Hikes 11C and 13: Matthews Beach

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry it's taken me so long, but this is the last page about my January hikes that I have to write.  It also covers the second hike I took housed.

Hike 11C - January 22

As I left Burke-Gilman Playground Park on January 22, the sun was already beginning to go down.  Fortunately, the Burke-Gilman Trail goes, well, not straight, but anyway directly from BGPP to Matthews Beach, so it was a straightforward trip.  All the same, I was racing against time, and ultimately lost.

I didn't even try to photograph the best face of the restroom building.  Those are "sanican"s that are there, but in this case the map I was checking also claimed the restroom was open.  True, I don't remember whether it said one restroom was open, or two were, and that matters because:

one restroom is still boarded up.  The other is not, but I was unable to open it.

I figured maybe someone was camping in it.  It was only 5:50 P.M., after all, and so far too early for a restroom to be locked for the night.  So I waited for someone from the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's maintenance department to show up to lock this one solitary restroom door in far northeastern Seattle that should need locking.

See, this building actually has two pairs of restrooms in it.  I've just shown you, dear Diary, the closed doors of the all-gender single stall restrooms, but what about the multi-user rooms that also feature showers, on the other side?  Well, those are only supposed to open in summer, like the Bathhouse Theater's in Green Lake Park, but unlike those, these don't also open in winter:

So Matthews Beach only had one room meant to be open.  Meadowbrook Playfield had none.  It was probably parks personnel staffing Meadowbrook Pool's restroom access, but probably not maintenance people.  Little Brook Park has the only restroom (singular) in Lake City, it was closed...  Basically, that restroom in Matthews Beach was the only one between Magnuson Park and Northacres Playfield that was supposed to be open.  But it's vulnerable to camping, and I found it locked.

So I stayed, growing increasingly uncomfortable, until about 7:50 P.M.  No parks personnel drove anywhere near the restroom building in that time.  I eventually had to use a "sanican" myself, and having taken off my mask while waiting, forgot to put it back on.  This led to a conversation with a fellow homeless man, a friendlier conversation than one would expect given my mistake.  But still no parks personnel.

After I gave up, I started pushing my cart, which had performed splendidly in the race despite our losing it, down Sand Point Way.  About halfway, right on schedule, the cart's right front wheel jumped off its spokes, just as I could have expected.  I didn't understand the way the back left wheel was malfunctioning, so I didn't know whether changing the wheel would fix the problem, but I did know that I'd had two good front wheels on the cart I'd thrown away about two weeks before.  Oops.  That left back wheel responded to the situation by behaving itself for an hour or so before getting back to its waywardness.

I lived on the streets of Seattle for about six years lugging everything I thought I needed around in satchels that were exposed to the rain and that I couldn't put down while it rained.  I wasn't sure I could stand to go back to that way of life, but more to the point, I needed to carry a lot more during the lockdowns than I had previously.  Sanitiser, detergent, paper towels, lots more books ...  By this point I'd already been co-operating for some time with Maia Robbins, who organised the GoFundMe that's now housed me, but this was the first time I had to face seriously the fact that I couldn't realistically continue living homeless, whether or not the GoFundMe went anywhere.  Not while COVID-19 shut everything down.

So, dear Diary, I didn't hike for you after that until I was housed.  The first hike I took then, hike 12, is the subject of another page, but I did eventually get back to Matthews Beach.

I'd had plenty of time to think about it.  I could see that a parks maintenance guy might think it made no sense to drive all that way to unlock one room, that would probably be blocked by a camper anyway, and then lock it again that night.  I could sympathise.

But that's looking at things exactly backwards.  It is not appropriate to sympathise with the idea that the less someone does, the less one should expect them to do.  Meadowbrook Playfield's restrooms apparently didn't have to close.  Why, then, were they closed?  The shower restrooms at Matthews Beach are in the same building as the ones that were supposed to be open.  And they presumably have access to hot water.  So they're quite obviously winter-safe; why weren't they opened?  Reduce the options to the two all-gender single-stall rooms, and board one of those up, and it can look realistic to forget the other.  But the parks department had no reason at all, in forgetting the other, to forget a significant percentage of the city.

Hike 13 - April 3

Anyway, I went back to Matthews Beach.  I didn't arrive much earlier - 5:30 P.M. - but it was enough later in the year that the sun hadn't yet set.

I stopped along the way to take photos of the nearby bit of the Thornton Creek complex.  Since Matthews Beach is where Thornton Creek enters Lake Washington, the creek there is probably the main, unified creek, but I haven't worked on your "Land and Water" series for months, dear Diary, and am not sure.  In any event, I'd taken pictures of it months earlier and then deleted them by mistake, so although I'd written about "Chinook Passage Natural Area" May 6 in "Go North, Aging Man!" and December 1 in "To the Beaches!", I'd yet to show you, dear Diary, a photo.  Well, here are three.

In several places, gaps in the woods that weren't there last May, as best I recall, allow one to see inside the forest a fair way.  My previous attempt to capture that effect in a photo was a dismal failure, and I'm not sure this is any better, but:

Another such gap opened up a view of the creek, although I'm not at all sure my photo actually caught that:

Although it's been several years since the park got a more specific name, its sign hasn't been updated:

Anyway, I finally got back to Matthews Beach, to find the same situation as before, only sunlit.  This time I made extra sure by staying close to the restroom doors - the ones that were supposedly being unlocked and locked this winter - as much as I could, and almost always staying within sight of them.  No parks personnel had shown up by the time I left around 7:45 P.M.

I did move away from the specific door I was observing to take pictures, this time, of all the things I was supposed to on the January hikes.  The building's best face, first.  This building, like the beach one at Golden Gardens, is so extremely wide, or long, that I had to back very far up to take this shot, and I'm not sure how much of the building can actually be seen:

The restrooms that were supposed to be open:

Oh, good.  I'd hoped to show the latch in the photo just above, and it looks like that worked.

The restrooms that weren't supposed to be open, except in an alternate universe in which Seattle's government had thought about how best to serve the public, and I do mean the public - Matthews Beach isn't in an area where homeless people could plausibly live - anyway, the restrooms that weren't supposed to be open this winter, but should've been:

The unobtrusive back door to that women's room that I found for the first time that night:

When I caught them in their lies about Sandel Playground and Loyal Heights Community Center, the places where they'd shown restrooms open that were not, in fact, open, without "sanican"s, the map's makers hurried to correct those.  Of course, the lies about restrooms being open with "sanican"s present weren't really lies, by the warped thinking behind the map, because its fine print didn't actually say those rooms were open; the map wasn't corrected in this respect all winter.  But as far as I know, the map's fine print did say Matthews Beach's actual restrooms were open all winter, and as best I can tell, none were.  Sometime in the two months I was away, someone could have asked the maintenance people whether they were really driving all that way, and fixed the map.  I sent the information by e-mail, long before telling you tonight, dear Diary.  But nobody bothered.

An alternative hypothesis:  Traffic in northeastern Seattle this pandemic winter was so unusually bad that the maintenance guys had to lock Matthews Beach at 5 P.M. to get it done at all.  Um, right.  I want some of that green cheese the moon is made of, too.

The "sanican"s by day:

A sign that I photographed as I left, so I'd know how late it had been, that someone had taped over enough of that it communicated nothing at all:

Would that that map had met the same fate.

Good night, dear Diary.  Tomorrow I hope to tell you about hikes 12 and 14, both made while housed, and neither one really related to checking the map any more.  Until then.

Hike 11B: Near Northeast, part II

Dear Diary,

After all the surprises of the previous page, this one is smooth sailing.  I visited three parks with four restroom buildings and one community center, but no "sanican"s, took thirteen pictures, and got no stories to tell you.  All the restrooms were open or closed as the map I was checking said they should be.

Ravenna Park

Ravenna Park, as one of the bigger parks in North Seattle, has two pairs of restrooms.  They're usually referred to as "upper" and "lower", and although Ravenna Park was probably the most familiar to me of the North Seattle parks when I started to write you, I was quite wrong to think the whole park could be understood as "upper" or "lower"; but that will have to wait.  So take the older of these pages of yourself with a grain of salt, dear Diary:  "Hypotheses", last April 23; "Our Main Characters", last April 25; "I Level Up, Wielding 'Sanicans'", April 26, "FOUND:  Park Drinking Water NEAR UW!!", April 26; "The Curious Incident of the Light in the Night-Time", May 2; "Go North, Aging Man!" and "Foolish Mortal", May 6; "Ravennawards", May 12; "Two Hours and Two Hours", June 3; "Home Dry Home", June 4; "Amazing Water Fountain News", July 30; "My Book of Hours", part II, August 30; "A Problem", November 12; and "Standing Room Only", part II, November 23.

The "upper" restroom building's best face:

Since this is the one that actually is closed in winter, I assume it's also the one in the list I quoted a few pages back that's supposed to be closed in winter.  It still isn't shown as open on the map as of today.  The closed doors January 22:

The "lower" restroom building's best face:

This one has heat, and was open (with exceptions, as witness the rather embarrassing page "Mysteries" of February 1) this past winter:

Laurelhurst Community Center

A try for a postcard shot:

 The closed doors to the inside:

Because of those closed doors, dear Diary, I haven't told you much about Laurelhurst Community Center, but rather more about Laurelhurst Playfield, which is where the community center is:  "Our Main Characters", last April 25; "Laurelhurst Playfield", May 2; "Go North, Aging Man!", May 6; "Home Dry Home", June 4; "This and That", June 20; "Amazing Water Fountain News", July 30; "My Book of Hours", part I, August 7, and part III, August 30, and then, yet again, oops.

The open outside-facing doors:

Burke-Gilman Playground Park

This is a much less important park in North Seattle than Ravenna Park, except to its neighbours, to drivers along Sand Point who rely on its restrooms when they're open, and to me because it was closer to where I slept than any restrooms except Laurelhurst's, which are on top of a very steep hill, and because I really liked its water fountain's water.  So I've talked about it to you, dear Diary, quite a bit:  "Magnuson Park Has a Warm-Water Sink!" last April 22; "Hypotheses", last April 23; "Our Main Characters", last April 25; "I Level Up, Wielding 'Sanicans'", April 26; "FOUND:  Park Drinking Water NEAR UW!!", April 27; "We're All in This Together", April 28; "The Curious Incident of the Light in the Night-Time", May 2; "Metropolitan Market or, Reliability", May 4; "Home Dry Home", June 4; "This Is Getting Old", July 2; "Momentous News", July 17; "My Book of Hours", part I, August 7, and oops.  The "Momentous News" was that the park's water fountain had been shut off.  I figured it was because I'd made it known that the thing was running.  I started getting water from University Village, which had also re-opened its restrooms by then, oh, and someone vandalised the bench I preferred to sit on, so BGPP stopped being all that important to me pretty quickly.

Anyway, though, the restroom building's best face is unfortunately the one they keep putting fairly unimpressive murals onto to advertise some sort of social media campaign for park improvements.  (I think.)  Here:

The closed doors:

And that leaves one park to go, Matthews Beach.  But I have a whole lot to tell you in that park's page, dear Diary, so don't know whether I can still get it written tonight.  If not, good night, and you'll see it tomorrow.

Hike 11B: Near Northeast, part I

Dear Diary,

Oops, I made a mistake yesterday.  Hike 11 was on January 22; January 21 was hike 10, in Green Land and Woodlake Parks.  (Or someplace like that.)  I've already corrected the dates in "Hike 11A", which I wrote in you yesterday, but hope by emphasising the mistake here to alert people who'd read that before the corrections.

Anyway, then, on January 22, I woke up early in Bergen Place in downtown Ballard, ran the two errands that had dragged me there through darkest jungles that damaged my cart, and then headed back to the U-District and "home", such as I then had.

It turns out I took so many photos there that I'll have to split this into two pages.  But let's get started with the first one, which conveniently enough covers everything I can imagine is really part of the U-District.  The next page will cover Ravenna and points east.

The Urban Rest Stop, University District branch

Unlike the Ballard branch, this is one I've used often.  During the 2018-2019 school year, abbreviated as it was, I went there most weeks to shower, leaving my stuff in relative safety in the obscure part of Suzzallo Library I then spent most days in.  (Once per month I went to my storage, got clean clothes out, and showered and changed at the downtown branch.)

At first this branch had several advantages.  Not only was it close to the University, but it had larger shower rooms than the downtown branch, so it was easier to deal with whenever I did have to bring my cart along.  And it was relatively quiet, meaning that most of the time one could take one's time showering.  However, during the aforementioned school year, this laxity apparently offended the Urban Rest Stop Powers That Be, and after a change of personnel, rules changed considerably, and kept changing, so things were much less predictable.

I already told you, dear Diary, on June 8, in "A Shower at Green Lake", about the last time I went there, which was on May 13.  Of course by then I was living outside about 23 hours per day, and had nowhere safe to leave my cart; I was astonished, as I wrestled it up the steps, to be told not only that I couldn't bring it in but also couldn't have brought my backpack in either, if I'd still owned one.  So unfortunately, my last memory of the U-District branch of the Urban Rest Stop at that location is an unhappy one.

Because, you see, dear Diary - oh, let's get the postcard shot out of the way first:

No, not much of a postcard shot, but that was the only outside entrance, and yes, the door was always plastered with notices like that.  But let's take a closer look at one of those notices:

Now this is just weird.  No, not that it had closed.  That was actually predictable, because the church building it was in is slated for demolition.  I remember news stories about the Roots shelter, which also used the showers, relocating.

What's weird is that that Urban Rest Stop location was funded by the Seattle Department of Human Services.  Yes, the same people who made the map these eleven hikes in January were meant to check.  But the map still showed it being open on January 22, at the same address, and still shows it open to this day:

 

Why can't Human Services keep track of their own contractors?  Maybe because their contractors can't keep track of themselves, either.  As of today, the Urban Rest Stop's own website continues to claim this branch not only is open, but is open at that same location.  But on March 11, while the closure notice was gone, the closure remained:

I'll go back there soon.  If I come back with a picture of demolition rubble, will people stop pretending the Urban Rest Stop is still offering restrooms amid that rubble to homeless people in the U-District?  Of course the branch should relocate, not fold, but it should do so and then publish its new address, not send people with urgent needs on wild goose chases.

University Playground

Yes, dear Diary, I tried to cover this one in hike 1A, "Inconvenients", about which I wrote in you way back on January 3.  But I couldn't get all the photos this series of pages is supposed to include for every restroom building.  So I stuck it back into the queue.  The postcard shot:

The closed doors:

The "sanican":

At first, I assumed the map I was checking was intended to truthfully show what hygiene resources were available to homeless people, and I figured the fact that the map showed only a "sanican" here, and didn't make hay out of closed restrooms, was only to be expected.  But by this time, January 22, I had a list of restrooms that were supposed to close for lack of heat (the list I posted part of April 8 in "Park Restrooms in North Seattle") - and University Playground's weren't on that list, even though they obviously don't have room for a furnace.  Now, I think the fact that the city didn't lie over the winter about this restroom building, the way they lied about so many others where a "sanican" was available, simply means that in the view of the Department of Parks and Recreation, this restroom building doesn't really exist, isn't expected ever to re-open.  Which is pretty upsetting.

The Seattle Public Library, University branch

I wasn't done with surprises for the day, although this one, I could've avoided by checking the map, which truthfully represented this particular situation.

I'd covered this in "Hike 1A" too, but made myself go look again, and there'd been a change:

 

I was particularly perplexed by the claim that restrooms were available at University Heights, since I knew that wasn't true, so I went there next.

University Heights Plaza and the nearby building

What the sign was referring to, of course, was these:

This was actually my first chance at two kinds of sinks that had become available during the pandemic, the SPU sink pictured, and one of the original Seattle Street Sinks.  The SPU sink was quite convincing:

Unlike the one I'd found in Lake City, it was working.  I observed that it didn't allow the user to control either the temperature, the strength, or the duration of the water flow.  I also observed that the sink bowls were too small to fill a water bottle at, and I shudder to contemplate trying to wash dishes in them.

The Seattle Street Sink appeared abandoned, although it sounds like it's supposed to be in this kind of environment:

I'm pretty sure it wasn't working, but I could see that it also wouldn't allow its user much control over the water flow.  However, it provided ample room for bottle filling and dish washing.  Of course, that isn't what the city wants homeless people to be able to do, because that would promote the health of homeless people, and we can't have that, can we?

But had anything changed at U-Heights?  Last I'd found, they claimed, like every other building on University Way NE, to have "No Public Restrooms".  How could librarians have gotten something so straightforward wrong?  Anyway, I took a postcard shot:

And then waited a good while for a porch to empty of children and the people taking care of them, so I could look at the signage, and here it is, same as before:

Of course, what we're actually seeing here is two different definitions of "restroom".  I think a restroom is a single room containing at least a toilet and a sink, and it looks like whoever wrote the sign just above agrees with me.  Whoever wrote the library sign seems to have a much wider definition of "restroom".  I will return to this topic later, dear Diary.

Cowen Park

I'm not fond of this gravel- and stairs-infested park even now that I no longer push a cart, but it was one of the core parks I told you about first, dear Diary, in "Our Main Characters" last April 25, "The Curious Incident of the Light in the Night-Time" May 2, "Go North, Aging Man!" and "Foolish Mortal" both May 6, "Ravennawards" May 12, "Home Dry Home" June 4, "A Thief" July 9, "COWEN PARK'S RESTROOMS ARE OPEN" July 30, "My Book of Hours" part III August 30, and, um, "Some Odds and Ends" April 4.  Wow, I neglected it for a while, didn't I?  Well, here are six more photos.

Two opinions as to the best face of the restroom building:  the chalk area:

or the roof with a view:

The closed doors, just as the map then said:

A close-up of that poster, which is actually complimenting the parks department:

And this park's surprise.  (The next page is going to be so boring in comparison...)

Of course, now that the map has caught up to the "sanican" being there (it was moved from Ravenna Park, as I confirmed not much later that day), it claims the restrooms are open too.  On the other hand, it's warm enough now that they should be open, so that may not be a lie.  Yep, more reason for me to go back to my old neighbourhood soon.

But first I should finish telling you about January, dear Diary.  I hope to write two more pages today.  Until then.

Hike 11A: Near Northwest

Dear Diary,

This page exists mainly because of how I got to Ballard on January 20 (correction:  January 21).  While there, on January 21 (hence hike 11, but correction:  January 22), I took a few photos related to hygiene for homeless people such as (then) myself, but those won't take long to explain to you, and I could easily have fit them into "Hike 8C", from April 4.  The hike there, however, is part of the story of how I got ready to give up homelessness, and is therefore the main topic here, and what I couldn't find a way to fit into the earlier pages.

I didn't want to go all the way downhill and south to the path I'd taken before, via Fremont and Leary Way.  I had two stops to make - at the Urban Rest Stop's Ballard branch, and at Ballard Commons - both of which are in downtown Ballard.  I knew I couldn't leave Green Lake and Woodland Parks via West Green Lake Way N to N 65th St, but figured I could take Green Lake Way N (note the lack of an initial direction), or maybe Aurora Ave N, I forget, south to N 46th St, and then follow that as it turned into N Market St and finally NW Market St.

The sun had already set when I started, and that's the only explanation I have for what happened next.  You see, dear Diary, from about Palatine Ave N to about Baker Ave NW, along the north sidewalk of Market St, the vegetation on both sides of the sidewalk very often encroaches onto it.  I walked this stretch again a week or two ago to verify by daylight, and someone has obviously cut the overgrowth back for a stretch near Palatine, but in general, it's still visible.  Now, I'm out of the habit of pushing my cart, so maybe I've forgotten how wide it really is, but in any event I can't explain what I experienced that night.

Basically, I thought I was pushing my cart through a jungle that had just about engulfed the sidewalk.  Most of the time, at least one back wheel was on greenery, not pavement.  It was a horrible experience, made more so because under these circumstances the left back wheel found a way to overcome its construction, which should have prevented this, and come into contact with the cart's structure every time it turned, which of course both made noise and slowed me down.

Now, this particular shopping cart is wonderfully designed for homeless users, with sturdy steel spokes so the wheels can stand up to heavy use, sturdy steel frame ditto...  This of course doesn't suit modern manufacturing at all, so they had to build it with planned obsolescence.  After a year or so, the rivets start to come loose.  But they also make the buyer spend money on it more immediately.  The back wheels my first cart came with were so designed that after about 20 miles, they'd start to brush against the structure.  (Replacement wheels sold separately have a simple fix to prevent this.)  Also, if one uses it on four wheels, at about the same distance one of the front wheels flies off its spokes.

The back wheel problem is far more important, so on my second and third carts of this brand, the seller had installed the necessary fix up front and raised the price to compensate.  This is why what the left wheel was doing was, and remains, a mystery to me.  But it meant I had to run the cart on all four wheels for the hiking remaining in January, and you can probably already predict, dear Diary, what consequence that had.

Anyway, finally the overgrowth that so mystifyingly obstructed me ended, and I continued down Market.  At which point I realised that I proposed to sleep in Ballard, a place whose homeless population, like its housed population, strikes me as amazingly entitled and somewhat dangerous.  I finally figured maybe Marvin's Garden would be a safe place to crash.

But on the way I found Bergen Place, which I've maligned so much in the past that I had to go back to Ballard specifically to correct myself.  (In "History and Parks" part II, June 25.)  I'm still not crazy about it, but it has a bunch of well-spaced wooden benches, only two of which were occupied that night, and one of those people got up and left soon after I arrived.  And it's sort of screened from the main street, i.e. Market St.  So I settled in, ate supper, read some, and went to sleep.

So I was in position to meet the appallingly early hours kept by my first target:

The Urban Rest Stop, Ballard branch

As noted in "Hike 8C", the first time I went to Ballard on that hike, I'd dawdled too long trying to economically stimulate Fremont, and all I found was this charity location's closed doors.  The resulting photo is probably as good a postcard shot as I could've taken, so I'll see if I can show it to you again here, dear Diary.

Wow, so many things about writing you are easier on a laptop than on a phone, dear Diary.

Anyway, here's a photo that shows the open door one actually finds if one gets there during its open hours:

Seemed like a nice place, but it never made sense for me to try to shower in Ballard, so I haven't had occasion to deal with it.

Ballard Commons

Ever since I'd found (in "Hike 8C") that the "Portland Loo" actually had a toilet in it, and was not just a fancier "sanican", I'd been dithering over what the word "restroom" means.  I decided that one relevant issue was the sanitiser "sanican"s supply (when it hasn't been stolen).  Since I've until recently always lived far east of Ballard, I've tried never to go there without more than one reason to, and this was the second reason that got me to go do justice to the Urban Rest Stop there.  Does the "Portland Loo" have sanitiser?

Well, it's designed to:

I took another photo, but to be honest can't remember what it's meant to show.

Looks like I was pointing out either that the lock worked, or that it didn't.  Beats me.  It seems there's always a loose end after my every trip to Ballard, and this was this trip's loose end.

Anyway, dear Diary, as I said, not much to these photos.  Tomorrow I'll tell you about the one area left, my home then, the near (i.e., southern) NE.  And there's one park left after that.  Until then, good night.