  Soon after I got to the day's first park I made a deal with myself:  look at the local restrooms, and I could goof off the rest of the day (which was already drying out).  What with the apparent return of unpredictable closures, I meant today to bring back door shots, but Blogspot won't let me upload pictures today, lucky for you, dear Diary.

Executive summary:  Burke-Gilman Playground Park either opened really late or closed, otherwise normal.

Burke-Gilman Playground Park, 8:55 A.M., closed.

Lower Ravenna Park, 10:33 A.M., open.

Upper Ravenna Park, 11:41 A.M., open.

Cowen Park, 12:04 P.M., closed.

University Playground, 12:32 P.M., closed.

Still no water from the water fountains at lower Ravenna and Cowen Parks and University Playground.

South tomorrow, I hope.  Coming soon:  Ballard.

Top of the City, Part II

Dear Diary,

Today's page is about four parks - or five if you count as the parks department does - that are all pretty close to each other, and that, taken together, project an image of an almost normal spring in the parks.  Two have no plumbing; in the other two, only one shut-off water fountain attests the current abnormal situation.

They're also all kind of hard to enter, so I'm giving more detailed directions.  They're all between 1st and 15th Avenues and 125th and 145th Streets.

Jackson Park

The parks department's website lists 413 parks.  It does not, however, list among those Jackson Park.  This is partly because it leases much of the park to a private company, Premier Golf.  (So this is the flip side of Nathan Hale Playfield and Cedar Park.)  Sad to say, this private company does a significantly better job of running things than I've found elsewhere in northeast Seattle.  Only two other parks there have all their plumbing working - Burke-Gilman Playground Park and Little Brook Park - and those two have only one or two restrooms and one water fountain each.

Visited May 14, 15, 26 and 27; over four restrooms, at least two pairs open, and at least two water fountains, both running

Jackson Park is, according to the parks department website and signage, two entirely separate not-quite-park entities:  Jackson Park Golf Course and Jackson Park Perimeter Trail.  Both are easiest to enter from 15th Ave, but the actual entrance to the golf course and the most informative entrance to the trail are further west, officially at 10th, actually best reached from 11th Ave and 130th St.  A sign for the trail near that intersection has a map of the trail on its trail-facing back.  As for the golf course, from 11th and 130th look around and identify the most active parking lot.  At that lot's head, you go up a steep incline to reach the main golf course buildings open to the public.

I don't buy the idea that these are two separate non-parks.  For one thing, both have the same official hours, "Dawn to Dusk", which is decidedly non-standard for Seattle parks.  However, all the plumbing is in the golf course.  I found much too little information online about the trail, so when I get the chance, I'll describe it in more detail.  Meanwhile, the golf course.

I didn't visit the course proper, only the cluster of buildings at the top of that hill.  There are essentially three - a cafe, which wasn't open anytime I was there; a shop staffed by professional golfers, so called the "pro shop", the course's nerve centre; and a building supporting a driving range, which is free and open to the public.  Each of these has restrooms.  One pro assured me that all these restrooms are open to the public; another, that no Premier Golf employee would block a well behaved member of the public from them.  I'm unsure anyway about the cafe - aren't restaurants in general still keeping their restrooms closed?  But the driving range has two single-user rooms; the shop's men's room features several toilets, with the usual privacy features so often lacking for park toilets.

I tried the driving range's men's room; it had hot water, believe it or not, but was out of soap that morning, May 27.  (So was BGPP's men's room, for days now.  I take this as a good thing, actually - it implies that parks employees are prioritising getting the rooms open, not getting them perfect - though of course in a better world I wouldn't need to carry hand soap.)

The water fountains I found are side by side between the restrooms at the driving range.  Of course there could be others.  Some talk about how Jackson Park adapted to the coronavirus mentions "restrooms" removed from the course itself, but I'm told these were only, as this implies, "sanican"s.

Licorice Fern Natural Area

Visited May 15; no plumbing

We've already seen with Mock Creek Ravine that individual parts of the Thornton Creek Natural Area can have their own names.  It now turns out you can have nested Natural Areas, as here.  Licorice Fern has, according to Google, not the parks department, an address, and if you go to that address, the dead end of 130th St west of 12th Ave, you find a greensward with two trails leading away.  I followed one, though not far, somewhat shocked by the idea of a trail anywhere near Thornton Creek.  (But wait until tomorrow...)  I found a map online (PDF) later according to which these two trails are the only ones, and excused myself on that basis from exploring further.

Flicker Haven Natural Area

Visited May 15 and 27; no plumbing

This is the current official name of an area south of Jackson Park, or sometimes considered itself the southwest of Jackson Park.  It has also been known as "Thornton Creek Park #1".  I haven't been able to reconcile descriptions of that with what I've found except by assuming the descriptions actually refer to the P-Patch which is in the northern end of what Google Maps thinks of as this park.  That P-Patch is on 10th Ave just north of a notional 130th St, on 10th represented by an overpass.  

The 8th Ave border isn't much more informative.  I couldn't tell whether the dead end of 130th St east of 8th included any public property.  Where 8th Ave turns and becomes 8th Ct, a trail appears, continuing north in the line of 8th Ave until it descends, probably to merge with the Jackson Park Perimeter Trail.

This page has a sort of map, but at least on my phone it doesn't render well.  Evidently people have worked within this area, but I don't know how they entered.

On this trip, I already knew I'd be covering Green Lake and other parks with strictly "N" addresses.  There are only two parks west of I-5 with "NE" addresses; since this next one has restrooms, I decided to cover them in this trip and set of pages.

Northacres Park and Playfield

Visited May 15 and 27; two pairs of restrooms (one all-gender single-user), for openness see below, and three water fountains, two running

This park is both terribly and excellently named.  It's entirely south of Jackson, Little Brook and Cedar Parks, and it's smaller not only than Jackson and Magnuson Parks but also than Ravenna Park and Matthews Beach.  But it still feels like acres, especially along its thickly forested north side, which stretches from I-5 to 1st Ave along 130th St, and it's still pretty far north for most of us.  As for its surname:  in Seattle's park nomenclature, "park" outranks "playfield"; Magnuson Park has a dozen ball fields, but nobody tacks an "and Playfields" onto its name.  This, too, however, makes sense, as I'll explain.

Northacres Park has the less common of the Seattle parks' two usual schedules.  It used to have the more common, and in this photo I can only hope you can see the different schedules on the two signs:

The two schedules are 4 A.M. to 11:30 P.M. (the default) and 6 A.M. to 10 P.M.  I suspect but do not know that the latter is usually thanks to neighbours.  Other parks I've covered that open at 6 are:

Laurelhurst Playfield

Ravenna Park

University Playground

Matthews Beach

Albert Davis Park

The park's official address is on 1st Ave, near a notional 127th St.  There one finds a seemingly ordinary park, with two age-specific playgrounds, a basketball hoop crowded by art, and weird plumbing:  two single-user all-gender restrooms, with two winter-hardened water fountains attached.  The weirdest thing about this not so ordinary park, however, is that in several directions it's surrounded by woods.

I don't remember any issues with the restrooms, which I used on May 15, except that I found them locked.  I'd had little luck calling the parks department weeks earlier, but decided to try again, and not only reached someone, but he got multiple parks employees to come unlock them.  On May 27 I filled two 20-ounce bottles from the water fountains and found it good water.

The guy who actually unlocked the rooms on May 15 represented himself as the boss of the person who'd forgotten to.  He's the one who told me Little Brook's restroom had reopened - he'd done that the same morning.  He wouldn't give me his name, but said he was close to retirement; I'll probably quote him enough to get him in trouble if any of his bosses ever read any of this, but doubt the trouble would be serious.

For now, however, I only need to thank him for pointing me to the playfield, which is in a different clearing in the woods, several blocks away.  This is why "and Playfield" makes sense to me here.  You reach Northacres Playfield by continuing south on 1st Ave, turning left onto 125th St, and turning left again on 3rd Ave.  This is a couple of baseball diamonds, a couple of picnic tables, restrooms and a water fountain; on May 27, without a game going, I found it kind of sad.

That day I used the men's room (which was open on both May 15 and May 27).  It was poor for privacy, but not as bad as Waldo Dahl Playfield or Little Brook Park.  Its sink, however, is of the same design as the one I remember from Cal Anderson Park:  spraying so much water horizontally that it's much better for soaking whatever's in your pockets than for washing your hands.

The water fountain, near but not visibly attached to the restrooms, is not running.  And that returns us to the real world of northeast Seattle's parks in May 2020, the last ten of which I'll discuss in less detail tomorrow.

I Level Up, Wielding "Sanicans"

OK, dear Diary,

Now maybe I get it.  I hadn't understood that our mayor's challenge was progressive.  A kind of game, if you will.

I'd meant to take yesterday off from it, just lazily use Safeway's toilet and University Village's water fountains and rest.  But I woke up with hands dirty in a way that I OCDishly handle with a really long wash that I couldn't possibly get away with at Safeway.  Luckily the restrooms at Burke-Gilman Playground Park were open.

You can see my cart in the doorway of the men's room.  (And yes, that's my umbrella cropping that photo.)

After that, though, I didn't go back to any parks the rest of the day.

Today has been ordinary too.  Again, BGPP was open:

But this time I did check Ravenna Park - and its restrooms were locked, its water fountain still not running.

So yeah, a game.  On Friday, with Ravenna Park's restrooms open, the numerous homeless people of the U-District should have intuited that they wouldn't have far to go.  Today, with it closed, the object is to get to BGPP, Magnuson or Green Lake, again without being told.  It's kind of like the no-notice sweeps that have become the norm lately:  a game of musical chairs our kind mayor casts us in for our entertainment.

But like a more modern game, our mayor's game has hidden complexities, side quests so to speak.  You'll remember, dear Diary, that I told you back in my first note that my primary concern is running water.  So I haven't said much to you about "sanicans", which feature no running water, or even "hand washing stations", which don't feature much.  But our mayor has made it very clear that her game includes "sanicans".

So I thought, when both my gut and my bladder threatened to burst last night, exactly as I'd planned, but too late for park bathrooms, that I'd failed the mayor's challenge yet again, my body insisting on untimely relief.  But two friends wanted to talk, so I didn't manage to reach Safeway until 9:50, ten minutes before closing, when my dastardly plan to use their bathroom was instantly foiled by a locked door.

I hoped to shut my body up, so dawdled awhile, but finally gave in and went to find a "sanican" the University keeps in the lower, eastern part of its campus.  But it was out of toilet paper.  Oh, what to do?

After more dawdling, I finally did Number One in that "sanican", which enabled me to hike north to Ravenna Park, which has one next to a "hand washing station".  Now, last night the Ravenna Park "sanican" was surrounded by three things one would hope never to find near one:  mud, an actual puddle, and a hose emerging from it, its other end loose on the ground, so help me God.  Today around noon, 12 hours after my adventure, the hose was gone, but you can still see the mud and the puddle:

Probably both are made by the machines that service the "sanican", not by actual spillage, but try to tell yourself that at 1 A.M.  Anyway, I was finally able to do Number Two, followed by a decidedly non-OCDish sort of hand-washing, and get on with the hike to bed.

So yeah, I thought I'd flunked, with untimely bodily urges leading me to break an actual law and enter a park after closing.  But now maybe I understand the kindness of our mayor's master plan.    The correct way to see things is that by wielding the awesome power of the "sanicans", I advanced in knowledge, and became better prepared to spend today miles from running water.  Gosh, I wonder what more sources of hidden knowledge our mayor has included in this game?  Dear Diary, I can't wait to find out!