A Sun Break Off Shilshole

Sunset Hill sits on the bluff above Shilshole Bay, facing west across the Sound. The name is not marketing. Most Seattle neighborhoods are named after the person who platted them or the thing that used to stand there, so it is worth noting when one is named after what it actually does.

Local forecasters have a term for what is happening in this frame. They call it a sun break, and they use it on air with a straight face, because a gap in the overcast is a discrete weather event here and people plan around it. Nowhere with reliable sunshine needs that word.

The boat is doing the work in this picture. Without it you have weather, and weather on its own is wallpaper. One small sail out there and suddenly the shafts have a scale, the far shore has a distance, and the water has something to be bigger than.

That low dark line is the other side of the Sound. On the clear evenings the Olympics stack up behind it and everybody with a phone stops walking. This was not one of those evenings, which I prefer. The mountains would have taken over the frame and the light was the better subject anyway.

The same water on a Sunday afternoon has no interest whatsoever in any of that. Those are California sea lions, not seals, which you can settle by the little ear flaps and the fact that they can hold themselves up on their front flippers. They have taken a Coast Guard channel marker and turned it into furniture. Nobody has managed to explain to them that it is navigational equipment, and nobody is going to.