A stroll in the park and across the cut

Third of four parts. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

The third morning, it was hard to believe that only a day had gone by since I'd set out at Newport. As I was busing into Seattle, I felt dizzy and sick, and I ended up taking the 14 in the wrong direction for quite a ways; it was an unfamiliar route, but I wasn't thinking very well. I didn't really get going until late morning, but the walk along Lake Washington Boulevard, north from Interstate 90, was lovely, an extension of the lakeside path of the day before. I looked out from the shade onto the sunny lake, walking along quiet stretches of pathway where I could hear my own footfalls, heading to the walker's golden oasis of Leschi. Pausing for a while, it was almost easy to imagine Leschi as the cable car destination of the 1890s, with a bandstand and gardens - but a hotel? A ferry landing? A zoo? And even harder to imagine, just north of I-90 had been Guy Phinney's steam sawmill, which was either the first or second mill on Lake Washington, according to McDonald - I kept comparing her photo to the shore, testing her location against my maps, trying to imagine a sawmill there, somewhere, on the lakeshore. The photo showed a strange shallow shoreline, with rushes growing in the water, so different from my post-Ship Canal shore. But knowing that the mill had once been there, that its engine and blades had commodified the forest here, filling the air with smoke and racket, informed the present for me. How wonderful it would be if the photos that I studied so earnestly were there for every passerby, to get behind the familiar.

The lakeshore is undergoing constant change and renewal, and nowhere was this clearer than among the elegant estates and homes of Seattle's Madrona neighborhood, where the narrow streets were jammed with the trucks of landscapers, carpenters, plumbers, decorators, painters, florists, furniture shops, and housekeeping services. Otherwise, the entire neighborhood seemed empty - no kids on bikes, no moms pushing strollers, no old folks out for a stroll - no one. The only owner I saw stood mournfully next to a plumbing contractor, sadly surveying a work in progress, as they stared together at a crew at work in a deepening trench.

I walked down into Madison Park, and found a picnic table I could lean on. I'd had visions of treating myself to a great al fresco luncheon at the beach, getting takeout at one of the restaurants. But I didn't feel like eating. I packed up and climbed westward out of Madison Park, trying to walk in the shade whenever I could and to keep my hat brim down whenever I couldn't. I turned north into the Washington Park Arboretum and paralleled the noisy, busy road on a dirt path back up in the trees. At times, the roar fell away, and I could hear my feet, little invisible birds, and the rustle of the leaves. Seattle's Arboretum is a magical place, another Olmsted design that has emerged as a glorious urban compromise between those who hoped for a rigid museum collection of plants and those who hoped for a green place of recreation and reflection. I crossed the little bridge to Foster Island, once a burial island for Native people, then the home of Joe Foster, then doubled in size by the lowering of the lake in 1917. The city bought the whole island for $15,000 to add it to Washington Park - the heart of today's Arboretum. I passed through the tunnel under Highway 520, then began to follow the lovely trail through the wetlands and across Marsh Island to the Museum of History & Industry, where I work. I felt at home here but never get tired of the delights of walking on the water; the walkway bucked and pitched in the waves and a welcome breeze blew across the lake. Bushes arched over my head to form a dark, cool cavern, and I reflected, as always, on the aged Danish man who lived on Marsh Island during the Great Depression. A Seattle Times reporter and photographer came out in a boat to interview him: He was cooking a stew outside his little shack, and he rowed back and forth to Madison Park for supplies. He had nowhere else to go; his was a one-man Hooverville.

I walked up Shelby Street and across the Montlake Bridge. Looking east down the Montlake Cut to Lake Washington, there was a long parade of pleasure boats - not at all what Thomas Mercer envisioned in 1854 when he renamed Lake Union and Lake Washington, forsaking their Duwamish names. One year after Washington Territory was created, Mercer suggested renaming the large lake to honor the first president and the territory named in his honor. Lake Union, he hoped, would be the "union" one day between Lake Washington and Shilshole Bay; there would be a water highway from the Cascade foothills on Lake Sammamish all the way to saltwater. Mercer was thinking of timber, coal, and ore getting out to bunkers and mills on the waterfront, and so to markets in San Francisco and Honolulu. But the Lake Union route vied with others and didn't open until 1917, with major cuts here and at Fremont, and then the great locks at Ballard. Once, Montlake was a Native portage, and a log chute was dug through in the 1880s with great labor, and then the great channel it is today - not for log booms, coal scows, and tugs, or seaplane tenders, tuna boats, and whaling ships, but for kayaks, sailboats, and cruisers.