Blogging then and now

Spoiler: it's harder than it was in 2002.

I had a Movable Type blog from around 2001 to 2009. I wrote about things I did outdoors: hikes, bike rides in the city, gardening — we’d bought our first house in 1998 — and explorations along Lake Washington.

These were ordinary activities that made me feel at home in Seattle. We had moved here in 1997, less than a year after getting married, mainly because I wanted to. I had been dreaming of moving to Seattle since my teens, and now that I was married to Tom, it was a lot easier to actually do it. It was a good move for him too. While still in Chicago, that spring, he secured a job at Microsoft. They gave him a signing bonus and sent packers and movers to our apartment in Chicago. Tom’s Nissan Sentra went into the moving van with our furniture and we spent a week driving my old Camry across the country. It was fun.

Blogging back then, before social media and before monetized blogs, felt as freeing as journal writing. I was working part time and I spent a lot of time on my posts, usually including photos of what I’d seen on my hike or bike ride or what I planted in my garden. Seattle bloggers found each other, and I met several in person over the years. A few that I remember are Susan Dennis, Jim Carson, Lee LeFever, and the late Anita Rowland. And I had other regular mutual commenters from different places, including a man who blogged about the animal and plant life in the old hedgerow where he lived, in England someplace.

There was a guy named Josh something, in his early twenties when I was in my mid-30s, who loved my hiking posts. He was shocked and dismayed when I posted that we’d gone bushwhacking off trail at Mt Rainier to see the glacier snout up close. He wrote, “Because I respect your mind so much, I’m disappointed that you would risk damaging the wilderness…” or something like that. I assured him that we were only on extremely rocky ground and were absolutely not trampling a meadow, and we were still friends.

It’s hard to imagine blogging being such a small world that ordinary people would find each other through the “blogrolls” of mutual connections. You could sense people quietly at home reading, in their free time. Commenters looked for a conversation, rather than defaulting to the inappropriately competitive I-knew-that-already or let-me-correct-your-opinion interjections. One of many reasons blogging is harder now is that, because there is so much more stuff online competing for our attention, it’s hard to imagine my audience being consistent. Related is the received wisdom that one should have a niche and always give the reader something. (But what?)

With the growth of the internet as a whole, and of social media like Instagram, also came a loss of the sense of discovery. Today, if I write about my bike ride, I feel pretty sure I’m not telling readers even one tiny little thing they didn’t already know, haven’t already seen, because seemingly every little thing on earth has been shown to every person. My friend and I are going to look at the Danish wooden troll (outdoor public art) in Portland next weekend, but seeing photos of it was unavoidable when we looked up its location. So there will be no element of discovery or surprise. Already seen it! I feel that as a loss.

Today, on the fourth sunny and warm day in a row, I rode my bike to the Cedar River Trail and then up the trail just a short ways past the dog park. I wanted to see the wetlands, which I noticed last year, that are on either side of the trail near a park. I stopped there last year because the pond was full of waterfowl and turtles. Today, earlier in the season, there were only about five birds of three kinds: bufflehead, a pair of hooded merganser, and what I think was a female common goldeneye. They were on the seemingly deeper pond on the right, which has lots of floating tree trunks and branches. A stream flows down into it from a high, muddy, overgrown bluff opposite the bike path.

That pond drains into one on the other side of the path, and today that one was echoing with the ribbets of a hundred frogs. Beyond it is the river and a small highway.

On my ride back to the route that would take me home, I followed the river downstream. It is shallow and fast, even though it doesn’t look steep. I’ve never not been able to see the coppery, varied pebbles underneath, because the water is so clear.

A couple of summers ago, I swam several times in the river where it meets Lake Washington, and it was cold but blissful. Today, looking from my bike out over the shallows farther upstream, I saw three hooded mergansers (I think) riding the current, surfing along on clear riffles above the stony bottom. One of the birds repeatedly shallow-dived under and popped up as if relishing the experience. Once in a while they paddled sideways as if to slow down. It was so much fun to watch them surf that I repeatedly rode ahead of them and stopped to watch them go by, taking their free ride.

Sights from today's bike ride: big flowering tree; sawed-off truck that hauls seaplanes to the water; Lake Washington at the Cedar River mouth; Cedar River near the lake.