Culture

Stealing Moments at Seattle's Hidden Beaches

“It was my secret, a private spot, which, like so many others like it, was public land.”
In a city with so much shoreline, some of the best beaches are hardest to find. Dylan Glynn

"My Secret City" is a collaboration between CityLab and Narratively, a digital publication featuring extraordinary stories of ordinary people, told through video, text, photo essays, comics journalism and more.

A few blocks down the street from the house I grew up in, there’s a tiny path—just a single paver square wide—nestled between two fancy driveways. The owners of the houses on either side seemed to purposefully grow their gardens and hedges over the path, narrowing it even more. On hot summer afternoons, barefoot and towel-toting, I’d look for the lighter-colored section of pavement between blacktops and follow the path to the bottom of the hill, where it widened into a ten-foot square of usually-dead grass before narrowing again at the edge of Lake Washington. There, a rickety piece of plywood with chipping yellow paint balanced on four metal rods: a mini-dock on which I sat throughout my childhood, reading, brooding, playing, being a kid. It was my secret beach, a private spot, which, like so many others like it, was public land.