Alive as any person or animal

On walking, in-city wilderness, and Marilynne Robinson

We live in a neighborhood cut through by three ravines. On a satellite map, they look like green gashes, a north-south swipe from an extinct three-toed beast. The ravines start just above 85th Street, where the tidy grid of sidewalked streets frays into irregular avenues that stumble northward, in fits and starts, toward Puget Sound.

This part of the city was unincorporated King County until 1954, when Seattle annexed it. By that time, development was well underway, and King County did not have regulations requiring pedestrian infrastructure, so there are no sidewalks or curbs.

Behold the variety of sidewalk surfaces in Seattle. The maroon lines are “unimproved” sidewalks, which means… there aren’t actually sidewalks ?

I appreciate that so many trees here were left alone — towering firs, cedars, bigleaf maple, hemlock — even as the roads were laid and houses were built. A stream runs (or trickles, depending on the season) through the valley of each and spits eventually into the Sound. I do not love taking walks on streets without sidewalks, especially not with a stroller, but I do it anyway. The cars are mostly polite, except for a single speeding Rivian this morning. Because of the ravines, many of the east-west streets are dead ends.

When we first moved in, I thought there might be trails down into the ravines. Whether or not there are depends on your definition of trail. There is a trail into one of them, but it only goes a few hundred feet before the trees close overhead like gothic arches and the trail disintegrates into mud so quick and viscous, June once got stuck ankle-deep in it and then I got stuck trying to extract her. My phone tells me that happened in 2020, April of 2020 — the metaphors write themselves, yuk yuk yuk!