When we visited with the Seattle Seyers, Ralph and Debbie said we had to go see the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. It had all kinds of things: fish ladders, unique boat locks and a beautiful garden. The best part was that it was free, except parking.
I have to admit that I was a little concerned about the parking when I saw a sign that said this was a high crime area or something equivalent. The sign didn’t worry me as much as the broken window glass littering the parking lot. I took all my camera equipment with me and stuck the GPS under the seat (like they wouldn’t look there).
Parade ground turned into English-style garden
We were early for the guided tour, so we elected to wander through the Carl S. English Jr. Botanical Garden. The locks were built and maintained by the Corp of Engineers, which has a military mindset. It had parade grounds in mind when it came time to transform a gravel construction area into something more useful.
They hired Carl English in 1931 for the project. The Corps must have been distracted because English gradually transformed a manicured lawn into a world famous English estate style garden.
Ship captains delivered seeds
Working with little money, English established connections with other botanists and horticulturists all over the world to exchange specimens of trees and flowers. Ship captains going through the locks would drop off plants for the garden.
573 species of plants
English heard about the discovery of a dawn redwood in China, something that was previously only seen as a fossil. He arranged to receive some of the first seeds ever shipped to the United States. Eight of these grow in the park today.
Botanical Garden photo gallery
Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.
Lamberts might be the home of “throwed rolls,” but the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle is the home of the flying fish. Fishmongers got tired of having to walk out to the Market’s fish table to retrieve a salmon each time someone ordered one. Eventually, the owner realized it was easier to station an employee at the table, to throw the fish over the counter.
It’s become part street theater and part efficiency over the years.
Customers get in the act
Not only can you watch employees flinging fish here and there, customers can get involved, too. Caron St. John of New Jersey was told to practice using her “eagle talons” to grab the fish when it came flying at her.
Caron celebrates catch
She must have paid attention, because seconds later she was holding a hunk of salmon in her arms.
Pike Place Market opened in 1907 and is said to be one of the oldest continuing operating farmers’ markets in the country. Even though tourism has caused the Market’s emphasis to shift towards crafts, there is still a lot of beautiful produce sold there.
Wikipedia has a long piece on the history of the place and how it was almost lost to development.
Produce as a work of art
It’s like walking through an artist’s palette of edible paints.
Covers nine acres
The Market’s official website says that it covers nine acres and attracts 10 million visitors a year.
That’s the good news and the bad news. They must have all been here when we were in town.
“Traffic Alert. Slow traffic ahead”
We’re leaving Seattle early, partly because it looked like West Palm Beach might be visited by Hurricane Emily on Saturday, but mostly because we were tired of fighting traffic. We couldn’t go five miles without the GPS intoning, “Traffic Alert. Slow Traffic Ahead. Expect delay of 52 minutes.”
This afternoon we wait through six cycles of a traffic light before getting through an intersection on our way to a downtown attraction. We decided we don’t have that many more years left to waste them in gridlock, so we bailed.
A tour guide said that the average Seattle resident spends 44 hours a year stuck in traffic. You can see why bicycles are so popular in the area.
There might be a couple days of no updates while we’re flying back home.
Photo gallery of Pike Street Market
Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.
After seeing that the flooding had gone down, I decided to drive down Old Highway 61 that parallels I-55 south of Sprigg Street and ends at a boat ramp. After taking a scenic photo, I noticed a couple throwing a cast net. [Click on any photo to make it larger.]
Aerial of Diversion Channel
Ed and Melinda Roberts of Jackson were trying to snag enough bait to put out two trotlines where the Mississippi River meets up with the ditch that is just north of the Diversion Channel. Ed Calls it the North Cut Ditch. I’ve heard it called the Little Ditch and at least one topographic map labels it the Dutchtown Ditch.
I was able to snap a picture of the Diversion Channel and the North Cut from the Cape Air Flight I was on. The Channel is on the right, the larger of the two canals.
“It’s all about stuffing the freezer”
Ed is a guy who fishes for the fun of eating fish. “I hope to have 400-500 pounds of fish in the freezer before the season is over. It’s all about stuffing the freezer.” Most of them will be channel catfish or blue cats. His biggest catch was an 82-pound blue on a trotline. “I WISH I had caught it on a rod.”
Enough bait to do the job
The water was boiling with fish, mostly gars, which the couple tossed up on the bank to join dozens more. “Most of them were killed by bow hunters,” he said. After about half a dozen casts, he brought up enough bait to do the job.
Heat killed many fish
“I’ve never seen shad die like this in the summertime. It’s the heat that’s killing them,” he explained. The hot water also limits how deep he can set his lines.
Nature’s cleanup crew
Maggots are hard at work cleaning up anything edible left behind by the flood and fishermen. “It’s a good thing,” Ed said.
Launching the boat
When I asked if I could follow them down to where they was going to put the boat in the water, ED offered me something better: a ride to watch them put out the lines.
Video: how to set out a trotline
Here’s your opportunity to see how to set out a trotline.
Motor wasn’t running right
When we started out, the motor was missing and sputtering. I wondered if they had invited me along to be a galley slave if the engine conked out. Ed assured me that wasn’t the case. He said that a plug was fouled and he wouldn’t go far from the ramp until he had it cleared.
Headed out the Diversion Channel
Before long, we were headed out the Diversion Channel to meet the Mississippi River. I’ll run scenic shots from the ride another day. I always thought of the Channel as a sterile ditch, but it’s a beautiful waterway with interesting trees on both sides.
Northbound on the Mississippi
Before long, we were northbound on the river. The boat felt a lot smaller out there.
Checking out the motor
When we got to where he was going to set his lines, he still wasn’t happy with the way the motor was running, so he left Melinda and me on the bank while he did a high-speed run in the river until he was satisfied.
Baiting the hooks
I couldn’t shoot both stills and video at the same time, so you’ll have to watch the video if you want to see what’s involved in setting a trotline. Here he is baiting one of the hooks with a fish he caught when we first met. If he’s in the river, he’s permitted to have 50 hooks; if he’s fishing in the ditches, he can have a maximum of 33.
Getting close to sunset
Ed was starting to run out of daylight, so he decided not to set out both lines. When we pulled into the bank, I asked what time the mosquitoes would show up. “I’ve got pepper spray, so I can hold ’em off for a little while while you make a run for it,” I offered.
Ed and Melinda assured me that they had plenty of bug repellent, but Ed said he’d run me back to the ramp before it got dark. They planned to stay a good part of the night running the line about every two hours and fishing with a rod and reel in the meantime.
It was a great experience. There’s a lesson here: you sure meet some nice people if you just get out of your steel cage from time to time and talk to the folks you come across. When I woke up that morning, I never dreamed that I’d end the day in a small boat on the Mississippi River.
Today was a rest day in Seattle. I came down with a killer head cold I’m going to blame on sharing the air with 300 of my closest friends on a commercial airliner.
It started coming on late Saturday. I was moderately miserable on Mount St. Helens yesterday, where I shot this photo that sums up how the world looked to me.
Since all of the trees in the blast zone were knocked down when the volcano erupted in 1980, they had to be replanted. Because they are all about the same size, their branches line up and cause your eye to think of a fuzzy test pattern. I thought I was REALLY sick until Wife Lila said she was seeing the same thing.
Mountain from a speeding car
Once we got out of the mountains and onto the Interstate, Wife Lila took over the driving responsibilities. She’s paranoid about getting my cold, so she made me ride with my head out the car window all of the way home. To reinforce her message that I should keep my distance, she’s been eating raw onions and garlic on everything including her breakfast pancakes.
She decided the best thing we could do was hole up in the room while I slept all day.
Laptop, junk food and meds
She was doing payroll and dealing with other office stuff on her laptop while I sawed away. At one point, she woke me up so she could make a long distance call. She said I was making so much noise she was afraid the caller at the other end would hear me and not her.
Finally, she said that she had endured all the serenading that she could and grabbed the car keys to go shopping. That didn’t bother me until I saw that she had returned with a huge plastic shopping bag from Bed Bath and Beyond. A bag much larger than the bath sponge she bought would have required.
I’ve seen those stories about Dr. Kevorkian and his machines. That bag looked to be just the right size to fit over a snoring person’s head.
Don’t let cherubic smile fool you
“I don’t know what happened, officer. One minute he was making the sound of a chainsaw chewing through sheet metal, then he got quiet. I just assumed that he had turned over and found a comfortable position. Oh, officer, I’m sorry about the onions. I had a big hamburger just before you got here.”
[Editor’s note: I actually made good use of the day to work on a video of the trotline experience. Youtube told me that it was going to take 869 minutes to upload. I hope it gets done before we check out.
{Right after I had typed that – and 300 minutes into the upload – a message popped up on my browser saying that my connection with the Hampton Inn’s Internet service had timed out and that I’d have to enter the super-secret code to reactivate it for 24 hours. The desk clerk didn’t know if it would drop a connection in progress or if it only kept you from establishing a new connection. He told me to call the 800-number support line. As soon as I heard the words “ATT,” I knew I was in trouble. Eight minutes after I heard the “we are experiencing a high volume of calls” announcement, a tech came on who was as clueless as the desk clerk.
[When I didn’t see the upload incrementing, I started another session. Oh, and don’t bother to use YouTube’s Advanced Video Upload with “resumable uploads.” It doesn’t resume.]
When we visited with the Seattle Seyers, Ralph and Debbie said we had to go see the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. It had all kinds of things: fish ladders, unique boat locks and a beautiful garden. The best part was that it was free, except parking.
We were early for the guided tour, so we elected to wander through the Carl S. English Jr. Botanical Garden. The locks were built and maintained by the Corp of Engineers, which has a military mindset. It had parade grounds in mind when it came time to transform a gravel construction area into something more useful.
Working with little money, English established connections with other botanists and horticulturists all over the world to exchange specimens of trees and flowers. Ship captains going through the locks would drop off plants for the garden.
English heard about the discovery of a dawn redwood in China, something that was previously only seen as a fossil. He arranged to receive some of the first seeds ever shipped to the United States. Eight of these grow in the park today.
