Seattle Walks - Update
Seeking help with the Update
Greetings and happy new year to all. I hope you will tolerate a little self indulgence and my asking a favor or two.
I am in the process of updating my book Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City. The book came out in 2017 and includes 17 walks around Seattle. They range in length from one to six miles. Some are themed, such as geology or terra cotta faces in buildings. Others do a deep dive into a neighborhood, such as exploring West Seattle or Capitol Hill. Most are round trip but a few go point to point such as walking Madison Street, the only street that connects Elliott Bay and Lake Washington; or following the historic drainage of Ravenna Creek from its source at Green Lake to its outlet at Union Bay.
My mom, and some of her friends, say that it’s a good book. But it’s also time for an update. In a city as changeable as Seattle, some things have changed, such as buildings razed and roads altered, so I am in the process of going through the book, making sure that all is well on the walks and in the language I use.
Here’s where I ask my favors.
Could you please let me know if you know of errors in the book or changes in the landscape/built environment, which need to be addressed in the update? Could the directions be clearer? Should I add or subtract information? Has something happened since 2016 (when the book was completed) that I should incorporate? I am in the process of walking all of them again but if you want to go out and test them and let me know what you find, that’d be wonderful, too.
In addition, I am dropping two walks from the book and adding three new ones. I would certainly appreciate knowing if there are walks you particularly like or feel don’t measure up to the rest.
You can either contact me directly (wingate at seanet dot com) or reply in the comments section of the newsletter. Any thoughts would be great. If you could let me know by the end of the February, I would appreciate it. Thanks.
And, a side note, or at least a sidewalk note, that I have been meaning to address. Last year, I was walking with friends on Queen Anne when we encountered several sections of rubber sidewalk. They were put in sometime in the early 2000s, inspired in part by an arborist who saw similar such sidewalks in Santa Monica. She liked them because the panels flexed around tree roots, could be taken apart and reassembled easily and a panel at a time, and were more comfortable than concrete. They are also ecohip because they could be made of recycled tires. Other locations they were used include South Park, Fremont, the Central Area, and downtown.
The first rubber sidewalks in the USA supposedly appeared in a small town in Iowa in 1875. Unfortunately, they were a bit too boingy, as an avid buggy-riding merchant once leapt from his transport onto the rubber sidewalk and ended up bouncing up onto the roof of his piazza. He eventually learned to control the boing to his leap such that he could “ricochet from the sidewalk to the porch with the graceful accuracy of a flying squirrel,” or so wrote an unnamed, ground-based reporter. The other advantage, noted the writer, was that the sidewalks could be stretched as circumstances demanded. With two yoke of cattle, the sidewalk could be lengthened “three miles a day.” I couldn’t any accounts of whether this actually happened or was mere conjecture.
Despite the benefits of rubber sidewalks, they have not caught on and only a handful exist in the Seattle metro area, which is good because they are actually a very bad idea because of the toxins in tires, particularly 6-ppd, which ultimately is bad for salmon. (This is an update from my original post, prompted by several comments; I should have pointed this out in my original posting.) If you want to see one section, I recommend W. McGraw Place between 1st Ave. West and 2nd Ave. West. (below)
January 11 - 7pm - Third Place Books - Lake Forest Park - Liz Nesbitt and I will be together chatting about our new book Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State. Here’s a link to register.
And finally, I am honored to be included in this list of essential Utah books. The book that Terry Tempest Williams (not related by blood but by spirit) mentions is my first, A Naturalist’s Guide to Canyon Country, written during my time as a ranger at Arches National Park.
Thanks for the information on rubber sidewalks, particularly the boingy incident from Iowa in 1875. I found it as funny as a rubber crutch and laughed out loud.
Hi David,
I always look forward to these snippets and your books. But the message below necessitates informing you that using recycled rubber tires for any use is a really really bad idea. In the last couple years it was discovered that a relatively benign chemical (6-ppd) in tires that is intended to lengthen the life tires becomes incredibly toxic to coho salmon when altered by UV light and becomes 6-ppd-q. There are many articles published about this. I encourage you to read a few and then encourage your subscribers to educate themselves on how unfortunately bad this stuff is.