(ThatKidInTheCorner :: The Shifty Deviousness Of The Great Outdoors)

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August 30, 2005

The Shifty Deviousness Of The Great Outdoors

And here I thought I could trust an urban park system.

Mellow weekend in Sea-Tac. Checked out a little nightlife, did some touristy stuff, hung out. And by “touristy" I mean we went to the fish market where they throw the fish. Guess what? This one dude chucks the fish to the other dude; also you can buy fish. Many people gathered to watch. (Not us, though. We even bought our fish at another stand. We preferred as-yet-unchucked seafood.)

(Brief Digression: so in one of my b-school classes the professor showed us this Sixty Minutes feature about how the throwing-fish guys from Seattle had started a consulting business where they teach corporations about teamwork through the metaphor of fish-tossing. Remarkably, the point of showing said vides in class WAS NOT to demonstrate how you can take a stupid gimmick from a fish store and use it to rip off dumb-ass HR managers so successfully that Sixty Minutes will actually make you the subject of a feature.)

Anyhoo.

The general theme of this weekend was that we were trying to go local a bit. Nothing too crazy -- just the sorts of average things an average Seattleite (NOTE: I have no idea if that's the proper term for "denizen of Seattle"; I've asked around to no avail) might do on an average weekend. We tried to be all chill and local. We did. We even headed to this park on Sunday thinking we’d chill out and read our books in the sun with a view for a couple hours.

Uh-huh.

We were led to believe that we were going to drive our car into a parking lot and then meander to the beach or some analogous quiet spot in the sun and just set up shop there. We found the parking lot. Check. Then we started our meander. Hmmm. Nothing but scrubby, dried-out shrubs and grass. Not a place one would want to sit. Okay. There's a trail. We'll follow that. Oh, it says the beach is this way? Okay, might as well.

Some 45 minutes later, following a series of minor rhetorical scuffles regarding the precise definition of the activity in which we were presently engaged, we took a deep breath and admitted the sad but all-too-obvious truth: we had gone (gasp!) hiking.

At this point it's worth noting that I don’t want to be that guy who moves to the new city and does nothing but talk about his old city. I’ve met those guys. They’re really boring. So I’m going to try to keep it under control. But you'll need to indulge me from time to time.

This is one of those times.

I don’t want to hate on anyone else’s healthy, outdoorsy, down-with-nature lifestyle. I just got here, and I’ll admit that I haven’t gotten the hang of it yet. And it seems that everyone I meet is all too eager to tell me about their I-love-nature hobby of choice. The camping, the water-skiiing, the snowboarding, the mountain biking. I get it -- Seattle offers lovely access to The Great Outdoors and one is well-advised to take advantage of it. And it all sounds lovely, and I'm sure I'll get into it soon enough.

But still. Hiking? Unless the view is spectacular (and by "spectacular" I mean wall-sized postcard, glory of creation kind of stuff), hiking has always struck me as an activity for People Unaccustomed To Walking Because Their Lives Don’t Require Them To. (I’ll give you a clue –- it seems to be really popular in LA.)

You want to go for a hike in New York? Awesome. It’s called "going to the ATM" and you get to do it a couple times a week!

What I mean to say is that we were pissed when we figured out that we’d somehow been tricked into a hike. There was much swearing, mumblings of "This is bullshit" and general snideness in re: our fellow hikers (and their RIDICULOUS hiking getups) that we passed on the trail. Said swearing and snideness only intensified when we finally arrived at the "beach," which was essentially seven feet of sludge-colored sand next to a sewage treatment facility. (I wish I was kidding.) We consulted a park map and cut up a decidedly unscenic access road on the way back. (At this point the cursing had slowed somewhat, though the snide comments about the other hikers remained steady and unrelenting.)

I guess what I mean to say is that I have yet to completely adjust.

Posted by thatkid at August 30, 2005 8:14 PM under ThatKid

August 30, 2005

The Shifty Deviousness Of The Great Outdoors

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