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.