Joe Szilagyi

A while back my wife and I started a blog on Seattleology, which was going to be about… well, Seattle. It never really panned out, due to boredom, or who knows what. Anyway, it occurred to me that I still wanted to something Seattle-related, and it occurred to me as well that all the link directories specifically “about” Seattle largely sucked. So… voila!

Yes, it’s a straight-up links directory, and a bit barren as of yet aside from the beginnings of a solid category tree, but everything has to start somewhere. I was figuring on adding more stuff, later on, content-wise.

x-posted from our Seattleology site

Last weekend we went to Discovery Park in the northwest end of Seattle. We’d both been itching to go there, and we both wanted to see the park–and to see what kind of shape we were in. For the shape… well, not so great, but it could have been a lot worse. Our wind was amazingly fine enough, in spite of our both still fighting to quit smoking (half heartedly at the moment, but that’s a post for another day). The part is, I’m sure to many of the locals or people who grew up in Seattle, unless they’ve rarely been there… just another park.

To me, it’s a funny place that feels nearly like another world. I grew up spending a lot of time in the outdoors. Boy Scouts. Camping. Hiking. Fishing (lakes, coasts, harbors, beaches, rivers, if it had fish, it was assaulted). Trail riding on my various half-destroyed bicycles. Something my friends and I called “wood stomping”, which was basically semi-deranged hiking mostly off of trails, where we had to run downhill. Every hill. I know the look, feel, and smell of all those sorts of places back home. You just, after twenty odd years of remembering it, get used to it. The trees come in certain basic types and arrangements, for a given time of year, based on the terrain. The same with fauna, the same with the smells. All of that. So far, the only thing that’s consistent here in Seattle with that is the smell of the salt water coming off of Elliot Bay and Puget Sound. That’s a scent that to me, always and forever, is the scent of Home. I’d go insane if I didn’t get it from time to time. I especially can recall the feel, sound, and look of the woods back home–I spent more than enough time in them…

…Discovery Park in massive swathes feels nothing like those woods I know. The woods have a gorgeous warmth to them, which I think comes from the insane lushness of it. Pine, cedar, alder, all the things you don’t get here, the various undergrowth which is much denser here than the old forests I know. I can from memory recall two distinctive, massive swathes of fern growth back home in two locations. One is in Roosevelt Forest in Stratford, Connecticut; the other was in the shadow of Bear Mountain in Salisbury, along an always freezing, fast moving stream. I saw tons and tons of bigger such growths in just three hours of walking. The forest had a sense of… being decorated? Painted? I can’t really think of a more elegant or poetic way of putting it. It’s entirely due to the undergrowth and moss along the various trees. No doubt, at all, on that. The sheer overwhelming amounts of green the forest shows you here… it makes the woods I grew up loving seem like the plain girl next door, with no makeup on. Northwest forests are a relative supermodel, done up for a photo shoot.

And that’s in the beginning of May, let alone summer. Good lord.

There was something else, there in Discovery Park, that absolutely made me happy. It was by the bluff, but not the fantastic view of the Sound itself. It was that massive beach below it. We got there at just about the height of low tide, and the wind seemed to be blowing up from the water. As soon as we got close to it, crossing the large meadow by it, the wave of salt water smell just rolled over me—it was wonderful, and the beach below looked amazing. Next time we go, I think we should time it for as the tide begins going out, so that we can do down to the water for a few hours. We only took the loop trail the whole way, unfortunately, last time. But if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have met the Tree Guy.

My wife about summed him up, but it was surreal. There was a massive, gnarly tree in the midst of the path, and we took a quick break. I’d seen trees like this throughout the park, but this one was especially large and wrinkled. She set out to take some pictures of it, while I checked it out top to bottom, trying to figure out what kind of tree it was. Tree Guy came up behind us, and educated us in his quiet, serene, and monotone tenor about how it was a sort of maple tree indigenous to the Pacific Northwest.

He waxed poetic on how the early loggers, in their zeal for clearing old growth trees for timber, replanted with alder, which apparently has a tendency to kill off the surrounding trees with it’s aggressive leeching of the surrounding soil… while ironically strengthening and nourishing that same soil in the long run. I have no idea if this true, and haven’t looked it up yet. But the Tree Guy seemed to be sincere, and he—while telling me of the trees of the land—pulled a circular bottle with a golden top from his jacket, and took a slow drink from it. It looked like it had honey, or mead in it. The whole thing was surreal, and he finally, with a smile, looked skyward, said something to the effect of, “They’re lovely, aren’t they?” in his quiet voice, and slowly walked off down the trail, leaving us to ponder him.

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As mentioned on her LJ, we started a blog. For real, this time. The old szilagyi.us one bores us, and LJ is better for that junk. Rootology.com… I have no idea. Bleh. Behold:

Seattleology.com!

A site about me discovering Seattle, and her re-discovering the place she grew up in, after being away so long. We’re still getting the hang of Wordpress. Posts will rev up soon even more!