Volunteer Park REDUX

It is cold today. It snowed last night and there is still patchy gray snow on the ground. The air stings your face and the bright sun shines weakly behind a thin screen of grey clouds. I thought the weather was getting better? I was wrong.

I was in a bad mood as I left an office-hour meeting with a professor and headed for the bus stop to Capitol Hill and Volunteer Park. This has happened before: I work so hard on a paper, I am fully committed to it, I turn it in, and it gets shot down mercilessly. He's right. When your best teachers are also your best critics, the relationship isn't always a pleasant one.

So I needed to get out.

The 49 to Capitol Hill stopped in front of a pizza place that was filled with high school students today. It's that time of day; they're just getting out of class. Almost a dozen stood outside the restaurant waiting for the 49. They traveled in groups of two or three, got on the bus, and chattered noisily. There was also a flamboyantly dressed young man with white cowboy boots and matching bleach-blond hair down to his shoulder. When a high school girl in a wheelchair got on the bus, he lifted the disabled seat so she had room. How considerate!

I got off the bus and released my bike from the rack on the front of the bus. I took the opposite way through Volunteer Park that I took the first time I visited. It was just as deserted this time around. There were about a half-dozen people with dogs wandering around, and another half-dozen joggers in jogging suits bouncing through the trees. I biked to a small playground and got out to take a look. I could see in the untouched snow that no children had played here today. Too cold. But there was an abandoned mitten, abandoned small toys. I could almost hear the echoes of kids playing here... I noticed an engraving in the ground: "Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dared to dream once do come true."

I biked up the hill to the Conservatory to explore it again. I couldn't wait to escape the cold for some warm air. When I entered the building, the humidity instantly hit me. I breathed deeply and smelled the sweet delicate scents of flowers. There were new orchids to gaze at, and I took my time examining the intricate flowers. I noticed little sticky nubs and basin-like petals covered in delicate, beautiful patterns. Each type of orchid was unique. I could smell the palm trees and it reminded me of Hawaii, lush and tropical, warm, sweet, earthy. It's such a treat to have this place to visit, an escape from a cold day in Seattle...

I overheard a conversation between two people about intelligent design... One man thought that there was no way these plants could exist on this planet in such diversity, with such great variations that had apparently no purpose, completely by chance. The other man said, if you had a giant workshop and hundreds of millions of years to play around, it's completely possible that all this could happen on its own.

I moved on to the perennial room and again located the gardenias-- my favorite flower. I smelled the luscious gardenia flowers deeply for several minutes, relishing in the silky sweet scent, missing spring. I noticed there were many new types of flowers--including a type that was like a carpet of bright flowers. There were several pots of these flowers in different colors.

There were other people wandering around in this area, so I went to the cactus room. People looking at plants are interesting. Some snap dozens of pictures and look hard at every specimen. Others are more interested in talking to their companion, and only point out the most interesting plants. Others visit the conservatory with their kids. One little girl was so excited she kept reminding her parents, "Don't touch the sharp things!"

I left the desert room to visit the plants in the opposite wing. This time I took a closer look at the collection in the middle of the room: they were air plants! I had some of these a long time ago. They have no roots, and instead get all their nutrients from the air and rain. They send off long stems where other air plants bud off. In the wild, these plants drop their buds and the plants then grow on other parts of the host plant where they are attached. How cool!

It was getting late and I decided to head out...

I visited an art sculpture up the street that looks like a giant tractor tire. I climbed inside the middle of it and was amazed by the beautiful view of the Space Needle, the water, and the setting sun over several islands in the distance. It felt nice to be outside. Then I visited the koi pond, and noticed a man with a bag of old bread feeding the ducks and taking pictures. The man had a weathered face and old, broken-in clothes. He had a brown rucksack, and he took out his film camera to take pictures of the ducks eating the bread he gave them.

I left them in peace and decided it was time to go home and get started on my homework. So I biked down the hill, going as fast as the cars, narrowly missing potholes and wondering what it would be like if the front wheel of my bike fell off unexpectedly...