I had a dream that I could see Mount Saint Helens from a public park here in Seattle. The mountain was steaming as it has been but also burping up rocks and ash, which you could see flying into the air and dropping down the sides of the mountain. Oddly, the mountain was visible through a break in a mountain range. More mountains appeared behind the volcano, in contrast to the volcano as it appears in real life.

The park itself was on a gentle slope, and seemed to be based on some of the pocket-sized parks built on scraps of land I’ve seen in cities like Boston and London. It was a traffic island type, an oddly shaped sliver of land defined by two converging streets. The surface of the park was contained and defined by a roughly built terrace of yellowish, flinty granite. On reflection the stonework appears to have been drawn from the now-shuttered ranger station at Mount Baker we visited this summer.

At the narrow tip of the park, the statue of George M. Cohan that resides in New York’s Times Square looked out over the shallow Seattle valley.