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.
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 
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.
