Walking Over Water

Yesterday I was walking at Gene Coulon Park. Went north this time, all the way to the nesting sanctuary nearest the Boeing roll out apron. It was interesting to note that the chained together "logs" enclosing the swim area are in fact perfectly round 25 or so ft. PVC (or some such) cylinders about 2ft. in diameter.

These are not like logs back in the day, the real ones we kids tangled with at the old Barbee Mill on Lake Washington, an interesting place to do stuff in the summer. In those 50's days the property wasn't closed off and we had access to Barbee's docks and waterfront and the very outfall of May Creek.

Like the spirit in the subway in the movie "Ghost" that teaches Patrick Swayze kinetics, we really weren't "supposed to be there" , but we only occasionally got yelled at and were never seriously deterred. Goofing off on the logs was fun. Fishing was good, especially when there were schools of chub. There were two kinds of logs: "boom" and "rolling". Boom logs were older, large, long ,debarked and permanently chained together end-to-end and anchored by pilings along the perimeter to form a corral (or "boom"). They could rock, but they couldn't roll. Rolling logs were newly cut timber contained by the booms and destined to be floated to the mill's saws.

It was possible to get quite far out into the lake - maybe a third of the way to Mercer Island - by walking the fairly stable boom logs. Anybody willing to risk their mother's wrath could manage it. Skill and risk taking was requisite on the rollers, however. They were unsecured, both rough where not debarked and slippery where they were and they....ROLLED!

Falling in the lake was not a problem. We could all swim well enough to get to shore if we couldn't get back on a log (which we usually could on a boom log, but absolutely could not on a roller). The danger lay in tumbling into the filled boom and not being able to surface or coming up between closely packed rapidly rolling logs. As far as I know there was never a serious injury or drowning at Barbee, but the potential for it was undeniably real. Those logs terrified Kennydale mothers as much as they enticed the kids. Their "you stay off those logs!" were as constant and earnest then as "don't take candy from strangers" was later and "know your rights" is today. For the record, this is a purely academic discussion for me. Not only was I mostly a creek fisher, but ever since Ma pulled out all my hair when I was five or so I always did everything I was supposed to. So I never went on those logs.