On full moon days, when it is mild, I sometimes spend a night in what I call “my bower.” My bower is pretty much in the center of a square mile of “reconstituting prairie” that adjoins a big big lake, between some athletic fields and a classy Seattle neighborhood. It is  approximately a square mile of fields, bosques, and ponds.
Its only straight lines are a canal, the estuary of Ravenna creek which goes underground as it leaves Ravenna Park at 55th Street and 25th Avenue N.E., resurfaces at 45th St. N.E. and eventuates in Lake Washington to the south east; and a road on the prairie's northern edge, a short cut from Laurelhurst, past a golf driving range, to a major thoroughfare.
The “reconstituting prairie” used to be a peat bog for thousands of years, sometimes under water, sometimes not, until Seattle built the Ship Canal in 1916 from Lake Washington through Lake Union all they way to the Shilshole Bay part of Puget Sound five miles to the west, lowering the level of Lake Washington by nine feet. Ten years later, the now completely exposed peat bog became Seattle’s public dumping ground for half a century — one reason why, for all intents and purposes, "Wakkakium Prairie" as it is now called as part of the Lake Union Natural Area, is still a superfund site, with quite a few pipes venting methane from the combusting crap underneath. Who knows, the whole damn th