Thornton Creek

Every place has its story. Even the suburbs.

I live a few blocks inside Seattle’s city limits. The double yellow line on NE 145^th St separates the Emerald City from the quiet residential community of Shoreline, and even downtown Lake City has a strong suburban flavor to it. The area just south of the neighborhood was home to both an elaborate Prohibition-era speakeasy operation and a historic civil rights campaign against a racist restaurant, both of which I’ll be writing about in future posts. But Lake City proper’s main claim to fame is hosting some of the oldest continuously operating dive bars in Seattle. There won’t be a period drama set here anytime soon.

History isn’t just thrilling stories, though: it’s about how people have lived and worked and loved and struggled every day. Instead of tracing a narrative story, this week I decided to take a walk that would show me new parts of my neighborhood and allow me to give some little vignettes about what Shoreline and North Seattle are like, and how they got that way. I was going to follow Thornton Creek.

Fig 3.1: It was also a really nice day out, so I needed an excuse for a walk.

Thornton Creek drains twelve square miles of city and suburb in Seattle and Shoreline, including almost all of Lake City. After an intensive restoration campaign in the 2000s, about ninety percent of it is aboveground, which is pretty remarkable for an urban river and makes it easy to walk along even when it disappears into private property. One branch flows from Shoreline south, the other flows east from underneath the Northgate Mall, and they converge in a specially constructed flood-control park before issuing into Lake Washington at Matthews Beach. I couldn’t follow both routes, but the North Branch was the obvious choice. Northgate is about as historically interesting as a mall can get – it was one of the first enclosed shopping centers in the United States, and Ted Bundy used to pick up his victims in the parking lot – but that’s still not saying much, and besides, the route of the North Branch is longer and more varied. I got on the bus and headed to Ronald Bog Park.

The Thornton Creek Watershed is originally home to the Xacuabš (Lake People), now part of the Duwamish tribe. A village was located on the lake at the mouth of the creek, the bogs at the creek’s headwaters were harvested for cranberries, and controlled burns were used to create hunting meadows all across the watershed. If you’re ever in the area, the Shoreline Historical Society has a beautiful hand-painted map of North Seattle as it appeared before colonization, which is worth the visit alone.

The Xacuabš were dispossessed and driven off their land by white settlers in 1854, and since then the story has been one of continuous construction and rising population density. The latest chapter was visible immediately when I arrived at Ronald Bog Park.

Fig. 3.2: Notices of Proposed Land Use Action are the Seattle area’s answer to red phone boxes or Benson Bubblers.

Two signs, listing far out into the sidewalk, notified passersby that the park will be undergoing some changes. A good chunk of it will be converted into artificial wetlands in order to “mitigate” the destruction of wetlands elsewhere. In a few years’ time, city engineers will be laying light rail tracks along the other side of the freeway, grubbing up boggy habitats as they extend the train up to Shoreline. Even development that’s good for the planet in the long run, like public transit infrastructure, can be pretty destructive in the moment.

Ronald Bog Park was quiet this Sunday afternoon. A couple snoozed on the grass. Ducks paddled on the water. An old man with a beard and bucket hat cooled his feet in the pond, Thornton Creek’s headwaters springing up between his toes. The cherry blossoms were out.

 You wouldn’t know it looking at the smooth green lawn, but this area was once a true cranberry bog, covered in peat moss and grazed upon by deer and bears. In the 1940s, a peat mining operation dug up most of the moss (leaving a hole that the pond fills today), and within a few years it became an urban wilderness, overgrown and contaminated by spillover from the Shoreline dump then located immediately to the south. It wasn’t until the 70s that neighbors got it cleaned up and parkified.

I hoped to find a way out through the park to the south, where Thornton Creek emerged from the pond, so I plunged into the remaining overgrown boggy area on the eastern edge, up against the highway. The ground bristled with poky dead reeds and Himalayan blackberry. A collapsed barbed-wire fence no longer marked the boundary between park property and the domain of the Department of Transportation; the highway was so close that I could’ve scrambled up and stood on top of the concrete berm. I couldn’t see a way south. The tents and tarps of a small encampment were visible through the trees in this jurisdictional limbo, complete with a handmade bridge across a drainage ditch and gates built from orange construction webbing. Even here, eleven miles from downtown Seattle, the housing crisis is plain as day.

Fig. 3.3: A quiet corner of the park.

I decided I’d have to circle the park instead. Back on N 175^th St, a gargantuan sign welcomed me to the City of Shoreline, Incorporated 1995. Incorporated 1995 it might have been, but this has been a commuter suburb since long before that date. The interurban from Seattle to Everett used to run right through this neighborhood. Like so many other transit systems of the early 20^th century, though, it fell afoul of mismanagement, the Depression, and – if you believe the story – General Motors’s nefarious plot to wipe out trolleys across the nation. Ronald Bog was de-bogged by the development generated by one light rail line, and is now being re-bogged to mitigate the construction of another. It’s a neat little historical poem.

Fig. 3.4: You can tell I posted this a little late. The park's statues were still dressed up for St. Paddy's when I went through.

South of the park, Thornton Creek begins its flow underground. I walked along Meridian Ave, dipping in and out of tidy culs-de-sac that had once been dump, but not seeing a sign of the stream yet. People were out working on their cars or yards in the sun. A girl was biking in circles in the street; a few blocks over, a bald man was doing the same. Every other household seemed to have a home improvement business: there were vans belonging to plumbers, landscapers, solar panel installers and even a chimney sweep. On Corliss Place, I finally spotted the creek bed running through a landscaped front yard.

Just as it hits daylight, though, Thornton Creek disappears again into forbidden property: a tangled stretch of woods posted with NO TRESPASSING and NO DUMPING signs. Through the trees, I could see the low bulk of the Shoreline Recycling & Transfer Station. Not wanting to have to circle around on Meridian again, I looked for a back way in, but all I found was a cell tower and a desolate park.

Fig 3.5: Fifteen-foot trees growing through the tennis court at James Keogh Park.

The signs on the other side of the woods, by the bustling entrance to the recycling station, caught my eye. One was dotted with lichen devouring the black paint of the letters, while the other had the pre-2006 insignia of King County on it.

King County was organized in December 1852 and named after then-Vice-President-elect William Rufus DeVane King. A Southern plantation owner and slaveholder, King is best known for founding Selma, Alabama, and for probably being James Buchanan’s lover. (The two men spoke about each other in terms that would be sweetly endearing if they weren’t the people they were.) King was dying of tuberculosis in Cuba when he won the election. He expired only two days after returning to the United States. As a closeted Romantic consumptive and a hideous racist, King is probably our most nineteenth-century Vice President.

It took 134 years for Seattle-metro officialdom to recognize that honoring a proud defender of slavery wasn’t a very good look. The solution was brilliantly simple: they kept the name King County, but proclaimed that it now referred to Martin Luther King, Jr., instead. It was another 20 years before they got the designation officially recognized by the State of Washington and the logos updated to match. I’m almost certainly going to do a post on the Guerrilla Theater of the Absurd when I get back to Portland, and you’ll see how surprisingly controversial honoring MLK could be in the 90s.

(The county councilman who led the renaming effort, by the way, was Ron Sims, who later served as Obama’s HUD secretary and ran for Governor on a platform of fixing Washington’s grossly regressive tax system – unfortunately he was less successful in the latter effort.)

Fig 3.6: Urban wilderness.

Thornton Creek runs somewhere underneath this zone of civic infrastructure. I walked through a grassy park bounded by the Metro bus garage and a clutch of humming electrical transformers, my eyes peeled for open water.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t see the creek again for a while. It emerges on private property and remains there for the next mile, tracing a property line between people’s backyards and the interstate. As I walked through more suburban streets, smiling at the cherry blossoms and getting scowled at by two men washing a vintage car, I spotted snatches of ivy-coated gully behind fences. I was too far back to see the flowing water, and it was too close to the interstate to hear it.

The creek became public property again in Twin Ponds Park. Now this place was bustling. A junior soccer game was in progress. Less competitively inclined kids were scrambling over the huge banks of tree roots that lined the ponds. A dad was trying to play frisbee while smoking a cigarette: an athletic feat I hadn’t seen since college.

Fig. 3.7: A Twin Pond.

On the southern edge of the park, where the creek jogged back to join the freeway, I spotted the first signs of watershed volunteerism: the Washington Native Plant Society had been by to replace invasives. This walk could easily have been a trudge along a culverted dump, and the fact that it was a fun adventure instead is due to volunteer effort. If you're in the area, you can get involved with the Thornton Creek Alliance; if not, your local watershed probably has a similar group that could use your help.

Once I emerged on NE 145^th St I’d reached the city limits. Seattle was right there on the other side of the street. The interstate was in sight, too, and I was about to get a new perspective on my local exit. Walking through highway infrastructure, even when it’s built with pedestrian accommodations, is always an uncomfortable and revelatory experience. It’s an ecosystem built for a different species, larger, louder, and tougher than human beings. I had diesel fume flashbacks to walking on the barricaded bridges during the anti-Trump rallies in Portland, and dodging big rigs on my way to work at a freight company off Columbia Boulevard. In my hustle across the overpass, I didn’t even stop to take a picture.

Catty-corner across the highway, I followed the creek down the edge of the Jackson Park Golf Course. The highway faded to a low growl and the scenery to pleasant monotony. On my left, a fence shielded me from errant balls; on my right, the creek ran by in the underbrush. I passed two joggers. Someone had chalked an enigmatic face on a beech.

Fig. 3.8: Shielded from balls and pinecones.

The creek eventually passed beneath me into the golf course, and I had to continue on alone until I reached Jackson Park proper. By the time we were reunited, the creek was lined with signs warning of invasive New Zealand mud snails. These tenacious bastards are about 1/5 of an inch long and are so tough they can survive passage through animals’ digestive tracts. They are hideously prolific. In New Zealand their numbers are kept down by an unlikely hero – a parasitic nematode called Microphallus which sterilizes snails – but elsewhere in the world they’ve become a hazard to local mollusks and to the fish that depend on them, including our own salmon species.

Here at the end of the golf course, the creek plunged into a deep gully of apparently public land; I tried to follow it but quickly got stuck in the mud. There was no trail here. Lost golf balls sank inexorably beneath the skunk cabbages. I scrambled up a slope, found myself in a community garden, kicked the mud off my shoes and headed onwards.

Fig. 3.9: No, I didn't pose the ball.

I liked the next neighborhood immediately. Technically, I live here, since the boundaries of the Olympic Hills neighborhood reach over to Lake City Way, but the enormous trees and pleasantly dated houses over here look nothing like the view from my apartment. I wondered idly if these trees might be old-growth that escaped logging because of the hilly terrain. Probably not. I spotted the only political sign of my walk here – a stakeboard for Trotskyite city councilor Kshama Sawant, who doesn’t represent this district – and one of the houses had an enormous, handmade wooden halfpipe in the driveway, disintegrating under a coat of pine needles. I’d like to settle down in a neighborhood like this.

Fig. 3.10: The Olympic Hills.

The creek had disappeared again, this time into a wildlife reserve that wasn’t open to the public, so I didn’t get another glimpse until it emerged from a condo parking lot at 15^th Ave. From here on, it was visible in backyards and side yards, and unlike up in Shoreline it wasn’t buried in a government gully next to the highway. It divided some properties in two, and people had put up little bridges across it and pulled up lawn chairs beside it.

By the time I reached the commercial strip on Lake City Way there was already a blue note in the afternoon sun. The little wedge of park across from Wendy’s, where Thornton Creek plunged down into a ravine again, was almost twilit. This park was the first place I’d seen the creek when I first moved into the neighborhood, and it was as much of a hideous mess as always. Native plants choked out by Himalayan blackberry, branches hacked off to stobs, Fireball bottles and busted shoes and Top Ramen flung everywhere, Satanic glyphs painted on the trees. I assume that the little ravine park’s seclusion and its proximity to a big, filthy strip of fast food outlets means that cleaning it is a Sisyphean task for the Thornton Creek Alliance.

Fig. 3.11: I didn't stand in the grove for very long.

The creek runs under Lake City Way (under Pacific Northwest Flooring and its weird brick monolith, specifically) before plunging on into more residential neighborhoods. Lake City Way started life as a nineteenth-century logging road, and it’s still unusually wiggly for a major right of way.

Heading down NE 117^th, now more than halfway to my destination and on a steep decline towards the water, I spotted the first really ugly houses I’d passed so far: skinny new builds with hard angles, gravel yards, and oddly scattered windows. I don’t need to include a picture. You know what I’m talking about.

What I do need to include a picture of is the sight that awaited me at the bottom of the hill: a giant vulva, kitted out for Saint Patrick’s Day and spouting out a stream of road reflectors. I’m not sure whether they’re meant to be love beads, a golden shower or a leprechaun’s treasure.

Fig. 3.12: The little text on the inside says "No New Taxes - Bush." Get it?

This incredible piece of public art is officially a commentary on the creeping forces of real-estate homogenization represented by the ugly houses up the street – the Showbox is a historic theater downtown, currently slated for demolition despite fierce protest from Seattleites, and the pun is obvious – but its origins are a little smaller-time. The owner was slagged off by his neighbors for leaving two giant stumps in his yard, so he decided to turn them into something they could really complain about.

A few blocks past the roadside attraction, I came to Thornton Creek’s confluence. The North Fork, which I’d just walked, and the South Fork, fed by parking lot runoff and the ghosts of Bundy victims, converge here in Meadowbrook Park. I’ll let Meadowbrook speak for itself. It was beautiful, and it’s the only park I’ve ever visited that requires a diagram to explain.

Figs. 3.13 - 3.15: Ahhhh.

By this point, my legs were getting sore. I’m not in great shape these days, and it felt good to have some muscles working besides my typing fingers. The sun was setting, and the neighborhood was quiet. A clutch of high schoolers were standing in a driveway, passing a basketball back and forth. As I passed, one was pretending to walk away in mock disgust at his friend’s joke. “Shit,” he realized, turning around. “I don’t have a car.”

A few more steep drops later and I hit Sand Point Way, North Seattle’s westernmost arterial, and only a block or two down that I spotted signs for Matthews Beach Park. Not too long ago, this was the site of the Xacuabš village, home to the people who walked the creek every day on their way to pick cranberries at the bog.

Tonight, families were packing up their Sunday picnics, and two friends were hauling their canoe ashore. I’d reached Lake Washington at last, three hours and eight miles later – and just in time for sunset on the Cascades.