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Complex Numbers #995608 added October 11, 2020 at 5:55am
Restrictions: None
If You Can't Stand the Heat...
We're already up to entry #5 (of 8) in
 Kitchen-Dick Road
"But Waltz... this is the third one you're doing a street name. I thought you said these things are random?" These things are random. That's why a bunch of them are clumped together. Sure, I use an app on my mobile which generates what's called a pseudo-random number, but it's statistically no different from rolling a hypothetical 16-sided die. The nature of randomness is...
...Oh, never mind. The reason I'm posting so late (for me) today is that after regaining consciousness from a thorough drunk pass-out, I got sucked into a YouTube rabbit hole of mathematical and physical oddities and, dare I say it: complexities. This led me to contemplate some of the deep mysteries of the universe, not in anyway related to roads, kitchens, or dicks.
Or are they?
After all, it doesn't take much to generate statistically random processes is one's kitchen. Happens all the time. Every day. Multiple times a day, for some people. Just boil water, and you'll see chaos in action, and chaos shares certain properties with randomness. Like... you know that water is going to eventually boil, but the exact location and size of the bubbles of steam? Unpredictable, within boundary conditions.
When I do road trips, I also use randomness. During my first cross-country road trip, as I'm sure I've noted before, I got it in my head to drive from the easternmost point in the continental US (in Maine) to the westernmost point (in Washington). Apart from these two boundary conditions, I had a few others:
 Avoid interstates, stick to secondary roads.
No less than four and no more than eight hours of travel in a day
Stay within the US; a great-circle route between the endpoints would be over 90% in Canada
Select a random endpoint within a particular radius of a theoretical six-hour drive to stop for the night
This is not an exhaustive list, and there were some deviations from the plan, for example when a friend invited me for Thanksgiving dinner and their house was, well, close enough to the semi-random route. And when I nearly got buried in a snowstorm in Vermont .
What I'm getting at, though, is that the last stage of this odyssey took me west of Seattle to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, and through a little town called Sequim, on the northern coast of the peninsula. And it is just outside of Sequim that the infamous Kitchen-Dick Road resides. So of the four road names in this blogging exercise, this is the only one that I can positively say I've seen - though I have no memory of seeing the sign itself, K-D Road intersects U.S. 101, and I'm certain that was the road I took because... well... look at a map of the area. There are no other through roads.
As for the name, the origin appears to be as mundane as it gets. There was a guy named Mr. Kitchen. There was another guy named Mr. Dick. The remarkably straight, north-south road between their farmsteads, or whatever they were at the time, was named after the dudes. Still, you have to think that whoever decided to name it that instead of, I dunno, Remarkably Straight Road or North-South Drive or Olympic View Boulevard, knew exactly what he was doing and was snickering like Beavis and/or Butt-Head the whole time.
How do I know this? Well, for once I could be arsed to look it up.
https://www.king5.com/article/life/style/best-nw-escapes/kitchen-dick-road-the-s...
Kitchen-Dick Road: The strangest street name in Washington
Okay, well, Washington's a big state, though admittedly with a low density of roads compared to, say, anywhere east of the Mississippi. But there have got to be other contenders for "strangest."
Additionally, according to that (very short) article at the above link, which also sports a very helpful photograph...
And it gets even better… The street actually intersects with Woodcock Road.
*cue more Beavis and Butt-Head chortling*
But the best part? The best part is something they conspicuously leave out of the article.
And there's a great reason for the name: two Sequim pioneer families, the Kitchens and the Dicks lived at either end of the road. They combined their names to name the road. This from Peggy Hardin Hunt, who's husband is the great grandson of William Dick, one of the pioneers.
Which could have made her name "Peggy Hardin Dick-Hunt."
*cue Beavis and Butt-Head dying of asphyxiation*
So next time you need a meetup location, considering telling your friend “I’ll meet you at the corner of Kitchen-Dick and Woodcock,” because it doesn’t get any better than that.
The chance of me ever setting foot on the Olympic peninsula again is perilously close to zero; Forks exists there. But you never know - an ex-girlfriend of mine, someone I still talk to occasionally, lives on nearby Whidbey Island. So it could happen. That would be pretty random, though. |
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