August 15, 2003

• Seattle Weekly recently had as their cover story an essay by a man who walked all the way around Lake Washington.
  
  Now, I think he cheated, since he never went to Renton (he started on the west side, under the I-90 bridge, crossed the bridge, went north, and then looped around as far south as Seward Park). But was still an interesting read.
  
  And it got me out the door last night. I was sitting here at the computer trying to find an image of blacked-out NYC under a full moon, but none had made it yet. And it was dusk, and the world here was getting darker, even though we had electricity. I was thinking about how all the barriers come down when something like a blackout happens, and how people regroup into different sorts of social structures. How they’d all end up on the roofs of the buildings because it would be cooler there, and they’d all get drunk because there wasn’t much else to do besides have sex, and people tend to get a little drunk before sex… You get my meaning.
  
  I found this rather striking picture of the 1977 NYC blackout. The sky outside my window was the same shade of.. red? Orange? Pink? So I decided to go for a walk.
  
  The neighborhood where I live has a wonderful resource, called the Burke-Gillman Trail, which I’ve mentioned before. Leaving my house, I had always caught up with it to the south, near Matthews Beach, but last night I thought I would find the elusive northeast passage to the trail, then follow it south, and come back north to my house.
  
  The neighborhoods off to the northeast are untrammeled and inconvenient, but exceptionally nice. No one goes through there because, ultimately, there are no outlets from the streets. There aren’t even any pathways leading down to the trail, which I thought was odd.
  
  I ended up walking about forty blocks, up and down hills, in a forest of huge houses, a full third of which are for sale ($500k – $750k), until I met a man who was leaving his house with his dog to go walkies. I asked him how to get to the Burke-Gilman, and he pointed me back down the street. “Go uh, past the, uh… There’s a street, but… uh… Wait. It’s two driveways back that way, then there’s a street, and you, uh… I think it’s two driveways *past*, yeah, *past* the first street.” “What’s there?” “A stairway. Just look for a stairway. It’s a little hidden.”
  
  Sure enough, there it was. I had passed it going the other way, without even noticing. It had a tall hedge on one side and a thick row of trees on the other. It was a pool of blackness into which I would have to descend, from the relative comfort of dim faraway streetlights and the occluded moon.
  
  So down I went. There was a party at one of the houses; I eavesdropped for about ten seconds, until it became apparent they were just talking about stupid birthday gifts they’d received.
  
  The path wound its way down toward the lake. I stopped to look at the view sides of the houses I had just passed. The lights were mostly out, like in NYC, the difference being the light switch instead of the circuit breaker in Niagra.
  
  I couldn’t help but thinking that the people who lived in these houses were only ever in one room at a time. Only one light on per house. We’re talking three-storey houses here, all dark except for one glowing window, one pulsating TV glow.
  
  That’s another thing about a blackout that disrupts the social boundaries: No media. A raid on batteries at the local store, and everyone’s listening to the news on their radio. But TVs require much more juice, and how ever will consumers be educated on which products to buy if there’s no TV?
  
  Anway. Finally made it to the B-G. Hiked home.

  • 4:47 pm
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