So instead of Discovery Park I went to St. Edwards state park and wandered around.
On a tip, I took the south valley trail, which was extraordinarily beautiful. Part of why it was so beautiful was the quiet; the walls of the valley are as close to vertical as they can be in a place where the rains are mostly unceasing during the wet season, and the foliage soaks up any noise foolish enough to try to echo around.
So it’s quiet. Silent except for a faraway jetliner making a dull rumble barely audible over the sounds of my measured footsteps. Faint chirping from a nest far, far up in a tree. Squirrels and birds making minute noises amongst the ferns. I was in the most ancient forest ever discovered by humans, walking along a trail that had been there since before time began. The moss on the trees had always been there, and one could assume that the whole rest of the world was carpeted with trees and ferns and moss. And a silence from before there were humans to hear it.
It was like this for about a quarter mile, half the length of the trail. I rounded a bend, into a place where another ravine joined the one I had been following. This ravine pointed straight to what once had been a Catholic seminary. There was a class reunion going on up there at the top, and someone was playing ‘Feelings’ on the amplified piano.
Feelings. Nothing more than feelings. Trying to forget.
Barry Manilow, it turns out, writes the songs that make the forest sing.
I enjoyed it. It was surreal in the kind of way that makes me happy, and thankfully the music stopped soon and they began making toasts, which were far more bearable, and much more earnest than ‘Feelings.’
Soon made it to the mouth of the valley and waded around in Lake Washington. The water was exceptionally clear; I’ve seen it much more nasty in that spot. Seagulls and Canada geese were having turf wars out in the middle of the lake, so their exhultations drowned out what little of the reunion was still audible.
Watched some little kids toss the ball to the dogs while their parents looked on.
One kid was trying to play frisbee with his dad, but didn’t quite understand how it worked, and he’d end up tossing it into the lake, or the woods, or someone’s face.
One of the dogs was terrified of the waves on the lakeshore. He would slowly advance toward the waterline, curious to see what it was, and when a wave would break he’d run for cover. You could see it in his eyes: The constant desire to stretch outside of one’s boundaries.
One of the down-sides (so to speak) of St. Edwards is that no matter what trail you hike, you’ll have to hike back up to the top of the hill to leave. I decided to take the trail marked ‘most difficult.’ Har. As if.
Admittedly, I was panting a little, and my heart was racing, and I probably looked like I was having a heart attack, but I took the opportunity to practice something like I to do when I’m out for a walk. It’s modified from some lectures by Thich Nhat Hahn I once read, and an essay by William Burroughs called ‘Do Easy,’ and about ten thousand other obscure metaphysical sources. It goes like this:
The feet and legs are spikes planted in the ground. The abdomen is a hoop, balanced on these spikes. The head is on a string, like a marionette, being pulled ever upward. The breath is a river that enters your mouth or nose, runs down the inside of your frontside, to your groin, around and up your spine, all the way up around the top of your head, and then down and out your mouth or nose.
There is no task but to plant one spike in front of you, and then shift your weight to it. Then you plant the other spike. This goes on until there’s a reason to stop; what that reason is doesn’t matter at the moment. That reason could happen at any time; it could be before your next step, or it could be three days from now. There’s only planting and shifting, planting and shifting. Even as you near the top of the hill, there’s no top of the hill, no reason to stop paying attention to how you walk.
And so, when I eventually got to the top of the hill, even though I was sweating and having to regulate my breathing, I was ready to climb another one. But I got in my car and came home instead.
Month: August 2003
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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. -
Just wanted to take a moment and point out that my xanga weblog is, in fact, fair and balanced.
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I keep thinking about Tennessee. About being a little kid on the banks of the South Harpeth, learning to skip stones and being afraid to go in the deep part of the river. It was all so big, and so mysterious, and I was surrounded in this strange summer land by people who looked after me. I remember feeling safe, safe enough to spend hours examining pebbles, chasing dragonflies, hiking up and down the path to the cabin from the riverbank.
Crickets, bullfrogs, fireflies. The cool after the sun sets. The sound of someone spraying themselves with Off. Watermelon. Fried chicken. The deep, hollow sound of footsteps on the porch. Crowds of cousins, a seemingly endless array of them.
I’ve read about places in, for instance, India, where there’s a tree in the middle of the village. Everyone goes there and social discourse happens. The whole of the village is united by the tree. A big tree in an open space becomes the definition of community.
Three or four different generations of villagers interact, maybe in a friendly manner, maybe in a way less than friendly, but it’s all there, under the shade of the tree.
Whenever I read something like that, I mourn that I grew up in the suburbs, worlds away from a commons, away from a gathering place, away from a ‘third place,’ as social anthropologists call it now. But I didn’t completely miss it. I had summers in Tennessee. Not the same thing, but still along those lines.
And dammit, I want my riverbank back. My wading into the river and playing in a capsized canoe. I want my twilight catching fireflies back. The bluegrass. The angled log fence. The outhouse.
The belonging, even if only by default, in a family, in any group at all. -
So today I was all ready to go ahead and plunk down the bux for a decent camera. I found that Amazon.com had a special deal on the one I wanted, where you get a discount on a memory card upgrade, and after free shipping I’d about break even on taxes (since I’m in the same state as amazon).
So I put the camera in my little virtual basket, and the memory card, too, and entered the special deal code and all that, and it spat it back at me. It turned out I was buying the wrong memory card.
So I went back and tracked down the proper card, which was marked up by the amount I would save. And not only that: The thing was discontinued.
So let’s get this straight… You save nothing on a card you can’t possibly buy. Such a deal.
Soon the camera will be mine. But not today. -
Al Gore gave a speech yesterday, and it’s pretty freakin’ good.
He covered a lot, so it’s hard to pick and choose something to quote, but I thought this was pretty impressive:
[...]
And of course the budget deficits are already the biggest ever – with the worst still due to hit us. As a percentage of our economy, we’ve had bigger ones — but these are by far the most dangerous we’ve ever had for two reasons: first, they’re not temporary; they’re structural and long-term; second, they are going to get even bigger just at the time when the big baby-boomer retirement surge starts.
Moreover, the global capital markets have begun to recognize the unprecedented size of this emerging fiscal catastrophe. In truth, the current Executive Branch of the U.S. Government is radically different from any since the McKinley Administration 100 years ago.
The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, George Akerlof, went even further last week in Germany when he told Der Spiegel, “This is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history…This is not normal government policy.” In describing the impact of the Bush policies on America’s future, Akerloff added, “What we have here is a form of looting.”
Ominously, the capital markets have just pushed U.S. long-term mortgage rates higher soon after the Federal Reserve Board once again reduced discount rates. Monetary policy loses some of its potency when fiscal policy comes unglued. And after three years of rate cuts in a row, Alan Greenspan and his colleagues simply don’t have much room left for further reductions.
