still blind, but...

Partial Net access was restored before I went out, but I'm still unable to access Blogger directly, so I'm still posting more or less blind.

One thing I've learned from this walk: I will never again tell people that "Seattle is close to the Canadian border," as if it were a simple hop across. Trust me-- it ain't. If Seattle is close to anything, it's slightly above the halfway point between the northern and southern borders of Washington (draw a north-south line straight through Seattle and you'll see what I mean).

I was also surprised that I was able to pass through Seattle so quickly: as the expression goes, I was in and out faster than shit through a goose. I had somehow thought that Seattle, whose stretched north-south axis vaguely reminds me of the way Rome is stretched, would take several days to walk through. Not so. I spent two nights in the city proper, but my two stopping points were within two miles of each other: I could have spent a single night in the city before leaving it.

But while Seattle might not be so big and bad in terms of geographical size, it's got some fear-inducing hills that make me wonder how Seattle natives handle winter icing. Thanks to Paul Cox's excellent planning, I basically followed the water out of the city and avoided the hilliness almost entirely.

During the walk along the Interurban Trail toward Rico's residence in Kent, I had my first glimpse of mighty Mount Rainer (here, too, we have to watch the pronunciation: "ruh-NEER," not "RAY-nee-urr," as I've been saying it all these years), which loomed in the distance like, as Rico put it, the biggest local god. The mountain stands 14,441 feet tall, large enough to be visible from 50-60 miles away despite the earth's curvature. It looks like the remains of some giant's ancient and failed attempt to punch its way out from inside the earth's crust. I was-- and am-- duly impressed. Rainier will likely dominate my walk for a while yet; I'm glad to have its companionship, even if a mountain that size is unaware of something as ephemeral as a puny human being crawling between earth and heaven.

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