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A Long Walk
For the last few years I've made it a habit to go on a long walk on Labor Day, trying to really push myself to see how far I can get. This year I decided to try my first multiday urban hike, taking the whole week off and seeing if I could make it around Lake Washington.
Why this goal? I can't really say, it's just been in my head for a long time. I started thinking about it not just as an experiment in urban hiking, but one of trying to see my own city from the outside. In Miéville's The City and the City, the two cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same space, but remain foreign to each other due to rigorously enforced social conventions about what one is allowed to notice. One can visit the other city, however, by going through a border crossing with the right paperwork, at which point you are allowed to notice everything you couldn't before -- while now carefully ignoring your native city. I wanted that experience.
I don't think I really achieved it, but it was interesting all the same. Being a pedestrian always makes you feel a bit invisible and unwelcome, at least outside urban cores. The infrastructure makes it very clear that you aren't welcome. But there is also an immense freedom in being a pedestrian, even in exurban hellscapes. Many more things are connected to a determined pedestrian than they appear on a map. Hop a fence, cut across an empty lot, scramble down an embankment, and you're there. Combined with making a point not to contact friends along the way, and mostly avoiding areas that I knew well, it did result in a pleasant feeling of disconnection. I simply couldn't be where I was, because that would be ridiculous. I'd rotated slightly and slipped through the cracks of consensual reality.
It does leave me wondering what it would be like in a city I didn't know so well, such as trying to walk around SF Bay. (That would be at least 3 times as long, possibly more like 5x if Google is right about what routes are and are not walkable.) I'd want to start out slower, keep the first two days well under 10 miles. And maybe get better hiking shoes than my steel-toed boots. And maybe get more blister-friendly socks than my default thick wool ones. I would also want to plan excitement levels better -- for some reason I only ever considered going counter-clockwise. That was a weird oversight, as it left some of the most boring sections for the end, when I most needed the boost. If I were to do the Bay, I'd want to make sure the excitement and drama of the Golden Gate and SF itself was left until the very end.
Anyway, some random observations:
Why this goal? I can't really say, it's just been in my head for a long time. I started thinking about it not just as an experiment in urban hiking, but one of trying to see my own city from the outside. In Miéville's The City and the City, the two cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same space, but remain foreign to each other due to rigorously enforced social conventions about what one is allowed to notice. One can visit the other city, however, by going through a border crossing with the right paperwork, at which point you are allowed to notice everything you couldn't before -- while now carefully ignoring your native city. I wanted that experience.
I don't think I really achieved it, but it was interesting all the same. Being a pedestrian always makes you feel a bit invisible and unwelcome, at least outside urban cores. The infrastructure makes it very clear that you aren't welcome. But there is also an immense freedom in being a pedestrian, even in exurban hellscapes. Many more things are connected to a determined pedestrian than they appear on a map. Hop a fence, cut across an empty lot, scramble down an embankment, and you're there. Combined with making a point not to contact friends along the way, and mostly avoiding areas that I knew well, it did result in a pleasant feeling of disconnection. I simply couldn't be where I was, because that would be ridiculous. I'd rotated slightly and slipped through the cracks of consensual reality.
It does leave me wondering what it would be like in a city I didn't know so well, such as trying to walk around SF Bay. (That would be at least 3 times as long, possibly more like 5x if Google is right about what routes are and are not walkable.) I'd want to start out slower, keep the first two days well under 10 miles. And maybe get better hiking shoes than my steel-toed boots. And maybe get more blister-friendly socks than my default thick wool ones. I would also want to plan excitement levels better -- for some reason I only ever considered going counter-clockwise. That was a weird oversight, as it left some of the most boring sections for the end, when I most needed the boost. If I were to do the Bay, I'd want to make sure the excitement and drama of the Golden Gate and SF itself was left until the very end.
Anyway, some random observations:
- 145th is still a shocking accessibility nightmare. It should be improved as part of the walkshed for the 145th Link station over the next 5 years, which is good. But the pure fuck-you-itivity of placing utility poles in the absolute perfect center of the sidewalk is still appalling.
- Kubota Garden is pretty and I need to go back when I feel more like random strolling.
- 405 is much closer to Lake Washington south of Bellevue than I realized.
- Trashy hotels are fun and atmospheric, but there is something deliciously decadent about walking in to an upscale hotel exhausted, dusty and drenched in sweat.
- The McMenamins hotel in Bothell is super weird. I'd been to their theater before, but it's a full resort. On the campus of an old high school, set in the middle of a suburban core, and hipster themed. I'm glad I stayed, cause when else would I get the chance?
- Renton is doing some big sewer retrofit, which means there is a big (>1 meter diameter) bypass pipeline up on the sidewalk for a mile or two near the mall. Impressive temporary system, and well enough contained, olfactorily speaking, that I wasn't 100% it was sewage until I got to the pumping station at the east end!
- Seeing all the Link construction was pretty great, of course. The whole abandoned switching yard by downtown Bellevue that I explored via railbike 2 years ago is being completely redone as the East Link maintenance yard.
- Despite being nominally focused on Lake Washington, rail and the echos of rail dominated the trip a lot more than I expected. I'd never appreciated the scale of the switching yards south of Seattle downtown until I had to walk over them. Most of the trails on the east side were on old rail rights of way. And even just all the little signs of old sidings and abandoned rail in the industrial areas. All stuff that I knew was there, but you get a much better sense of how dominant it must have been until just a few years ago.
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Did you discover any neighbourhoods you were previously entirely unaware of? When I was driving 405 a lot, I was surprised by the very (intentionally) isolated extremely posh neighbourhoods between it and the lake, just north of like the Renton Fry's and such, which were, at least at the time, barely connected with the surrounding road networks. I imagine there are a lot of other rich-people enclaves?
Anywhere you intend to go back to? Having gotten lost and/or deliberately exploring both on foot and in cars a few times by the old rail stuff, I feel like there's probably whole worlds there that one can't see without spending a lot of time there. I guess as Seattle ~real estate~ becomes infinitely valuable, though, a lot of that old expanse of wasteland will probably be redeveloped and disappear entirely?
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I wish I could get a shop or a house+shop in Georgetown before it's completely gentrified. It's still an actual industrial area and I love that. But I guess that's really just another way of saying that I wish I was the one gentrifying it.
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Under the 405/520 interchange is also great, but in a different way. Much less developed, with the rail having only been removed in the last year or so. That will eventually become the Issaquah to South Kirkland Link line, and you can already see the stub coming out of the maintenance yard under construction. The trail gets very little use at the moment, and it's more the kind of place middle school students would come to hang out and experiment with being a nuisance. There was some delightfully incompetent graffiti this time, a mixture of math equations and random profanity. Very interstitial.