The first order of Saturday was to take a walk. Our 3 mile loop starts at the marina, goes
under the train tracks then winds up through the Sunset Hills neighborhood
overlooking the Marina and Puget Sound.
There’s a wonderful park with huge views of the sound.
The sailboats in the picture are from the second annual
‘Race Your House’ sailboat race. The
only qualification for the race is you need to be a bonafide liveaboard.
We thought about participating it the race, but there were
several pre-events and it was just too much given Jodi’s travel and it would
have added a large planned event into an otherwise delightfully blank slate
weekend.
Back to the walk.
After the park there’s a strategically located coffee shop. Gotta love these urban walks. There were no such amenities on the Preston
Trail.
Then comes the stairs.
100 stairs. Steep stairs. Trip and risk your life steep. Fortunately there’s a good rail down the
entire length. Back under the train
tracks and at the Marina.
We did see another regatta, this one was an ‘Opti’
race. An Opti is an 8 foot sailing
dinghy usually sailed by kids. It was
great seeing a 6 year old, complete with mini foulweather gear and a
professional looking life jacket. At 6
this kid looked very competent as skipper of his racing machine. We saw some Oregon sailing clubs that had
brought their boats and young sailers to the regatta.
We did have a couple of chores after the walk, but the
evening’s event was a visit to Seattle’s underground. The Underground Tour.
There’s quite a bit to the story, so I’ll need to
paraphrase. Much of Seattle’s Pioneer
Square area was originally swamp land at or below sea level. The only thing going for it was an ever
optimistic functioning alcoholic who happened to be the town Doctor and early
Seattle promoter.
Doc Maynard. It wasn’t mentioned during the tour, but legend
has it Doc Maynard swindled the swamp land from Arthur Denny during a tooth
extraction and Denny obligingly agreed to the transaction while under the
influence of opium administered by the good Doc.
In any case, the original pioneer square area was built on a
landfill of largely sawdust and in the 1880’s was home to 2,500 or so alleged
seamstresses in a town otherwise dominated by a much larger number of male
lumberjacks. It was said these 2500
self proclaimed seamstresses collectively owned something like 7 sewing
machines and the principle color they all seemed to like was red. So it was called the red light district.
At the same time, the flush toilet plays into the
story. It seems that Seattle’s first
attemp at a sewer system didn’t anticipate population growth on the hills above
Pioneer Square and at high tide the pressure of the #2 coming down the hill was
exceeded by the backpressure of the high tide, the level of which was still
above much of Pioneer Square.
Apparently if you lived in Pioneer Square and flushed during a high tide
there was a great risk of far more poop exploding up through the toilet than
disappearing down the normal route.
Which lead to the tide tables being published on the front
page of the local papers.
Then in 1889, a single event altered the course of
Seattle. While the single paid fireman
was out of town in San Francisco learning fire fighting techniques, a young
assistant was boiling glue. Seems he
was distracted (by one of the 2500 seamstresses?) and the glue boiled over into
some turpentine soaked rags. Fire
erupted and spread to the paint store immediately above the glue shop. This in a town with no brick structures and
wooden houses and shops by the hundreds built side by side.
In relative short order, much of Seattle was completely
destroyed. The ever optimistic city
founders set at once correcting the level of Pioneer square by building the
streets 12 to 24 feet above their former elevation and for a while townsfolks
needed ladders to cross the streets.
One by one the shop owners raised their businesses to street
level leaving a fascinating rabbit warren like area beneath Seattle. Giving rise to Seattle’s underground tour.
The tour guides package all the information with a humorous
twist. Unknown to us, there are at
least 2 tours. The ‘family’ tour, which
was the one we were on, and the ‘adult’ tour which is probably quite a bit of
fun.
It was a fun evening with dinner at ‘Place Pigalle’ in the
market.
We should have hiked Sunday, but by the time we got
ourselves up and going it was too late.
We had a late breakfast at Vula’s Offshore Café. Dad and his buddies ate here often after
crew practice. Nearly 20 years later
the pictures of the Ancient Mariners, Classic Ancient Mariners (CLAMS) and
Really Ancient Mariners (RAMS) still hang on the wall.
Dad once told me of quite a stretch where they couldn’t row
because of fog. Day after day they’d
get up before 5 am only to find out it was too foggy to row (their coxwain was
mostly blind, so it was prudent not to get out on the water). Day after day they’d not row and end up at
Vula’s for breakfast. So the RAMS
became the RAMBO’s. The Really Ancient
Mariners Breakfast Organization.
The current crew of the Ancient Mariners still gather in the
morning after practice and over the years they have earned quite a
reputation. The guy at Vula’s running
the place summed it up by saying ‘those old guys are hard core’. He did. remember Dad and we reminised a bit.
After breakfast we biked off the calories going over the
locks to Discovery park. On the way back the 'Olympus' was locking through.
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