Waiting for the High Board

Every one of them is waiting and pretending not to. That is the whole social mechanism of a diving board, and it does not change: you climb up, you look down, you become aware of how many people are behind you, and the decision gets made for you by arithmetic rather than nerve.

Green Lake gets swum in. Lake Washington is colder and mostly belongs to boats, Puget Sound will genuinely hurt you, and the Sound’s beaches are for walking. Green Lake is shallow, it is warm by August, and it has rafts and lifeguards and pedal boats, so this is where the city goes when it is actually hot. The paddle boat behind the raft is doing about two miles an hour and has nowhere to be.

This frame had a life before this site. It ran on MyGreenLake, the neighborhood blog, back when it was taken, which is the first time anything of mine got published anywhere. A photograph on a local blog is not a career, but it was the first evidence that a picture of mine was worth something to somebody who had not met me.

Green Lake keeps reappearing here, against one visit each for most of the city. Some of that is proximity. Most of it is that a lake with a path around it gives you a reason to come back, and coming back is the only way any of this gets photographed properly.