What's the right way to go around Green Lake?

“What’s the right way to go around Green Lake?” Isaac Chirino of Shoreline asked KUOW’s Local Wonder. Boy, people REALLY care about this one. People like Carolyn Frost. In the early 1990s, she and a friend walked the Seattle lake’s 2.8-mile path every morning. But there were these aggressive runners, according to Frost, and they would yell, “TRAIL!” forcing her and her friend out of the way. Read blog posts about Green Lake and you’ll find similar gripes. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has spent time in Seattle. We are a city that loves its rules – we wear our helmets, we wait at crosswalks, we rarely honk our horns. We are, after all, a city that had garbage inspectors for a while.

But online comment threads also include complaints about Green Lake know-it-alls, who seem to revel in schooling the rest of us. Frost was one of these marmish types. She was a working mom of three who didn’t have much extra time, but she was so frustrated by the Green Lake scene that she started taking photographs of people she believed were going the wrong way. “We’re not just some lunatics,” Frost told me by phone. “We just could not understand why people did not follow the rules at Green Lake.” Photos as proof, she called the parks department for a meeting. But officials there dismissed her. That ticked her off. “When you call your government and you get absolutely nothing back from them, not even the courtesy, ‘We’re glad you brought this problem to our attention,’ you start wondering,” Frost said.

Frost became convinced – still is, in fact – of a government conspiracy. A pause to note that that these walkers and runners were not going the wrong way. Feet may go either direction in the inner lane; wheels must go counterclockwise in the outer lane. But signage in the early 1990s was confusing. The arrow for cyclists and roller-bladers pointed up; the arrow for feet pointed down. Frost and her friend interpreted that to mean that feet could only move clockwise. She became so frustrated that she targeted “the runners and their friends.” Robin Hennes was among them. Then 34, Hennes walked to work every morning by way of Green Lake.

“They would say, ‘Wrong way,’ then, ‘Wrong way, lady,’” Hennes recalled. “Then it got kinda snarly, and it would be, ‘Can’t read, stupid lady. What’s the matter with you? You can’t find a man? No sex in your life?’” Seattle nice, they were not. “They would do odd things like pop out of shrubbery and say, ‘There she is!’” Hennes said. “And then they started taking my picture every day.” Frost admitted to taking those photos. (She said she still has them at her Puyallup home, for her children to discover after she’s gone.) But she vehemently denies ever jumping out of the bushes.

Hennes continued, “Then they would shake a fistful of keys and me and then they started blasting me with a whistle.” That whistle, Hennes said, once threw her so off balance that she fell over. Frost sounded proud of the whistle when we spoke. “Everybody should carry a bear whistle,” she said with a chuckle. Hennes learned of others being harassed and before long she and five others – including an 80-year-old woman named Margaret Anderson – went to court for a restraining order. According to the court record, Frost and her friend were banned from the lake for three months.