on the trail

There's the signpost up ahead -- you're entering...the Shoreline section of the Interurban. This is at 145th street where Linden Ave terminates and the trail resumes. 145th Separates Seattle from the City of Shoreline, where I was partly raised and went to high school.

There's kind of a little parklet there, with a canopy and seats and water fountains and flowers. One biker thinks it looks kind of like a miniature train station, appropriately enough.

It's an aesthetically pleasing sign; it and the little train station remind us that the name "Interurban" refers to the history of the trail, which was originally the trolley track right-of-way for the line that ran all the way from Everett to Tacoma, about 70 miles through the heart of what today is a metropolis, but was then a patchwork of cities, towns, and rural stretches with farms.

Seattle, like most other U.S. cities, once had an excellent and comprehensive electric trolley system. I've seen the trolley map from 1913, and it's impressive. You could get anywhere from anywhere else, cheaply and safely. But people preferred to have their own cars after the mid-twenties, or at least they were told by the automobile builders of Detroit and the oil refiners of Oklahoma and California and the tire makers of Akron that that's what they preferred, and the people believed them.

So we tore up our trolley tracks and bought our own Fords and Chevies. Silly people.

I would like to see all the 1913 trolley routes in Seattle become bike and walking trails. That would be justice.

Coming along the sunshiny trail this afternoon after my late-morning volunteer teaching gig, between 125th and 115th, the grass on both sides was bursting with dandelion flowers. With all the late rain we had this spring, the greenness of the grass and yellowness of the beautiful weeds zaps you like a cup of coffee. In a month the dandelions will turn to puffballs, and then the little white parachutes will float off onto the breeze and alight somewhere. With the usual rainy winter, we should have a bumper crop next year.

Dandelion leaves are very good in salads, and were the favorite food of my pet land tortoise.