Volunteer Park

Volunteer Park is a short walk from my apartment, uphill, which is how you know you're on Capitol Hill: everything is uphill, both ways. I go most Sundays when I'm not working. I've been going for four years and I haven't run out of it.

The conservatory first. It's a Victorian glasshouse, white-painted iron and a great many panes, more than a hundred years old, and inside it's always a different season from the one outside. There's a room of palms and a room of ferns and a room of cactus that smells of warm dust, and that last one is mine. On a gray Sunday in February you can stand in the cactus house for half an hour and come out believing in summer.

Then the loop. Past the reservoir, where people sit on the grass and pretend it's a lake. Up the water tower, if my legs are willing, round and round the stairs inside to the windows at the top, where you can see the whole city laid out and the mountains behind it on the days the mountains are in. Past the art museum, which has been shut behind fences for over a year for its renovation, so the big black stone ring out front stands on its own, framing the Space Needle for anyone who finds the right spot. Along the edge of the cemetery next door, where once or twice a month someone will stop me and ask, a little sheepishly, which way it is to Bruce Lee.

And the crow man. He's there most Sundays, an old man in a tweed cap on the same bench above the reservoir, with a paper bag of peanuts in the shell. The crows know him. They're waiting on the wires before he arrives, a dozen or more, and when he comes up the path they drop down and follow him in short hops, like an escort. He doesn't throw the peanuts. He sets them on the bench beside him, one at a time, and they come and take them, and he talks to them the whole time in a low voice I can never quite hear.

I sat on the next bench for weeks before I said anything. When I finally did, he told me they recognize faces, which I knew, because there's been research on it at the university here and everyone in Seattle has read about it. He told me they bring him things. A button. A piece of blue glass. Once a small brass key that doesn't fit anything he owns. He keeps them in a coffee can on his kitchen windowsill.

I asked whether he'd named them. He looked at me as if I'd said something faintly embarrassing. "You don't name a crow," he said. "They'd laugh at you." Then he gave me three peanuts and told me to sit still, because they didn't know me.

I sat still. One of them took a peanut off the end of the bench, quickly, looking somewhere else the whole time, like a man pocketing a tip.

Is there someone you see every week whom you've never really met?