After an hour on the lake he was paddling reasonably well, and I did something stupid: I wanted to demonstrate how fast a kayak could move6 knots or so in a sprint. It triggered a squirt of his competitive testosterone, and he tried to keep up. The wind grabbed his poorly controlled paddle, whipped it under the boat, and inverted him. I waited for him to wet exit and pop up, but he didn't. I had 30 yards to cover, too far to help before he drowned. But he wrenched free enough to grab a mouthful of half air, half water, then finally burst out of the boat as I got there.
By then he was too panicked even to try the re-entry we'd rehearsed in theory. I told him to climb halfway onto my aft deck and I'd paddle him to shore. But with his drag and a headwind, I couldn't make much progress. I blew my emergency whistle, and a boater at the nearest marina sped out to rescue him.
Chris Landry
Day pack? Check. Walking shoes? Check. Copy of Thoreau? Check. Writer Lawrence Cheek has all he needs for an exploration of Seattles largest freshwater coastline.
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Lake Hike Advice What you need: Metro map, duct tape, and a strong bladder.
An urban hike demands a different kind of planning than a wilderness backpacking expedition, because you can't sleep just anywhere or pee whenever you feel like it. In summer, you'll need bunk reservations. Friends living near the lake are the obvious cheap stays. There's only one hotel on Lake Washington, Kirkland's Woodmark, which you can't afford if you have to ask. (For the record, summer rates start at $205for a room without a lake view.) A Web search for hotels and B&Bs will turn up several in Bellevue, Kirkland, Seattle, and Renton within walking distance from the water (which shouldn't faze you). In Kirkland I stayed at the Pinneos Garden Inn, a B&B at 411 Seventh Ave. S., 425-827-8989; and in the UW neighborhood at University Inn, 4140 Roosevelt Way N.E., 206-632-5055.
Your most important accessory is a friend or spouse to serve as your motorized Sherpa, meeting you nightly with clean clothes, fresh books, laptop computer, encouragement, and other provisions. This frees you to ramble with a lightweight day pack. Trucking everything in a serious expedition backpack will (a) invite suspicion and (b) hurt you, both unnecessarily.
The only real necessities are water and snack food, a detailed street atlas (I used the GM Johnson Greater Seattle book), compass, sunblock, hat, and rain jacket. To save weight, photocopy what you need from the atlas.
Test your proposed shoe-sock combination on a 10-mile practice walk; you don't want to be brought down by a foot rebellion. You might pack some moleskin, although some backpackers now swear by duct tape.
Other than sleeping accommodations, don't plan rigidly. Take detours to explore neighborhoods and discover food. Take unsigned paths wherever you find them; your compass will eventually lead you out. Trespass, but not egregiously. Use every park rest room and watch your fluid intake on the Burke-Gilman leg, which offers no legal place to pee for five long miles. Stop to enjoy wildlife and people, because you're having a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As my Japanese friends say about one of their most alluring landmarks: "Only a fool would not wish to climb Mount Fuji. And only a fool would do it twice." L.W.C.
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The sun emerges, grudgingly, in late afternoon. A chilling June wind skips off the lake. The water temperature is in the low 60s; the official swim season opens next weekend. Two people have drowned in Lake Washington so far this year. I bunk down at a friend's house near Seward Park after 15.8 more miles.
I'VE INVITED A FRIEND to meet me at Seward Park for the last leg of the expedition. He brings a friend, too, a bright and energetic woman who has a secret passion for writing, thinking we will have plenty to talk about.
We do. In fact, I find both of them such good company that I barely take note of the lake and the neighborhoods we breeze through. It seems like a reasonable diversion and rewardI've already passed four days meditating on the lake and its neighborhoods mostly in solitude.
But our best walker-essayists have usually traveled alone: Thoreau, Muir, Audubon, Edward Abbey, even Harvey Manning. The curmudgeon of Cougar Mountain told me that he preferred not only to hike alone, but also to flout the fundamental rule of telling someone where you're going.
"So if something happened, you'd just die out there?"
"Yes, as God intended of us."
Walking alone, in wilderness or city, is uniquely clarifying. One mind makes all the decisions, editing the environmental inputs so as to meditate fiercely on just one thing or struggle to assemble the Big Picture. The solo walker solely decides where to go, what to see and do and listen to, and what, if anything, it all means.
AND HERE IS what might occur to you as you walk around Lake Washington (which, by the way, becomes a hike of 75.9 miles if you weave and bob capriciously, as I did):
Nobody you meet thinks you're a doofus for doing it. Most, in fact, seem openly envious. They'd do it themselves, only they don't have enough time off, or they don't know how they'd explain it to their families.
Nothing bad happens to youyou aren't robbed, run over, chewed up, panhandled, or questioned by police. This speaks well of the Emerald City and its suburbs, contradicting the conventional wisdom that abrasive California emigr鳠are grinding away at our legendary amiability. Novelist Jonathan Franzen, who calls himself a "recreational walker," writes that in recent years, walking in places such as suburban St. Louis and Denver, "a not negligible percentage of the men speeding by me in their cars or sport-utility vehicles feel moved to yell obscenities at me." But not here.
To your surprise, you shed first your resentment and finally your envy of all the lakeshore homeowners, who initially seemed either more industrious, smarter, or mostly just luckier than you. In four or five days of urban hiking, you've gained secret knowledge of the lake in more forms than they'll ever know from their private decks. And if you want to own Lake Washington all by yourself, all 22,000 acres of it, why's your kayak lounging on its rack in the garage, dummy?
You're still a populist at heart, and you still think there ought to be more lakeshore parks and fewer rules. And that more of those parks ought to resemble Seward or Mercer Slough, with substantial vestiges of old-growth forest or working wetlands. At the same time, you're not unhappy that the goose-extermination program appears to have been working, and that your sneakers (and likely the lake) are cleaner because of it. Yes, you're inconsistent and hypocritical.
In Walking, Thoreau wrote that almost all man's improvements "simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap." I imagine he rode miserably in my backpack, since I generally like cities and think that the intersections of civilization and nature, such as the edges of Lake Washington, are the most intriguing places in the world because they expose us at our most arrogant, careless worstand at our muddling, haphazard best, trying to do the right thing.
Lawrence W. Cheek is an Issaquah-based writer who has written for Seattle Weekly and was a regular contributor to Eastsideweek. He is the author of several books and travel guides.
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