A Walk Around the Lake

Forget Green Lake. I wanted to walk around Lake Washington. Why? Of course it was hard to explain.

"To reflect on our urban relationships with the lake" was sort of true, but it sounded like grad-school mumbo-speak, and I happily fled grad school a quarter-century ago, a long way from earning any degree. I wanted to gather evidence that the increasing wealth necklacing the lake is choking it for the rest of us, but hesitated to say this. Communism is a hard sell in Kirkland.

Eventually I realized the best explanation was the simplest and most honest one: I like the lake, and I like to walk. And I wanted to see what would happen.

MY WIFE, PATTY, deposits me under the I-90 bridge in Bellevue on her way to work. There's a park here, Enatai Beach. It has a counterpart where I-90 launches itself off Seattle, Day Street Park. These are bizarre, contradictory environments: softly sculpted arcs of manicured grass contravened by virtuosic feats of concrete engineering thrusting overhead and the endless rumble, swish, and shriek of freeway traffic. They're uneasy places to spend time. They trigger an instinctive flee-or-duck reaction in the human brain, not very different from when a marmot unhappily finds itself wrapped in a hawk's shadow. But the alternativeleaving these under-freeway wedges as weed-infested wastelandswould be worse.

I have a bias about land use around the lake, and I might as well lay it out now: There's not nearly enough for the public. Roughly 76 percent of the lakeshore is locked up as private homes, private clubs, and private marinas and for other restricted uses. The shore of Lake Washington could have been an entirely public treasure, like Oregon's seacoast, where all 362 miles of beach and headland have been preserved for everyone's use.

Why wasn't it? The Olmsted brothers tried, and thanks in great part to their visionary master plan for the Seattle park system, Seattle gives the people more than twice as much shore as all the suburbs combinedabout 11 miles, not counting the University of Washington's shoreline. Mark Hinshaw, former chief urban designer for Bellevue, tells me the attitude toward public space in the burbs was different, at least back when waterfront property might have been available. "Suburbs have seemed to be based on notions of exclusivity and private space," he says. "I'm not sure that was ever a public policy, but it was a private attitude."

I'm packing some contrarian reading on my trek: Thoreau's Walking, a slim book published posthumously in 1862. Thoreau suspected an American future where most of our land would be locked up behind fences and "No Trespassing" signs, and the thought made him apoplecticyou can sense his blood approaching boil as the sentences tumble forward:

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds . . . when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's ground. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

I pick my way north under I-90 along a 12-foot-wide corridor enforced by chain-link fences on each side. These, in concert with the freeway ramps slashing overhead, would for Thoreau constitute Evil Days indeed. My expedition is just beginning, though, and it would be a shame to let cranky Henry sour the project within the first couple of miles. Anyway, the freeway roar begins to ebb as I plod into the slough, the avian commotion increases, and my mood brightens.

Mercer Slough is one of the urban area's least plausible environmental triumphs. As the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the Lake Washington Ship Canal, they drained 9 feet of water out of Lake Washington in 1916, exposing assorted peat bogs for imaginative uses. Union Bay and Columbia City wetlands became landfills; Mercer Slough for a while tolerated farming. When an oddball named Siegfried Semrau became Bellevue's parks director in 1962the incorporated town was then only nine years oldhe hatched the radical-for-its-time idea of leaving it alone as an urban nature preserve. Despite a consulting biologist's 1970 report that called it "unattractive, unfishable and unproductive," by 1989 the city had pieced together about 320 acres, fulfilling Semrau's vision.

It's frightening how fast our perception and understanding of environmental issues can change: One generation's wasteland becomes the next's treasure, or vice versa. We now know that the dense wetland vegetation filters sediment from river water and urban runoff en route to Lake Washington and provides habitat that's hardly "unproductive" for great blue herons and muskrats.

And mosquitoes. I duck into a small clearing to pee and suffer my first wildlife attack of the trek. Hey, we've saved your home from development, and this is our reward?

It isn't easy to walk the lakefront through Bellevue. I wind through the upper- middle-class neighborhoods west of Bellevue Way looking for unadvertised trails and pocket beaches. There are some, but they're tough to negotiate without a local escort. I have the uneasy feeling of being an interloper, even when I'm staying on public streets. In one cul-de-sac, a pair of golden retrievers growl a command to retreat. On another placid street, I see a warning tacked to a tree: "Mailbox Is Under Video Surveillance." I'm relieved when I get to Chism Beach Park, except I remember coming to this park once before, six or seven years ago, and a city employee ordered me not to sit on the boulders bordering the beach. What, my buns might scratch the municipal rocks?