Since election day, the president has issued a vast and horrible horde of executive orders. Most have been short-sighted and narrow-minded. Many have been racist, mean-spirited, and vindictive. Others have been perplexing and one or two can be classified as mainly the gestures of a megalomaniac. I would like to comment on one of the latter ones, in part because it has a Seattle connection.

In 1886, William Andrews Dickey arrived in Seattle. It was the home of his wife’s parents, Dillis and Sarah Ward. Dickey was a chess prodigy and star pitcher for the Seattle Reds and supposedly one of the first baseball players in Seattle to throw a curve ball. Around 1893, he moved to Denny Hill and lived at its high point, 4th and Blanchard, with his wife and her parents. Formerly wealthy but now not, Mr. Ward nicknamed Denny Hill “Poverty Row.”

Ten years after arriving in Seattle, Dickey traveled to Alaska, attracted by recent discoveries of placer gold around the mouth of the Sushitna River at Cook’s Inlet. His plan was to head upriver and find the source for the gold. (“Luckily,” he wrote, “in June, the days are so long that it is never too dark to see to kill mosquitoes.”) When the weather finally cleared two weeks into the trip, he sighted a great mountain. “All the Indians of Cooks Inlet call it “Bulshoe” Mountain, which is their word for anything very large.” Actually, Bulshoe is the Russian word for big, as in the Bolshoi Ballet.

To the Indigenous people of the region, the mountain was, and still is, Denali. The name came from "deenaalee," a word from Denaakk'e or Koyukon Athabaskan, the Indigenous language of the Alaskan interior. According to an article in ICTnews, deenaalee means "the long one," though some people also refer to the mountain as either the big one or the great one.

After returning from Alaska, Dickey wrote an article, which appeared in the January 24, 1897, New York Sun. Noting “the total absence of the great Alaska range…on the Government charts of Alaska,” he appears to have decided that it was his obligation to bestow a new name on deenaalee. He chose to honor President William McKinley because he had first heard the news of McKinley’s nomination while in the wilderness. (Washington state voted for his opponent.) Dickey estimated the mountain to be over 20,000 feet high, “no doubt…the highest in North America.”

In 1975, Alaska’s State Board on Geographic Names attempted to change the name back to the Indigenous name. Starting the pathetic tradition of being someone who felt he had the right to abuse his power despite having no regard for the Indigenous people and no relationship to the mountain, Ohio Congressman Ralph Regula blocked the renaming…for 34 years. Not until six years after Regula’s retirement was President Obama’s Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell (a Seattleite) able to have the mountain renamed Denali, in 2015. Most of Ohio’s House Representatives thought the return to Denali was a travesty and a miscarriage of presidential power. Regula compared Obama to a dictator.

I find it hard not to consider the post-1975 history and the recent re-renaming to be the deplorable moves of arrogant bullies. These elected officials seem to think that their office confers some sort of power to dictate thoughtless and spiteful decisions. It doesn’t. Their actions illustrate their lack of consideration, sympathy, and empathy for others who are different from them. By the way, the act to change the name is known as “Restoring names that honor American greatness.” True greatness understands that what made this country great is compassion, diversity, and respect for others, not pathetic displays of pettiness.

Consider in contrast how the Washington Board of Natural Resources recently renamed two peaks in the Glacial Peak Wilderness. Crook Peak is now Goat Mountain and McCall Peak is now Huckleberry Mountain. Both of the new names are based on Indigenous names and replace the names of Lt. George Crook and Lt. James McCall, who were involved in an 1858 massacre of innocent Wenatachi Tribal members.

The president’s plans to change the names of Denali (and the Gulf of Mexico) pale in comparison to what is happening with immigrants and their families, to people of color, and to the LGBTQ+ communities, as well as what will happen to the environment. But these name changes are illustrative of how this presidency operates and how they lead to capitulations. (Sadly for the sake of journalistic integrity, the Associated Press immediately stated that it “will use the official name change to Mount McKinley.”) Aren’t there far more important issues to address and far better ways to make this a great country?

Paying too much attention to the news, I have been thinking about language and animals, in particular the metaphors we use. I would like to propose a few substitutes. It seems to me that whatever animal we hold in contempt, our own behavior is far worse than anything that animal has done or could do.

Toady - Really no better choice than going with Bezos as representing someone who capitulates in the hope of gaining favors. “The AP bezosed when it decided to go with Mount McKinley.'“

Weasel - How about Zucker (which seems better than Zuckerberg) for someone who misleads or shiftily manipulates.

Scum - Goetz, duh, with no disrespect for the amoeba that comprise scum.

Jackal - Hegseth seems appropriate for someone behaving in an aggressive or predatory way, as the OED puts it.

Please suggest your own.

February 19, 2025 – Elliott Bay Bookstore – 7pm – Wow! It’s the book launch for the new, exciting 2nd Edition of Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City. I will be in conversation with the splendid Taha Ebrahimi, author of Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide. Sign up here.

I like to think I am pretty good at reading maps. I understand topo lines and can tell a valley from a ridge from a summit. I know to look for scale and that sometimes 39-foot cliffs don’t show up on a map with 40-foot contours. I also know that maps can lie and mislead and that people use them for political or other sinister purposes. That being written, I didn’t expect to question my navigational talents via a small map illustrating part of a Washington State Park. But I was.

Over the weekend, my wife and I stayed in a cabin at Deception Pass State Park, at the north end of Whidbey Island. Perhaps I should have been forewarned about geographic shenanigans. Some Whidbites claim that their island is the longest in the United States. New York’s Long Island is far longer, but a unanimous 1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision rendered that point moot. They justices wrote that "Long Island, juridically, is a peninsula" and not an island. Such brilliant logic has facilitated the Whidbites’ bogus claims of exaggerated superlatives of island size.

In our cabin was a handy brochure with information and maps about Deception Pass. Looking at it, I noticed a section of the park where we had not hiked. Known as Hoypus Point Natural Forest Area, it juts north on the east side of Deception Pass. Hoypus has a high spot of 400 feet with steep sides on the west and east. Our plan was to circumnavigate the point and explore a complex of short, interconnected trails on the undulating area south of the summit. We were slightly concerned that the map’s legend listed 30 trails in the park and the map failed to show trails 27 to 30. But we figured we’d deal with it; after all Marjorie is an Excel whisperer and knows how to deal with obstinate numbers.

So, without a care in the world, we set out along the water. We were soon passing by Douglas firs wider than my outstretched arms, some so tall it took “two men and boy to look to the top,” as logger and historian Stewart Holbrook wrote in 1938. (I have long liked this phrase but recently learned, to my horror, that Holbrook wasn’t the first to use it; it’s been lurking around humor columns in newspapers since at least 1841. Apparently the first guy looks up until he’s tired and the second guy, aided by the boy, takes over from there.) Sadly, since we weren’t a party of three, we couldn’t actually see the tops of the trees.

As we walked around the bend we came to our first, well-made wooden sign, alerting to us being on the East Hoypus Point Trail (no. 17). We didn’t think much of the deviation from the map (which indicated we were in Fern Gully) figuring that we were headed the right way. Continuing on, we zigged and zagged, passing by other signs that didn’t match the names on the map. But still we weren’t worried. We had had a cup of coffee earlier so weren’t too concerned about caffeine headaches and Marjorie had several chocolate bars. We had also had a Vitamin C-enriched drink the night before, which most likely meant we would not get scurvy, the notorious and dreaded disease of misplaced souls. Clearly, we were up for whatever challenge awaited us at Hoypus Point.

Two hours into our walk, we sensed that we were mostly traveling in the direction that would complete our proposed loop. Yet, the trail names on the map placed us far to the north and east of the trail junction that a passing runner assured us was our present location. The runner slowed down enough to say that all we needed to do was take a right and left and we’d find the trailhead. Still doubtful, we broke down and turned to our phones. They have 120 million times the computing power of the Apollo Guidance Computer that directed humans to the moon. Despite all of the vaunted power of the phone though it failed to show the left turn our runner friend described and which showed up on our printed map.

Bold and intrepid as ever we sallied forth and found the left turn, which the map listed as Hemlock Hideaway. Again, this did not jibe; we had encountered a Hemlock Hideaway about 45 minutes earlier and the sign at the left turn said West Hoypus Point Trail. At this point, Marjorie turned to her chocolate, ate some, and declared that we would head up this trail, hemlock be damned. About 15 minutes later we reached our starting point, where we looked at a map on the kiosk. It showed what we suspected. The handy brochure map was either made as a joke, created by a geographically-challenged cartographer, produced without a copy editor, or was a sinister plot on the part of State Parks to annoy hikers. Or all four.

I tell you this story for several reasons. First, with the vile, immoral, and selfish proclamations oozing out of Washington DC, it seems that some silliness is necessary. Second, despite the cartographic issues, we had a splendid time; after awhile, all we could do was laugh at the signs and map. As usual, being outside was rejuvenating and seeing the big trees was inspiring and hopeful. In addition, our experience reaffirms my belief that when outdoors, one shouldn’t rely implicitly (or explicitly) on phone-based maps. They don’t provide the scale one often needs to navigate large spaces. Plus, they seem to push people to not pay attention to their surroundings. If we hadn’t been so diligent, and wired on caffeine, we might still be lost!

Finally, Hoypus Point is truly a lovely area. Studded with big trees, many of which bear marks of fires from long, long ago, it is an unusually intact Puget lowland forest. Many additional trees have complex growth patterns, such as multiple trunks or bent trunks and branches (both close to the ground and high up). And, despite the misinformation on the map, we did find the Big Marsh and Slug Slough (though no slugs). It is always a pleasure to travel locally and find new places to explore. In the future, though I will be more careful in basing my explorations on free brochure maps.

It’s not too late to get a paid subscription to my newsletter. As I noted last week, paid subscriptions are central to enabling me to write these newsletters every week. Surely, you don’t want them to stop.

Sources: Stewart Holbrook, Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American Lumberjack, 1938.

2025 began with a burst of color in our yard. Along the wall in our backyard, I spotted a patch of brilliance, the astonishing yellow-gold of a slime mold. It looked a bit like a two-dimensional broccoli, with radiating stems topped by little balls, each about 2 millimeters wide. The growth on fir needles, cones, and sticks was less diverse, basically rows of lemon-colored balls. I have seen slime molds many times before on hikes but never in our yard; I took it for a good omen for the year.

Overlooked, often unloved, sometimes derided, and once an inspiration for an evil alien that ate teenagers, and tried to eat a young Steve McQueen (more about this later), slime molds sound like they might be disgusting. After all, their name combines two substances that most people abhor. And, to make matters worse, the species I saw is often called dog vomit slime mold. But, of course, slime molds didn’t name themselves, and these fascinating organisms merit far more appreciation than their name implies.

Slime molds have confounded scientists since at least the 17th century when a German botanist described them as fungi. Subsequently a French botanist thought they were a sponge, which would confer upon slime molds animal status. Others placed them in the plant kingdom. None of these early writers were correct. Scientists now put slime molds in the kingdom, Protista, labeling them as myxomycetes (myxa, meaning slime and mycetes, referring to fungi), mycetozoa, or myxogastria. (By the way, molds actually are fungi so slime mold is terribly misleading as a name.)

About a 1,000 species exist, primarily in temperate and tropical forests but also in more extreme environments, including perhaps an aquatic variety. They are neither dangerous nor bad for you or the environment; in fact, they help maintain a healthy ecosystem. At least one species, F. septica (most likely the one in our yard), is eaten; in Veracruz, Mexico, it is scrambled like eggs and known as caca de luna, or excrement of the moon, arguably one of the world’s finest colloquial names.

Slime molds attract our attention in two forms. The form I encountered in our yard is called a plasmodium (plural: plasmodia). These naked (lacking a cell wall) blobs of protoplasm are often yellow or white and spread amoeba-like in a quest for food, which they engulf and digest. Their preferred meal is bacteria often found in decaying plant matter, such as the Douglas fir detritus in our yard. Plasmodia can move up to an inch per hour.

The secord form of slime mold can be even more beautiful than the plasmodial mode. These fruiting bodies of spores, called sporangia, often have a fungi-like shape of a stalk topped balls, columns, or tubes. They can be extremely colorful and gorgeous. Unfortunately for people with aging eyes like mine, sporagania are typically no more than a few millimeters tall so you may want to bring along a hand lens to assist your viewing pleasures. (The fruiting body of F. septica, which resembles dog vomit, is what gives this slime mold, its unappealing name.)

More astoundingly, plasmodia have been found to possess “a unique, coupled-oscillator based sensorimotor system that may be the key to its highly developed problem-solving abilities.” In other words, they have the capacity to make complex decisions. Slime molds, or at least the Einstein of the group, Physarum polycephalum, can find the shortest route through a maze and construct a highly efficient network of nutrient-feeding tubes in structure comparable to the Tokyo subway system. Researchers have begun to analyze the slime mold for insights into malleable network systems, including road, trains, and computers.

These problem-solving techniques of slime mold take us back to Steve McQueen, star of the slime mold inspired, 1958 sci-fi schlock of The Blob. After a meteor crash lands (how else do they land?), it unleashes a malevolent red-brown blob that begins to subsume people, “assimilating flesh at a remarkable speed,” says the soon-to-be assimilated town doctor. Fortunately, Steve (also his name in the movie) realizes what’s happening and warns his fellow citizens of the danger. He also saves the day by figuring out that the Blob cannot handle freezing. In the end, the Blob is airlifted to the Arctic, where the ice will prevent the Blob from rampaging again. Everyone in town lives happily ever after. And, you wonder why Steve McQueen was a legend!

Clearly, modern myxomycetes scientists need to be aware of the capacities of the beings they are studying. All’s well if the slime molds are merely passing the time by navigating mazes or working on more efficient subway systems. What happens if these slime molds go rogue or worse, like the Blob? We all know how easy it is to flip from simply driving a car to road rage. We can only hope that slime molds never learn how to drive cars!

P.S. Within a week the slime mold in our backyard had changed to a collection of little dark brown blobs. If no newsletter arrives next week, you’ll know that our slime mold went rogue.

Upcoming Event: February 19, 2025 - 7pm - Elliott Bay Bookstore - Book Launch of Seattle Walks: 2nd Edition. I will be in conversation with Taha Ebrahimi, author of Street Trees of Seattle. Free, ticketed. Register here.

Sources: C. Reid et al, “Decision-making with a brain: how an amoeboid organism solves the two-armed bandit,” Journal of the Royal Society: Interface 13 (19), June 2016.

Raphael Key et al, “Stepwise slime mould growth as a template for urban design, Nature,” Scientific Reports 12, 1322 (2022).

I have long been enamored with maps so I thought I’d begin 2025 by exploring one of my favorite’s. In 1891, Augustus Koch produced his Bird’s Eye View of Seattle, a glorious illustration of the city. As he noted on the map, it came out just 18 months after Seattle’s Great Fire. Koch was illustrating the city’s rise from the ashes.

Like many his age, 49 years old, Augustus Koch had fought in the Civil War, where he had been draughtsman making maps. For the past two decades he had traveled the country producing fantastic aerial views of cities from Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles. He had come to Seattle in the summer of 1890 to do the same.

With exquisite detail, Koch drew Seattle from a perspective over what is now Pigeon Point in West Seattle. His bird’s eye view showed the city, its surroundings, and its infrastructure. Measuring 32 by 50 inches and published as a limited edition lithograph in January 1891, the panorama map took six months to complete. It provides a remarkable snapshot of a city on the cusp of change from its pioneer roots to its status as the most important city in the state.

Plying the waters of Elliott Bay are more than a dozen schooners, tugs, and paddlewheelers. Two were specific ships, the steamers Willamette and Walla Walla. Both were passenger ships running between San Francisco and Puget Sound. Also named was the U.S. Man of War Charleston. Koch’s smaller vessels look to be part of Puget Sound’s legendary Mosquito Fleet. Typically pointy-ended, flat bottomed, propeller driven, steam powered, and made of wood, the boats were a combination of public transportation, UPS truck, post office, and general store. (Note that a southerly wind was blowing, as smoke from factories and stationary ships blew to the north.) The Mosquito Fleet was essential to knitting together Puget Sound’s far flung settlements into a thriving community.

But what stands out most to me is the phenomenal presence of rail. Fifteen trains, the longest of which pulls 16 cars, travel on tracks to, through, and from Seattle. The train tracks so dominate the waterfront that you cannot reach any part of Elliott Bay from Beacon Hill to Smith Cove without crossing at least one and up to five tracks. In addition, thirteen trolleys carry passengers across the city, going up to Capitol Hill, along the spine of West Seattle, over Madison to Lake Washington, and south toward Rainier Valley.

Tracks also cross the tideflats of the Duwamish River and frame in the lowland’s east and north sides. Extending south into the tideland are wharves that give the city an appearance of trying to become a new Venice, floating atop the water. These were working wharves with a ship building facility, several lumber mills, immense coal bunkers, railroad depots, and boiler works. One result of the growth of the train system and associated infrastructure was the complete reshaping of the waterfront, which would ultimately add about 2,200 acres of made land to Seattle.

Known for his remarkable accuracy, Koch did what a photographer couldn’t; he created a composite image. For instance, all of those ships couldn’t have been in the harbor on the same day; they would have needed too much space to turn around. I would guess the same is true with all of the trains traveling through his drawing, but Koch’s portrait accurately reflects what a typical Seattleite could have witnessed in the growing city.

In the 18 months since the downtown had burned to the ground, everyone had rushed to rebuild, usually bigger and certainly more substantial with brick and stone instead of wood. The sounds of hammers, saws, chisels, sledges, and pile-drivers resounded with the Seattle Spirit. Ships arrived daily bringing in goods and supplies and taking out raw materials. And although, Seattleites would have to wait two more years for direct transcontinental rail service, trains also arrived and departed daily from points south and east.

It must have been an exciting time to live here. The city had survived its devastating fire and was now thriving and changing at an unprecedented pace. But, part of what make this image so interesting is that I know it is fleeting. Within thirty years, Seattle regrades (note the Hotel Denny atop Denny Hill) would reshape the topography, the tideflats would be filled, and forests that Koch shows would be logged. But what else is new; reimagining and reinventing itself has long been the story of Seattle. Just look around at what has happened here in the past few decades.

You have one more day (to January 3) to take advantage of the UW Press’s Winter Holiday offer of 40% discount of books ordered directly from them.

Happy Holidays to all.

A couple of weeks ago I explored the world of ghost creeks in Seattle. Now, I’d like to turn to ghost lakes. Like ghost creeks, these are bodies of water that have been overlooked, buried, or long forgotten. They are far rarer in the city though some still rise from the dead and haunt their former landscapes.

I know of only two, Seattle ghost lakes that merited names. The northern one was Oak Lake. Located roughly between North 100th and 107th streets and Ashworth Avenue North and Aurora Avenue North, the small lake does not show up any maps. We know about it from a couple of photographs and because it inspired the name of the Oak Lake School, which was open from 1886 to 1985. (Only one legacy of the school remains, the student overpass on Aurora.) Perhaps the oddest aspect of the lake was the use of the name oak (most likely our one native Quercus garryana). What makes this unusual is that oaks were never common in Seattle, perhaps growing only at Oak Lake and south of Seward Park (coincidentally at a site of another former school). We have no clue when Oak Lake disappeared but as a ghost, a tiny artificial hint remains. In 2013, Seattle Public Utilities completed the Midvale Stormwater Pond in the vicinity of the former Oak Lake.

Seattle’s other named ghost lake was first noted in an 1855 survey of what is now Sand Point/Magnuson Park. Described as a small lake in a swamp, it appears to have inspired the Native place name of Cha7áhLqoo. The name means “digging in the water” and probably refers to wapato (a potato-like tuber) collected in the wetlands around the lake. Mud Lake, as settlers called it, first shows up on USGS maps from 1894. It covered about 40 acres and was home to cutthroat trout and non-native bass and perch (introduced in the late 1800s). Mud Lake shrank in 1916 after Lake Washington was lowered by nine feet for the Ship Canal, and died in the 1930s, when WPA workers covered the flat area with runways for Sand Point Naval Air Station. But as ghosts are wont to do, Mud Lake partially arose from the dead (with the aid of volunteers) in 2009 with a restoration project that established wetlands and small ponds in the vicinity of the former lake.

I suspect that Seattle may have had other ponds and lakes that disappeared before they earned a name. In particular, I am thinking of the bogs that formerly existed. Each of these wetlands consisted of a small pond (e.g. Mud Lake) surrounded by vegetation such as sphagnum moss mats, bog laurel, Labrador tea, and sundews. All were gone by at least the mid-1950s though two still ghost their former homes. Covered by a grassy field, the former bog and pond of Big Swamp keep the ground at Dahl Playfield, (25th Ave. NE and NE 80th St) damp and spongy. Another more destructive bog around N. 87th St. and Palatine Ave. has led to sinkholes, buckled sidewalks, and sunk foundations and roads. Unfortunately for property owners, this bog’s poltergeist is persistent and continues to disrupt the area.

I would be remiss as a geodork if I didn’t mention our two largest ghost lakes: Glacial Lake Bretz and Glacial Lake Russell. Toward the end of the last Ice Age, when the great glacier that covered the Puget Lowland began to melt, its snout acted as dam, which retreated to the north. As water from this melting glacier, as well as the mountain glaciers, drained into what we now call Puget Sound, a multi-fingered body of water known as Glacial Lake Russell formed. Covering all of the south Sound (it drained south), it extended as far north as Lynnwood and had shorelines as high as 380 feet above present sea level. Younger and covering more ground to the north was Glacial Lake Bretz. The two lakes persisted for perhaps 1,000 years or more. The most visual evidence of these lakes are deltaic gravel deposits, which were mined for decades, at places such as Richmond Beach Park and what is now Chambers Bay Golf Course.

Seattle also has what I would consider to be honorary ghost lakes, in that few people seem to know they exist. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I had long known of one of them, Haller Lake, but never gotten to its shores. (Once known as Welch Lake (for John Welch, who homesteaded there in 1869), it got its modern name in 1905, when Theodore Haller began to develop the area.) The one time I tried, I ran down what turned out to be a private lane and encountered a less-than-friendly resident. I thought all of the access roads were private until I looked at a map and found two public street ends. When I visited them the other day. I found a quiet lake, a nice bench, and many docks. The access roads are Meridian Ave N., south of N. 128th St. and N. 125th St. east of Densmore Ave. N., which takes you to an official Street End park.

Easier to access is Bitter Lake (near N. 130th St. and Linden Ave. N.), which was once a station on the Seattle-Everett Interurban, as well as the site of a farm where you could buy Crystal White Orpingtons, award winning egg layers of the poultry kind. Surrounded on three sides by buildings, the lake opens to Bitter Lake Playfield on the south end. The name comes from a long gone sawmill on the south end, which led to tannic acid dumping into the lake, rendering it too bitter for horses to drink, or so the legend goes.

Like most urban areas, Seattle has erased much of its surface aquisystem under concrete and buildings. Ironically, the city has had to build a new infrastructure to address the attributes provided by the ghosted lakes and creeks. These benefits include improving water quality and habitat and reducing flooding and sediment retention. Addressing these issues has led the city to develop a new aquisystem of detention/stormwater ponds, such as Midvale. At least 53 exist, dotted across the city. They are the ghosts of waterways past, a subtle reminder that water has long been central to the story of Seattle, and will continue to shape it long into its future.

Thanks to Derek Booth, Ralph Haugerud, and David Dethier for information on the glacial lakes, and to Valarie Bunn, for information on the Big Swamp. Thanks to the Friends of Street Ends for their work in preserving and making people aware of these fine assets and access points to water.

I just looked and I am just a few subscribers short of 3,500. It’d be nice to end the year above that number so I have a favor to ask. If you have friends who might be interested in a free subscription, please forward information about the Street Smart Naturalist to them. Thanks kindly.

As a map and geography dork, one of my little pleasures is being a gnomon. This is particularly true when my shadow is directly in front of me as I walk north on a city street. When that happens, I know it is celestial noon because most streets in most cities are laid out due north/south, which means you also have a gnomonic ability. Therefore, I was confused when walking up Fifth Avenue in downtown Seattle. (I was also a bit taken aback simply by the sun being out in late November.) The reason for my confusion was that my shadow pointed directly up the street, like a sundial at noon, which meant it should be noon. And, it wasn’t!

I quickly realized my mistake, which I knew resulted from a geographical quirk created by early Seattle settlers Arthur Denny and Doc Maynard. In 1853, they were tasked with platting Seattle streets. Legend holds that Denny believed that Maynard was “stimulated by liquor” and that he had the gall to align his streets with the cardinal directions. In contrast, Denny (a notorious teetotaler) aligned his streets with the shoreline.

Both were right in their actions. Most urban and rural settings operate on a cardinal direction street orientation, basically a Cartesian grid, aligned north/south and east/west. Thus Maynard was simply following historical protocol, when he created his street grid south of what is now Yesler Way (nee Mill Street). Denny’s idea was also logical. An alignment tied to the waterfront would make it easier to navigate to, from, and along the shoreline, certainly a key issue in a city whose economic life centered on maritime trade.

The two couldn’t compromise because Denny believed that “Maynard had taken enough to make him feel that he was not only monarch of all he surveyed but what…I surveyed as well,” wrote historian Murray Morgan, in his book Skid Road. Ironically, Denny had been a surveyor so should have known and accepted Maynard’s logic of alignment with the cardinal directions. The conflict between the two fellows is what led to my confusion because my shadow was oriented with Denny’s waterfront roads, thus altering the normal time-space continuum of noon shadows and north/south roads.

I can easily imagine that many of you are now wondering: Does Seattle have other big downtown road quirks that mess with David? Well, readers, look carefully and you can see that Second Avenue Extension South (created in 1928/29) is the only street west of I-5 that cuts straight across the Maynard-Denny Line of Contention. All others follow the kink created by the original plats. Builders of the new road hoped that a direct connection from the more prosperous northern part of downtown would drive “better” money and business to the area known variously as Blackchapel, Whitechapel, the Lava Beds, Tenderloin, and perhaps most famously, Skid Road. The straight-line extension would also help alleviate congestion, which was becoming more problematic with the growing popularity of automobiles.

To the north lies the other notable road idiosyncrasy. Like the 2nd Avenue Extension, Westlake Avenue cuts through the established road grid, this time at yet another angle different not aligned north/south. Built partially with fill from Denny Hill between 1905 and 1907, the road ran in what some called the “great Westlake Valley,” an area where surveyors in 1856 reported six-foot-wide western red cedars. Westlake Boulevard, as it was originally known, would be the new arterial highway bringing prosperity for property owners and businesses along it and to the north, unless of course the city condemned and appropriated your property. Oh well, you can’t please everyone.

The story of Seattle’s downtown street grid is the typical one of a thriving and ambitious city, particularly one obsessed with becoming a WORLD CLASS CITY. Initially, the layout follows the topography, often tracking old footpaths, which in turn might follow routes utilized by the Native inhabitants, or perhaps even animals. As the city grows, roads get more formalized through official platting, and less tied to topography via regrading. Eventually, enough changes occur, such as the arrival of new modes of transportation or development of more outlying areas, to force planners to slice across the grid. I get their point that following that ancient observation—the shortest distance between two points is a straight line—is a good idea but it really messes with my ability to tell time.

Speaking of streets, today’s as good of time as any to announce the imminent publication of the Second Edition of Seattle Walks. I have updated the walks, fixing mistakes and addressing changes in the urban infrastructure. I also added three new walks—in Georgetown, the Central District, and Cascade/South Lake Union—and dropped two walks—Magnuson Park and Where You At? Seattle Walks won’t be out until February 2025 but you can pre-order it through the UW Press and get a 40% discount until January 3.

One of my joys of discovery is heading down an absorbing path of seeking out more information in newspapers and scientific journals, reaching out to friends and colleagues, or delving into the books waiting to be probed on my bookshelf. No matter where these paths lead me, I feel I am rewarded by the knowledge I gain and the connections I make.

I have had this happen many times in my writing life, including this encounter on a very cold winter day. My wife and I were walking with a pal of ours at Tolt River-John MacDonald Park (about 20 miles east of Seattle). The air was brisk, the ground frosty, and the decaying tree limbs erupting in beauty. In particular, we were attracted by a curious phenomenon none of us had ever seen. Sprouting out of the downed wood were what looked like tufts of fine hair, brilliantly white and curled like Albert Einstein’s mane but better kempt.

Known appropriately as hair ice, this fragile and ephemeral feature owes its origin to the winter-active fungus Exidiopsis effusa. It is a white root fungus (please feel free to use this as the name of your next rock band) capable of decomposing the lignin—a complex organic polymer—that gives wood its strength, something very few organisms can accomplish. In his thoughtful book Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake writes that the decomposition is accomplished by “highly reactive molecules, known as ‘free radicals,’ which crack open lignin . . . [via] ‘enzymatic combustion.’” I suspect it’s probably less dangerous than it sounds.

But back to what E. effusa does in the Pacific Northwest. The fungus helps create the tufts of hair ice via a process called ice segregation. After the initial formation of ice nuclei in the limb, new ice extracts additional water from the wood, which leads to more ice growth that eventually extrudes out through holes in the limb’s surface. If E. effusa isn’t present, the ice turns crusty, but if E. effusa is present, it provides decomposed lignin and tannin, which act as a combination curler and hair spray, shaping and setting the fine strands of ice growing out of the wood. They are so fine that they are between 2.5 and 6.5 times narrower than a human hair. Some strands can grow up to 8 inches long, or about the size of an average banana. Sadly, I have yet to encounter such cascading locks of hair ice; all of the hair ice I have seen has been less than two inches long.

Part of what makes the science so splendid to me is that the first person to propose (in 1918) the fungus and hair ice connection was one of my heroes, Alfred Wegener. A meteorologist, explorer, and hot-air balloon experimenter, Wegener is best known for his theory of continental drift. Like his theory on hair ice, decades would pass before scientists proved he was correct about how the Earth’s land masses once formed a single great continent.

On-going research has found that hair ice growth requires rotten hardwoods, including two of our resident species, red alder and bigleaf maple, and high humidity, such as after snow melt or heavy rain. The temperature should be just below freezing in windless conditions. Curiously, climate change may lead to more hair ice in temperate latitudes, such as the PNW, because there will be more snow free periods, and if the temperature subsequently does drop below freezing, hair ice can form.

If you touch the gossamer strands, you will find that the hair ice has a curious density of texture that is most likely the product of the decomposed lignin, as if its structural strength had been transferred from the wood to ice, as if all were part of one amazing, interwoven community. Despite this tenacity, hair ice will melt quickly if held too long and tends to last for only a few hours to days. Fortunately, hair ice can regrow year after year on the same branch, as long as E. effusa is present, so it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

I have been fortunate to encounter hair ice many times over the past few years. I usually stop to marvel over the shimmering evanescence and to rejoice in the amazing surprises of the natural world. As usual, I am glad I followed that path of research to understand this beautiful winter feature.

On one of the recent times I saw hair ice in the past week, I was also excited to locate a woodpecker in a tree, which may not sound cool or unusual but it was. I was hiking with pals on the Poo Poo Point trail at Tiger Mountain when we saw abundant, fresh looking wood bits and chips around a snag. I suspected that the wood was from the poundings of a Pileated Woodpecker but we couldn’t locate a hole so continued on our way. When we walked back by an hour or two later, however, the light had changed and I noticed a couple inch hole about 30 feet up the snag. As I gawked I heard a sound from within the dead tree. Clearly someone was pecking away. Being the busybody I am, I lightly tapped the base of the tree with my hiking pole, the sound stopped, and a Hairy Woodpecker flew out of the hole.

I didn’t mean to disturb the bird and felt bad that I had driven away the industrious homemaker. A birding friend, however, told me later that “woodpeckers are quite hearty” (perhaps she meant hardy but she is a writer so who knows) and that I was sort of a meanie but the bird would return soon to continue feeding or broadening out the cavity for winter roosting. I sincerely hope so.

This is a repeat of one of my first newsletters, from February 2001. I decided to repost it (though slightly modified), primarily because I have encountered hair ice several times during this recent cold spell. I suspect I will continue to see it throughout winter and hope you do, too. Here’s a link to more information about hair ice formation.

I recently heard this quote and found it thoughtful. “When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.”Timothy Snyder in his book On Tyranny

Greetings all. Several people suggested that they would prefer the podcast and newsletter packaged in one email, so here it is. Again, any thoughts on this experiment with podcasts would be great.

As occurs in many cities, ghosts thread the landscape of Seattle, quietly passing by us everyday. Endless and ceaseless in their travels, despite some of our efforts to thwart their movement, they occur in every neighborhood. None of them call attention to themselves, though they occasionally burst out and wreak havoc, but all make an impression as they cut through the city’s hills and ravines and by our houses, schools, and businesses. How many of them exist? We have no idea though I know of at least 49 that have been named, some by early residents, most by settlers, and others by more recent arrivals.

These ancient ghosts, all of which owe their origin to the last Ice Age, are the uncountable creeks and streams that course(d) across Seattle. Known as ghost or lost or phantom rivers, they have been culverted, covered, buried, troughed, and hidden by decades of development. (Given their size, Seattle’s ghost rivers merit more the moniker of ghost creeks.) Although we may overlook these ghost creeks, many still retain some semblance of their corporeal existence and can reappear unexpectedly, such as during big rainstorms, when water collects and flows in the channels carved by the ancestral creeks.

Seattle is actually fortunate in how many of these ghost creeks still have sections where the water flows on the surface and provides enticing hints of how ubiquitous flowing water was in Seattle’s past. For the most part, however, even these visible traces of water receive scant attention and, I would guess, few visitors. Seattle’s ghost creeks are as much a result of how we interact with and perceive nature as any physical thing we did to them.

For instance, compare these two maps of Seattle. The left-hand side is the Google map, one that I would guess is becoming the most familiar to residents. I count four, maybe five streams on it. Pick any quadrant on the right-hand map and you will see at least four streams, and this map does not tell the full story, as not all of the streams are shown. (This map is mostly based on information from the Government Land Office’s cadastral surveys, which gridded the country into Township and Range and were completed in order to make the land available for individual ownership. In addition to the maps, the surveys contained detailed notes about topography, fauna, soils, and waterways but not all creeks made it onto the maps because they weren’t directly on the survey route.)

Few creeks better exemplify their ghostly nature than Thornton, which has the largest watershed (7,402 acres or 14% of the city) of any Seattle creek. In a 1998 poll conducted for Seattle Public Utilities, half of the 75,000 inhabitants who live within Thornton’s watershed couldn’t name the creek or its numerous tributaries when asked to identify a creek near their home. The most likely reason: a modern terrain of impervious surfaces—such as roads and parking lots—envelops over 50 percent of the watershed, giving Thornton its invisible, ghostly status. A similar cover of concrete applies to Seattle’s other creeks, and I suspect the percentage of people unaware of how close they are to ghosts would be significantly higher across the city. (Many Seattleites also tend to overlook our one actual river, the Duwamish River, or what author BJ Cummings called The River that Made Seattle, in her splendid book. Seattle used to have another river, the Black, which connected Lake Washington with the Duwamish, but the Black became a ghost in 1916 with the construction of the Ship Canal and Locks; only the merest remnant remains.)

By failing to recognize the existence of our ghost creeks, we miss so much. They have a rich variety of plants, some limited to streams. They are home to salmon and other fish, amphibians, numerous birds, and many mammals, particularly beavers. Creeks provide excellent travel corridors for animals such as coyotes, raccoons, and river otters, as well as good play areas for children (though the creeks are contaminated in places and the water may not be totally healthy). And, I know of at least one glacial erratic and several exposures of glacial sediments in Thornton Creek! Unfortunately, creeks also suffer when we neglect them. Fecal material from our pets, toxic-laced runoff from our roads and homes, and indiscriminate dumping of our garbage, each harms sensitive riparian communities.

Our inattention to our ghost creeks is ironic. In this city famed for its precipitation, we are overlooking a significant visible manifestation of our rain. One reason may be that our better-known water features, Lake Washington and Puget Sound, take all of the attention away from the creeks. These two big bodies of water have long played critical roles in the story of Seattle, and they deserve our concern, care, and protection, but so do our creeks. They are the arteries feeding into the lungs of Seattle’s urban aquisystem, and like human arteries, they need to be treated well. I can think of few better ways to do that than visiting them and learning their secrets.

If you want to get a sense for what has changed, take a walk in Discovery (particularly on the trail up from North Beach), Lakeridge or Schmitz parks and see how much water flows in the many seeps and rivulets that grace these areas. Now, walk out of the parks and it’s as if you had entered a different country, a country that has tried to erase nature and replace it with the human infrastructure of roads, sidewalks, parking lots, and buildings. It’s a startling change but I wouldn’t assume that people have triumphed; nature has a resilience and persistence that keeps these creeks alive. Like any good ghost, they will rise again.

This newsletter was inspired by a wonderful book I recently read: Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky. Spanning centuries and connected by a single drop of water, it’s a love letter to rivers, says the author, particularly to the Thames and Tigris, where the action centers. Shafak raises complex questions about history, museums, religion, and rivers as she weaves the lives of three people: a young girl on the Tigris (2014), a hydrologist who lives on the Thames (2018) and studies ghost rivers, and a young man who grows up in poverty on the Thames (1840s) and becomes a renowned researcher who translates the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a tour de force, hard to put down, thought provoking, and evocative and, I would also say, a love letter to the power of place in our lives.

Thanks to Jennifer Ott, Patrick Trotter, and Jason King for answering my questions about ghost creeks. If you are interested, Jason has a splendid Substack newsletter, Hidden Hydrology, that takes deep and thoughtful dives into this subject.

Greetings readers of the Street Smart Newsletter. I am trying something new and am creating a podcast based on my newsletter. As you will hear, it’s pretty basic, just me reading the newsletter. I have no idea how this will go but figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try.

My plan, if this works, is to record my future newsletters and possibly to go back and record some of my previous ones, if I can figure out to do so without having to send you announcements about that.

If you already have a subscription to my newsletter, you will now receive two newsletters per week: one of the written word and one of the spoken word. I am still figuring out the logistics of how all of this works so please bear with me.

If you want to subscribe, please do so. You will then enter the rarified country of those who get two Street Smart Newsletter per week. How exciting is that?

Any thoughts or advice or suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks again for joining me on this adventure.

If you are interested in the newsletter of this podcast, here’s a link.