SEATTLE WALKS - DAVID B. WILLIAMS

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55.4 Miles. That’s the total length of all 17 walks in this book. It took my partner and I 2 years to complete, since there’s only a short season in Seattle to take a nice long walk outside. I don’t have a PNW local’s relationship to the rain. I won’t fuck around, this book was amazing. I wish this would have existed all of the places I lived. I remember walking around Watts in LA going from former nightclub to coffeeshop to riot ground zero(s), I remember walking down LSD in Chicago just to see how far I could go (as well as scope out what remains of the White City), I remember trying to wrap my head around the 100s of years of history visible (if you know how to look) at all moments in Mexico City’s endless sprawl. Can you imagine one of these for Calcutta or Antananarivo? A dream. Anyway, in the world we live in, there only exists one such guide and it is for Seattle. As I said before, there are 17 walks in the book and Williams does a better job than most at providing a geographic diversity. 5 of the walks are downtown, I agree that fewer would have been fine (or combine the rock themed downtown one and the stone animals one), and the rest are spread fairly evenly around the city. I could always use more info about Seattle’s South Side, there’s a Rainier Beach walk and a Beacon Hill walk but more would always be welcomed.  In a total dreamworld, I’d add a Queen Anne Walk and a Central District walk to the book. But fantasy aside, what makes this book engaging is the range of disciplines Williams is able to deploy. Obviously, there’s lots of history and urban studies stuff but there is also a ton of ecology and geology. Full confession, I’m not a rock guy. I’ve never been that into geology or cared about rocks and their origins. My understanding is that John McPhee wrote a really good book about rocks (possibly several? Hard to tell.) but I haven’t fucked with em and I’m not sure I will. Rocks, sadly, are boring. However, Willimas weaves the rock stuff in masterfully. There’s a lot (I’d actually say, it’s still a bit too much, but I ended up liking it way more than expected) of about how and where the rocks featured in downtown skyscrapers were sourced. He calls limestone a “matrix of corpses” and points out a,rather beautiful, 4 billion+ year old stone in a bank. Beyond that he puts a lot of emphasis on the way first nature then YTs physically reshaped the landscape of Seattle. It’s hard to grok that the way Seattle looked in 1855. Denny Hill was regraded. What is now downtown was regraded and filled in. The International District was regraded. Beacon Hill was sliced and reshaped. All of SODO was a marshy swamp, full of delicious wildlife and spiritually important to the Duwamish. There was a very important ghost-canoe journey undertaken on the winter solstice in this swamp (a journey that people were undertaking until at least the 1930s, I have an anthropological survey of Natives at the time that mentions their reports that the dead now drive cars). Now all warehouses and  pavement. Williams doesn’t do the best job weaving in the pre-Vancouver history of the area into his book, I’ve gotten most of my knowledge on these topics other sources. But its the variety of types of knowledge as well as the breath that really stand out. I found this book really inspiring, I’m writing my own guides to a few of the things in Seattle that I know about that the book glosses over or doesn’t address (red-lining, the various totem poles, the more radical labor history, etc). Some of the walks’ routes are impressive in a how-did-he-figure-this-out way, sometimes involving finding trailheads at the ends of parking lots or other less than obvious itineraries. Also, some of the longer ones, the 5 mile and up ones, really benefit from a bike. Overall, wonderful. Really, really great, if only they existed for everywhere. 17 long walks.