Saw the photo you see above, on Facebook, yesterday. Motivated me to blog about it on my Washington blog. Did so in Ferry Friday Harbor to Anacortes Looking at Mount Baker.
For Texans reading this, let me explain what you are looking at. That big white thing is a volcano. Its name is Mount Baker. Mount Baker is part of what is known as the Cascade Mountain Range.
Those little mountains surrounded by water are what are known as islands. In this case, the San Juan Islands, an archipelago of a lot of islands, most small, but several large enough for habitation, and needing a ferry dock.
That little white thing you see in the water, is actually not small at all. It is a Washington State Ferry, photographed soon after leaving Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, on its way back to Anacortes on the mainland.
When I saw this photo of the San Juan Islands yesterday it brought to mind a conversation I had had the day before, when someone asked me if I knew what the current status was of Fort Worth's Trinity River Vision.
I replied that as far as I knew Fort Worth's supposedly vitally needed flood control and economic development scheme is still stuck with only three little freeway overpass type bridges, built over dry land, in anticipation of one day a cement lined ditch being dug under the bridges, with Trinity River water diverted into the ditch, creating an imaginary island, to be known as Panther Island.
Fort Worth's vitally needed project, sold as such by its incompetent advocates, has been limping along since this century began.
Just one fact alone has bugged me from the start. As in, what sane city would name something an island, when the creation of such is due to a cement lined ditch diverting river water? Having grown up in a state which has oodles of actual islands, this was a hard bit of nonsense to try and swallow.
During the same time frame, as in, during the years of this century, whilst Fort Worth has not managed to see hardly anything of its embarrassing Trinity River Vision, other parts of America have seen all sorts of things.
The town I moved to Texas from, Mount Vernon, Washington, has built an actual vitally needed flood control development. Which turned a stretch of the Skagit River, as it passes by downtown Mount Vernon, into what basically is a mini-Riverwalk.
This century Seattle has built two downtown ballparks, re-built its waterfront, built a tunnel to replace a waterfront viaduct, and more, like, well, the entire Amazon complex.
All over America, other than Fort Worth, major projects have been proposed and come to fruition, during the same time frame in which Fort Worth has been unable to get water to flow under those three bridges built over dry land.
Los Angeles built its huge So-Fi Stadium.
Arlington built the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium.
New York City re-built the site of the Twin Towers.
Fort Worth began to perplex me soon upon my arrival in Texas. There were so many things that just were not right. And now, all these years later, still the same.
Why? It is perplexing....
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