Oh, what a relief it is

My wife and I received the vaccine for COVID‐19 with gratitude as soon as we were eligible and supplies became available. In the weeks since, we have tried to take good advantage of the inoculation, the weather, and of no longer being confined to the house by traipsing around the Great Outdoors in some of the parks near our home. I was looking at some of the pictures this morning that I have taken while we have been on the trails that wend through those parks; awash in green, they have transported me back to those bosky enclaves.

Bridle Trails State Park is one of the top equestrian parks west of the Mississippi River, featuring twenty‐eight miles of trails for horseback riding and hiking. Park history can be traced to the years before statehood, when the one‐mile square section was reserved for the purpose of supporting public schools by the sale of parcels of land and logging under the Organic Act of 1853 that established Washington Territory.¹ Around 1930, local horseback riders who used the area petitioned the Washington Commissioner of Public Lands to dedicate the land to use as a public park, which led to the establishment of the park in 1932. The Lake Washington Saddle Club, founded in 1945 and based at the park ever since, helped fund the construction of the horse show facilities within the park, and today helps the state maintain those facilities and the trails within the park.

The park forest is dominated by Douglas fir, western hemlock, and western red cedar. Bigleaf maple, red alder, and black cottonwood are also abundant. We followed signs to see the largest fir in the park, a semiotic exercise that was almost surely a side effect of the work of a grad student who had spent the time needed to catalog the tree and wished simply to call attention to it. Unlike, say, Trees of Mystery in northern California, which would have cleared the surrounding ground and lit the trunk, first having posted a 49′ 2″‐tall statue of Paul Bunyan and his 35′‐tall friend, Babe the Blue Ox, at the park entrance to wave and welcome one and all, the largest fir in Bridle Trails Park was in an undisturbed stand, merely one of the trees that were shading the footpath.

The City of Bellevue, a neighbor of the host City of Kirkland to which the park had been annexed in 1969, has an easement with Washington State Parks to operate a municipal water reservoir and pump house within Bridle Trails Park. Bellevue leaders began planning a few years ago to replace its existing one‐million‐gallon steel reservoir from 1968, and construction on the new concrete reservoir began two weeks ago; when completed, it will be large enough to hold 1.25‐million gallons of water.² The reservoir is situated near the southern park boundary adjacent to one of the primary trails and also to the Seattle City Light powerline corridor that bisects the park. Two hundred years ago, a village of the Duwamish people called Tabtabi´ux could be found at the shore of Lake Washington — known to them as x̌aču — down the hill from the present location of the park. That village is long since relinquished³ by its Indigenous builders, but one imagines their amazement had they happened upon such objects as these of twentieth century infrastructure standing in the middle of the nearby forest. The two of us were entirely blasé about their presence, having come to the park in partiality to the trees; inured to the intrusion of complex industrial artifacts even into the sylvan remnants of continental forests set aside as bulwarks against just such manifestations of our estrangement from Mother Nature. Elsewhere, what was described in the early twenty‐first century as the quietest place in the coterminous United States⁴ is now routinely overflown by U.S. Navy EA‐18G jets producing one hundred decibels of sound, which is what a car horn registers from a distance of five meters. At home, there are things aplenty that buzz, beep, blink, whirr, grind, and spin. Were the Klingon Empire to land a D7‐class battlecruiser in the park, no confusion would reign: we have all seen space ships. One of the ironies of the pandemic was the intimation that the most transcendent life is quite likely the one lived at a nice place for a picnic, now that most such places are being bulldozed to make room for warehouses.

Offshore of Holmes Point, to the south of Saint Edward State Park, is a grove of about one hundred drowned trees. They are there because an earthquake 1,100 years ago caused a landslide that slipped the grove into Lake Washington, where they remain today. Some of the trees were removed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the early twentieth century because their tops neared the surface, creating a hazard to navigation. We walked down to the lakeshore at Saint Edward Park, where vigorous seiches caused by that earthquake had destroyed the surrounding Indigenous habitations, leaving only legends of terrible sucking and shadow monsters that obliterated the world. The afternoon of our visit was lovely, with geese swimming about and boats filled with families and partygoers motoring toward unseen destinations. Across the narrow glacial trough that composes the basin of the nearly twenty mile long ribbon of lake, the wooded hillsides of North Seattle created an illusion of isolation, as if deep in the boondocks, not sheltering the fifteenth largest metropolitan area in the United States.

The park is named for Edward, the son of Æthelred the Unready and King of the English from 1042 until his death in 1066. It was created in 1978 from land that had been purchased from the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle, helping to explain why a state park memorializes a rustic nobleman surnamed The Confessor. Lacking sins to expiate, we spent our time in the park climbing its paths along the brome, sorrel, hazelnut, dandelion, and nettle. The seminary students who once lived here kept a Volkswagen bug hidden in these woods; when they wanted to go into town for fun, they would carry the forbidden car to the road, set it down, and sneak away, only divulging its hiding place to the next class upon graduation.⁵ We looked for evidence of those exploits, but, though forty‐five years have passed since the school closed, the shadows continue to erase the details.

In 1926, the City of Redmond — home of Microsoft — purchased 160 acres from the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company for $1,000 in order to create a watershed and supply water to the city. Following that purchase, two dams were built across the creek that traversed the property, and a pipeline was built to carry its water to the city. By 1940, after subsequent land purchases by the city increased the watershed to over 800 acres, the Washington State Health Department directed its abandonment as a water source when the water of Seidel Creek failed to meet state standards. After a plan by the city in 1970 to build an airport on the watershed land met public opposition and a 1985 study that proposed uses for the watershed as varied as a golf course, gun range, or city nursery was ignored,⁶ in 1996 the city developed a network of trails for recreational use of the land.

Record crowds are being reported at national parks as folks stampede into the outdoors. I have taken to declaring that the West is full after making a motorcycle tour this month of the northern Interior West and observing some of the effects of unleashing millions of people who have been cooped up at home for more than a year. Bridle Trails and Saint Edward parks had attracted visitors enough to overrun their parking lots, but we seemed to have the Redmond Watershed Preserve to ourselves the day we visited. That few hours in the woods together, uninterrupted by mobs of equally relieved survivors of the ordeal of the pandemic, was a treat, and the tranquil enfolding of the conifer and broadleaf forests, salal, cascara, ferns, and elderberry was as a blanket smoothed about the limbs of the body at the moment a fever breaks, the lullabies of the songbirds a relief to taxed emotions.

Such are the recollections stirred by the photos I have displayed here. My wife and I intend to continue to guard our health and exploit the benefits of the vaccine, among which is the easing of restrictions on access to public places, further exploring our surroundings aiming to imbibe the tonic of fresh air wherever yet more chlorophyll is to be found.

Update July 15, 2023
As reported this week by the Downtown Bellevue Network, the construction by the City of Bellevue within Bridle Trails State Park of the new Pikes Peak Reservoir has reached its completion. The correspondent, Kara, notes that, The new reservoir, built with earthquake resilience in mind, is set to serve the water needs of Bellevue residents for generations to come.