Pugs and Unicycles - Green Lake Park

          Green Lake Park is a 2.8 mile circuit of path surrounding, as you might have guessed, Green Lake. It’s not far from our apartment and walking a little less than 3 miles is about the extent of my exercising these days besides the occasional weekend hike. Green Lake makes for a pretty walk, curving all around the amoeba-shaped lake, ducks all a-quacking and paddling about. It serves as an outdoor gym for North Seattle, people from all over the area coming to walk, jog, rollerblade, bike, and also to be seen by others doing all of these things. Erica and I have been trying to go once a week when we both get home from work. Now that fall has undeniably arrived it’s been getting dark around 630ish every night and we usually end up coming back in the dark. I only now remember last December driving home from work in pitch black before 5pm.

          Even if it’s cold and sometimes gloomy, after spending the entire day in a windowless office staring at a computer screen, my being aches for movement and fresh air. Besides giving our couch-prone bodies a bit of mild cardio-work and a chance at escaping workaday oblivion, walking Green Lake also provides ample opportunities for viewing numerous breeds of dogs with their owners, and a chance to see the latest in ridiculous forms of recreational transportation.

          The people of Seattle love their dogs, sometimes obsessively so. Case in point, we pass a couple walking with two pugs, one a bit fatter than the other, pushing in front of them an empty stroller. A half hour later we pass them again on the other side of the lake, and now the fatter of the two pugs is sitting happily in the stroller, looking all tuckered out from his big day, while his healthier brother trots along merrily. These people brought along a stroller because their pug gets tired.

          The most common dog in our neighborhood is easily the Corgie. Daily spottings and the proliferation of   Corgie puppy videos on YouTube has led to my inevitable love affair with those silly fat guys that look like the perfect sidekick for a gentleman about town. If we got a Corgie we have hypothesized naming him Mr. Tickles, and giving him a beret, but this will obviously (probably) never happen, like other hare-brained schemes to open a restaurant serving only potato dishes called PO – TA – TOES and so on. On any given day, a walk around Green Lake will net four to five corgies, a healthy smattering of pugs, golden retrievers, labs, spitzs, pointers, and all the other common ones. For a whole number of logical reasons we’ve decided we can’t get a dog until next summer, a general period of time I keep pushing further back. Walking around Green Lake while dogless can make your heart ache.

          We do see plenty of dogs that don’t make me envious, dopey little dogs bred long ago for specific purposes that have nothing to do with being a good companion. A man walks past us, holding the leashes of two cocker spaniels in one hand, pressing a cell phone to his ear with the other. He passes a couple walking a lab, and the two cocker spaniels suddenly lash out like beasts possessed, yapping and blathering, nearly pulling their owner off his feet. He mumbles some apology to the lab people and keeps going. The spaniels instantly forget their rage and trot with their long floppy ears drooping along.

This picture almost makes me want a Dachsund

          One of my neighbors back home in New Cumberland named Betty had two dull, tan cocker spaniels, Betsy and Daisy if I remember right. If you so much as looked at their front porch they would go to pieces, barking and smacking their slobbery faces into the screen door. I had a hunch that angry little dogs like these were meant for something specific. A search of the internet led me to see that Cocker Spaniels were bred for hunting Eurasian Woodcocks, fat little pheasant-like birds that are probably a lot more personable and friendly than Cocker Spaniels. I also found that Dachsunds were made for going into burrows and fighting badgers, and pugs were bred as accessories to Chinese emperors. I just don’t understand the appeal of the angry little bastard dog. To me a dog is an animal your wrestle with, that you slap on their butt and race to the end of the yard, not a snooty little thing that needs put in a stroller.

           I do not understand, but at least respect those obsessed with enhancing their bodies by punishing them daily, like the girl charging around the park who has easily lapped us twice, sweating buckets on a cold October day. I have never had the impulse to run until I fall over from exhaustion, and I probably never will. Green Lake is a place of worship for the cult of The Exercise. Hordes of the traditional followers using time-tested craft like bike and rollerblade flock here, but you also find those pioneers bringing waves of the future to our fair city. These things I will be forced to call fusion-craft, as part of their appeal stems from their cross-extreme-sport-genre-ness. In a single walkaround I encountered three things I had never seen before coming to Seattle.

          1.Rollerskiing. An elderly man in a skintight red and gray jumpsuit with a dynamite mustache easily in his sixties glides silently past us, utilizing the side of the path marked WHEELS : SLOW. Roller skis are cross-country skis mated with rollerblades, wheeled poles and everything. For the cross-country skier who just can’t wait for the snow, there’s roller skis!!

           2. Long-boarding with a pole. A small crew of two or three young dudes in sunglasses and backpacks cruise around a bend near the park’s boathouse, pushing themselves along with a big pole. To best describe the rush these guys may feel, I borrow some prose from gearjunkie.com author Stephen Regenold.

          “The tang stench of tar is in my nose. The street ahead is fresh and featureless, a snaking stretch of smooth asphalt put down just days ago by a construction crew. I am surfing on land, the wheels and wide deck of a longboard swooping downhill, carving polyurethane to pavement as I lean to check speed on a city street."

          Well put Stephen. So I won’t deny that longboarding is pretty fun, and that not having to move your feet and using a big Venice-style gondola pole sounds pretty nice. Kahuna creations, the Hawaiian company that makes these describe it as paddling on land, of surfing meets skateboarding meets snowboarding, the ultimate in extreme sports mega-fusion. I just don’t know what to think about this development. What new innovations can man hope to achieve, when such marvels are common place already?

            3. SUP, or Stand Up Paddle Surfing, also whats uppy, or suppy for short in certain circles. This is another Hawaiian creation, called Hoe he'e nalu in their language. This is basically the aquatic version of the longboard just described. SUP-ing has taken the Northwest by storm, you can see it all over Seattle, on Lake Union, Lake Washington, I even saw someone out in the choppy surf of Puget Sound. This just doesn’t look terribly fun to me. All the fun of being on a boat plus all the annoyance of standing up (really who likes standing up?) There’s usually at least one or two SUP’ers out on Green Lake, navigating between rowing teams and lap swimmers. A lot of them look like this guy.

          Then, there’s the classics. I cannot express any more affection and admiration for the man we saw UNICYCLING around Green Lake. Not unnicycling while juggling on a street corner next to an open hat filling with change, nor at a circus or carnival setting, but unicycling for exercise over a long period of time. I salute you.

          I don’t doubt that in December, a good throng of people will still jog or walk their dogs around Green Lake in total darkness, an outdoor-oriented community doesn’t shut down for something silly like winter. It will be hard to make myself stay outside as it gets darker and darker, and the folly of beginning a blog about parks in fall starts to dawn on me, but if that guy is still unicycling and pugs are still treated as the Chinese royalty that they are, I’ll make the effort.

Gasworks Park In September

The gray sky ceiling hangs low, bright enough to force squinting as I watch a V of geese pass up and over the lake.  I’ve found a nearly perfect groove between two lumpy patches of yellowed grass on the side of a hill.  Lake Union dotted with boats stretches out in front of me, the skyscrapers of downtown hung with patchy fog across the water.  At the base of my hill there’s a flat grassy space now full of people in black tights, fine-tuning choreography for some musical.  Their stereo plays a scratchy old French recording, the mademoiselle pining for her lost love in a tremulous soprano as dancers practice their cartwheels.

When the number is finished the performers give themselves a round of applause and there is much pattings-on-the-back. They begin the publicity portion of their practice session, dancers ambling up the hill, shooting mysterious faces to other park-goers.  A girl blows me a kiss and approaches, stepping forward with toes pointed, both dancing and walking.  She holds a stack of cards advertising the name and date of her play.  She asks me if I already have one. At that very moment I am chewing three water-crackers.  I smile sheepishly with my mouth full and make a guttural noise between gooey chunks of wheat.  She doesn’t understand my answer, and hands me one anyway before briskly dancing away.  These days I’m mostly beyond embarrassment.

Life constantly creates strange pairings.  In a public place full of people; like the park, street, or the bus, stopping for a minute to observe all the things happening at the same time is immensely rewarding. 

On the hill above me a father is explaining the science behind draw- bridges to his two identical blonde sons.  An escaped white balloon with a bell tied to its end drifts by me, just too far away to reach, up towards a gray blimp matching the sky bearing the logo of a local credit union as a young couple on a blanket rub their bare feet together and a sullen, heavyset woman walks by with her old floppy beagle and a swarm of black and white starlings are frightened from their fence by a passing boat shaped like a silver bullet that must have cost a fortune and here I am lying on a hill 2,724 miles away from my home and family considering the abstracts of purpose, illness, and what I should cook for my dinner.  What makes all this happen exactly as it does?

On the other side of the hill there are wedding photos in the works.  A tall man in a tuxedo kisses a woman in a shiny white and gold dress.  Three young people in jeans and sweatshirts circle them, snapping pictures on professional looking cameras with long lenses.  Other members of the wedding party mill about on the lawn. Several hold empty champagne glasses and don’t know what to do with them. 

A trail leads past the main pavilion with its playfully colorful and useless industrial pipes and out into the woods.  A single willow tree down by the water is surrounded by a square of chain link fence.  A sign from the city parks department say the spot is consistently high in tar. They are conducting a study to find out why. There are signs all over the park advising citizens to avoid swimming and by no means to eat any fish or shellfish caught from the lake.  Due to contaminants, the water is off limits. Back at the apartment, three or four days worth of greasy dishes are waiting for me.  These facts don’t seem to be overly related, but my brain thinks they are.

 The trail follows the shore past the quarantined tree, smaller paths branching off into the underbrush, leading to the backdoors of houseboats that look barely mobile and hardly sea-worthy. Further into the trees I am confronted by a huge rooster in the path blocking my way.  My annual viewing of roosters is pretty low, but here alone in the shady woods without proper context, this rooster looks fucking huge.  His feathers are a mix of black, brown and green, and the fleshy blobble at the top of his head is bright crimson. 

          He pecks at the dirt, scratching at it intermittently with his thick yellow legs.  I’m not close enough yet for him to care about me.  Is he the pet rooster of one of the house-boat-people? He doesn’t have a collar on. Would a pet rooster have a collar? The identity of this rooster is obviously unknowable, and I slowly approach him for reasons also unknowable.  He turns now to face me.  He scratches the dirt with aggressive purpose, like a bull soon to gore a fancy Spaniard.  A low, rumbling cluck, sounding more like a dog than a chicken finally warns me off.  I back away slowly and once he is convinced I’m not a threat, goes back to his mindless pecking.  I come across the strangest things when I’m by myself.

I’m sitting now on a flight of cement steps down by the water, notebook folded over my knee, feeling proud of myself for actually putting my thoughts down on paper.  Not writing makes me feel guilty, like I’m wasting all that money I’m still spending on college.  Writing about an angry chicken definitely counts as using my degree. 

On the platform above me an immigrant family is enjoying themselves.  There are a handful of adults leaning up against the railing, looking out towards the city as all the lights start to come on, having a heated debate in their native language.  Based on the color of their skin, the way the women are dressed, and the way their language sounds, they are probably Somalis, maybe Ethiopians I don’t know. There are quite a few East Africans in the city, there’s even a non-profit called Somali Community Services Coalition devoted just to serving their population here, maybe they’ll give me a job next year. Cross your fingers. 

The adults are speaking entirely Somali, but as the children run around and splash in the puddles I hear the occasional English word. As a completely useless mono-linguist I’m always impressed by people who can flow interchangeably and effortlessly between two or more languages.  These kids have two completely separate ways of relating to their existence, of describing everything they see and know. 

I wonder if they were born here or immigrated along with their parents? I am terrible at guessing children’s age but I’d say all three of them are between ten at the oldest and five at the youngest.  Maybe they need both languages to sort and make sense of their two vastly different lives, their family’s home across the ocean in Africa and now this strange new place.  I can only imagine what Seattle is like for someone from Somalia or Ethiopia, like being relocated to Saturn.  Their parents only have one way to express and understand their lives, one that I’m sure has large gaps in its understanding of a place so far from its origin.  They will look to their children to find the keys for unlocking this society unless they pick up English very quickly.  But then again, what do I know, maybe they love it here and are getting on fine, their fellow Somalis that came before them guiding them slowly and carefully to build for themselves a new life vastly better than the one they had before.  I will never know, because I can’t and won’t ask them, because they are strangers in the park.

   The light above the clouds seeps away and more and more people drift out of the park.  The sun is vaguely visible now hovering just above the Olympic Mountains way off west. I’ve been here almost a year and still have no handle on the weather, it shifts and moves amorphously, of its own accord. What I can tell is there won’t be a sunset tonight. I’ve lingered here long after most people have gone home for dinner. I see the brilliant pink and purple sunsets when I’m driving, when they are mostly hidden behind trees and buildings and hills, but when I come to the park and wait they hide from me. You can’t plan for them, they are only willing to surprise you.