Pacific Coast Quotes

I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans

The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. (69)

Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den. I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there.

The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature.

Jesus Christ!" sterling shouted. "Where'd you learn to drive?" "nobody asked you for commentary!" Emma yelled back as they hurtled into the moving traffic. Luckily it was late and the lanes were mostly empty. "I don't want to die on the pacific coast highway!" sterling wailed. "Oh, I'm sorry," Emma's voice dripped acid. "Is there a different highway you'd like to die on? BECAUSE WE CAN ARRANGE THAT.

Angry words pierce & the holes can't be patched.

To think of the Midwest as a whole as anything other than beautiful is to ignore the extraordinary power of the land. The lushness of the grass and trees in August, the roll of the hills (far less of the Midwest is flat than outsiders seem to imagine), the rich smell of soil, the evening sunlight over a field of wheat, or the crickets chirping at dusk on a residential street: All of it, it has always made me feel at peace. There is room to breathe, there is a realness of place. The seasons are extreme, but they pass and return, pass and return, and the world seems far steadier than it does from the vantage point of a coastal city. Certainly picturesque towns can be found in New England or California or the Pacific Northwest, but I can't shake the sense that they're too picturesque. On the East Coast, especially, these places seem to me aggressively quaint, unbecomingly smug, and even xenophobic, downright paranoid in their wariness of those who might somehow infringe upon the local charm. I suspect this wariness is tied to the high cost of real estate, the fear that there might not be enough space or money and what there is of both must be clung to and defended. The West Coast, I think, has a similar self-regard...and a beauty that I can't help seeing as show-offy. But the Midwest: It is quietly lovely, not preening with the need to have its attributes remarked on. It is the place I am calmest and most myself.

Take me to unexplored paradise & one of your best islands, I want to cross the pacific ocean and make a great memory. Let's go to the eastern coast of the Philippines where the waves meet the sky. You know where it is!

The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: "Hello - Goodbye!" and no address.

I’ve always judged places and times by how lonely they felt. The entire Midwest, for example, strikes me as horrifically lonely, Indiana more so than Wisconsin and Wisconsin more so than Ohio or Illinois. Coasts are dependably less lonely than inland areas while the warmer latitudes are noticeably less lonely than the colder ones. Hardware stores feel lonely while bookstores do not. Mornings are lonelier than afternoons, while the hours before dawn can be devastating. Vienna is lonelier than Paris or London, while Los Angeles is lonelier than San Francisco or Boston. The Atlantic Ocean is lonelier than the Pacific while the Caribbean is not lonely at all...

Unable to afford street OxyContin, Matt at some point switched to the black tar heroin that had saturated the Columbus market, brought in by young Mexican men from a small state on Mexico’s Pacific coast called Nayarit.

he P.C.H. [Pacific Coast Highway] being one of them; the melancholiness of the ocean; the melancholiness of everything else. And the feeling of being like, this is a fragment of a holographic reality that a higher consciousness made.

We can't be good enough or perfect enough. We have to trust Christ to be good enough for us.

Thus mysterious divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one Bay to it; seems heart-beating heart of earth.

On Friday the 13th of April 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth, that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, it's named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death. If the trajectory of Apophis at close approach passes within a narrow range of altitudes called the 'keyhole,' the precise influence of Earth's gravity on its orbit will guarantee that seven years later in 2036, on its next time around, the asteroid will hit Earth directly, slamming in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. The tsunami it creates will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim. If Apophis misses the keyhole in 2029, then, of course, we have nothing to worry about in 2036.

Yui concluded that memories were like objects, like the soccer ball that was found on the coast of Alaska a year after the tsunami, 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Sooner or later, they always floated back to the surface.

In Carter Woodbine’s Bentley, he is southbound on Pacific Coast Highway

The P.C.H. [Pacific Coast Highway] being one of them; the melancholiness of the ocean; the melancholiness of everything else.

So that’s why when I buy a new house—and there have been many (never underestimate a geographic)—it has to have a view. I want the sense that I can look down on safety, on someplace where someone is thinking of me, at a place where love is. Down there, somewhere in that valley, or in that vast ocean out there beyond the Pacific Coast Highway, on the gleaming primaries of the red-tail’s wings, that’s where parenting is.

It happened far away from the capital, all the way on the Pacific coast, but it was still our country, our dead, Elena thought. Tragic, almost, that she never felt more patriotic than when grieving her country's victims.

At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.

Relatively new to the faith, she stumbled around at first. But after a bit, she settled down to read her favorite psalms. The verses she often referred to were Psalm 27:14, 52:8-9, and 91:2. She read all three passages, then focused on the verse from Psalm 91: I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust.

The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea, the smell of land reaches far out to greet one. And the same it true when one has been long inland.

Although the frontier had advanced by fewer than two miles a year in the 150 years following Jamestown’s establishment, in the first half of the nineteenth century it shot west at nearly forty miles a year, stopping only when settlers reached the Pacific Coast.

Only one further prize remained on the entire North Pacific coast, the peninsula of Korea. Although Japan clearly regarded Korea as essential to her security, a group of Russian adventurers resolved to steal it. Their plan was to establish a private company, the Yalu Timber Company, and begin moving Russian soldiers into Korea disguised as workmen. If they ran into trouble, the Russian government could always disclaim responsibility. If they succeeded, the empire would acquire a new province and they themselves would have vast economic concessions within it.

America’s patriotic song “America the Beautiful” invokes our spacious skies, our amber waves of grain, from sea to shining sea. Actually, that song reverses geographic realities. As in Africa, in the Americas the spread of native crops and domestic animals was slowed by constricted skies and environmental barriers. No waves of native grain ever stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of North America, from Canada to Patagonia, or from Egypt to South Africa, while amber waves of wheat and barley came to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the spacious skies of Eurasia. That faster spread of Eurasian agriculture, compared with that of Native American and sub-Saharan African agriculture, played a role (as the next part of this book will show) in the more rapid diffusion of Eurasian writing, metallurgy, technology, and empires.

The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two. Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic. Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl — or the girl you wanted to score with — for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told. You see, I'd never actually been to Florida before the war, much less Miami. I was a newspaper reporter from Chicago before the war and had never even seen the ocean until I was flying over the Pacific for the Air Corp. There wasn't much time for admiring the waves when Japanese Zeroes were trying to shoot you out of the sky and bury you at the bottom of that deep blue sea. It was because of my friend Pete that I knew so much about Miami. Florida was his home, so when we both got leave in '42 I followed him to the warm waters of Miami to see what all the fuss was about. It would be easy to say that I skipped Chicago for Miami after the war ended because Pete and I were such good pals and I'd had such a great time there on leave. But in truth I decided to stay on in Miami because of Veronica Lake. I'd better explain that. Veronica Lake never knew she was the reason I came back with Pete to Miami after the war. But she had been there in '42 while Pete and I were enjoying the sand, sun, and the sweet kisses of more than a few love-starved girls desperate to remember what it felt like to have a man's arm around them — not to mention a few other sensations. Lake had been there promoting war bonds on Florida's first radio station, WQAM. It was a big outdoor event and Pete and I were among those listening with relish to Lake's sultry voice as she urged everyone to pitch-in for our boys overseas. We were in those dark early days of the war at the time, and the outcome was very much in question. Lake's appearance at the event was a morale booster for civilians and servicemen alike. She was standing behind a microphone that sat on a table draped in the American flag. I'd never seen a Hollywood star up-close and though I liked the movies as much as any other guy, I had always attributed most of what I saw on-screen to smoke and mirrors. I doubted I'd be impressed seeing a star off-screen. A girl was a girl, after all, and there were loads of real dolls in Miami, as I'd already discovered. Boy, was I wrong." - Where Flamingos Fly

Floating past the Soyuz TV screen, I noticed we were over the Pacific, off the Chilean coast. At the window, I saw few lights: fishing boats, I thought. Then they resolved themselves: the Southern Cross. I was looking at a constellation in the night sky, not the sea! It was a strange delight to be that disconcerted while simultaneously at ease.

This encouraged Grant to revive a proposal he had floated a year earlier to connect American canals and rivers into a national network, lowering transport costs and stoking business. He also wanted to revive American shipbuilding, which had been badly damaged during the war, by paying “ample compensation” to American ships that carried mail domestically and abroad. Grant expanded this vision by again endorsing a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and he had surveys conducted to locate the most feasible site. Quite visionary about this pathway, Grant maintained that “it would add largely to the wealth of the Pacific coast, and, perhaps, change the whole current of the trade of the world.

We were going to ride motorbikes from Paris to the Côte d’Azur, or all the way down the Pacific coast of the USA, from Seattle to Los Angeles; we were going to follow in Che Guevara’s tracks from Buenos Aires to Caracas. Maybe if I’d done all that, I wouldn’t have ended up here, not knowing what to do next. Or maybe, if I’d done all that, I’d have ended up exactly where I am and I would be perfectly contented.

So that’s why when I buy a new house—and there have been many (never underestimate a geographic)—it has to have a view. I want the sense that I can look down on safety, on someplace where someone is thinking of me, at a place where love is. Down there, somewhere in that valley, or in that vast ocean out there beyond the Pacific Coast Highway, on the gleaming primaries of the red-tail’s wings, that’s where parenting is. That’s where love is. That’s where home is. I can feel safe now.

You always were a Left Coast girl even when you lived back East,” Selah says from her lounger next to Jo. “You can try to take the girl out of the Pacific Northwest, but you can’t take the… you know…” she fades out with a wave of her hand. “Ryan,

What does Africa — what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition,with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

clean boyfriend someday. I love you. Joe. On the other side was a photograph of the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast, where we’d stayed together once. I stared at the photograph for several moments, a series of feelings washing over me in waves: grateful for a word from someone I knew, nostalgic for Joe, disappointed that only one person had written to me, and heartbroken, unreasonable as it was, that the one person who had wasn’t Paul. I bought two bottles of Snapple lemonade, a king-sized Butterfinger, and a bag of Doritos and went outside and sat on the front steps, devouring the things I’d purchased while reading the postcard over and over again. After a while, I noticed a box in the corner of the porch stuffed

But perhaps the greatest asset was the surviving oil tanks. Had 4.5 million barrels of fuel oil been blown up, what was left of the Pacific Fleet would have been forced to limp back to the West Coast and have its operations in the Pacific severely curtailed. That action, not Japan’s sinking of a few aging battleships, would have given Japan the free rein it sought in the South Pacific.

From Dark Waters by Jason Lewis. "Fifteen minutes into our multi-year journey, subsumed by the suburban wastes of South London, we were lost. We carried with us maps of France, the Pyrenees, the Algarve Coast, and navigational charts of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the North Pacific. We even had a star chart for celestial navigation. But were the hell was a London A - Z roadmap when you needed it?

By late 1940 the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo was sending secret messages to its U.S. embassy and various consulates requesting “utilization of our ‘Second Generations’ and resident nationals” to commit acts of espionage and to stir up antiwar feelings among “Negroes, communists, anti-Semites and labor union members.” The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reported that “a number of second-generation Japanese have been placed in airplane plants for intelligence purposes” and “will observe closely all shipments of airplanes and other war materials [from the West Coast] and report the amounts and destinations of such shipments.” The Japanese consulates were soon sending a series of detailed responses to the Tokyo authorities outlining almost every aspect of U.S. warplane production on the Pacific coast, as well as which warships were in harbor and which ones had sailed.

The Atlantic is a cheesy, second-rate ocean,” Jordan shouted back, but he was starting to judge the incoming waves again. “It would be okay if it had a hurricane come up the coast every day. But it’ll never be the Pacific. Now, you ride, Jack. See that fourth wave forming? Don’t be afraid when the bottom drops out of it. That’s the board entering the heart of the wave. Just rise to your knees on the first one. Remember, it’s all about surfaces.

Do you remember our conversation? Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? The bindery was our access, the point in space that contains all other points, and that night you were a boy unbound, a tiny astronaut, taking your first leap into an infinite and unknowable universe. For the first time you could see the voices of the things you'd been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention. With your supernatural ears, you were able to perceive, with absolute clarity, the sinuous shapes and contours of the sounds that matter makes as it moves through space and time and mind. Some of these sounds were so beautiful they made you laugh out loud and clap your hands with delight, and others were so sad they made tears run down your face. And, oh, the visions we had! Container ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. The plundered moon and all its craters; globes and stars and asteroids; a jet black crow with a diamond tiara; a flock of rubber duckies, spinning through the Pacific gyres. At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. Fires rage as the redwoods burn; and in the deep ocean, a pilot whale carries her dead baby on her nose, while sea turtles weep briny tears onto nets of plastic.

Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean had been written by a Scottish fur trader, from Stornoway in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, named Alexander Mackenzie. Or more accurately, Sir Alexander Mackenzie—since King George III had awarded him a knighthood for becoming the first white man ever to cross the entirety of North America. Mackenzie had completed his voyage almost nine years earlier. He suspected that his seven-month overland journey to the Pacific was probably of historic moment, and so he had left a memorial. He had created what he hoped would be a lasting inscription on a tiny sea-washed rock near the present-day British Columbia fishing village of Bella Coola: “Alex. MacKenzie, from Canada by land. 22nd July, 1793.” He had inscribed the message with his finger, using an old trappers’ trick for long-duration messages, dipping it into a poultice made of bear grease mixed with vermilion powder and smearing out words that he hoped would survive the cold and lashing rains for which the Pacific coast is notorious.

He has no friends that I know of, and his few neighbours consider him a bit of a weirdo, but I like to think of him as my friend as he will sometimes leave buckets of compost outside my house, as a gift for my garden. The oldest tree on my property is a lemon, a sprawling mass of twigs with a heavy bow. The night gardener once asked me if I knew how citrus trees died: when they reach old age, if they are not cut down and they manage to survive drought, disease and innumerable attacks of pests, fungi and plagues, they succumb from overabundance. When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom in enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to their excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who would want to do that?

To understand President Obama’s second term, however, all you need to know are the following three: First, the Country Clubbers. Guardians of the GOP’s upper-crust traditions, they believed in lower taxes, less regulation, and being polite. They were led in Congress by Speaker John Boehner. They held out hope for the resurrection of Mitt Romney. Their fortunes were not on the rise. Second, the Flat Earth Society, with Sarah Palin as its patron saint. These were the hard-core conspiracy theorists. They insisted that President Obama had faked his long-form birth certificate. They were certain that bike-share programs were a world-domination plot fostered by the UN. Finally, the Holy Warriors. Some of these crusaders were, in fact, religious. Others were more likely to quote The Lord of the Rings than Matthew or Luke. But regardless of where they spent their Sundays, what they shared was a worldview. Where traditional Republicans saw a debate between liberal and conservative, Holy Warriors saw an existential battle between good and evil. They warned endlessly of appeasement. They spoke of “defeating the Left” as though Satan’s minions were amassed along the Pacific coast. The Holy Warriors pursued Romneyite goals with Palinite fervor. For this reason, they were ascendant in 2013.

He came in the end, as he must, to the other coast, over the state line and well north of where he'd thought he was going, to a place where the Pacific Ocean ended on a white beach under dark pines and there were mussel shells as big as his hand and driftwood logs taller than buildings, wider than a man's length. Swell that had been rising and running from the coast of Japan, from the other side of the planet, crashed day and night onto the sand below the group's cabins, as if he'd come at last to a place where he could hear the earth breathe. Even now, in August, it was cool here, the green breath of the old forest and the salt sea always on his face.

Along the Oregon coast an arm of the Pacific shushes softly against rocky shores. Above the waves, dripping silver in the moonlight, old trees, giant trees, few now, thrust their heads among low clouds, the moss thick upon their boles and shadow deep around their roots. In these woods nights are quiet, save for the questing hoot of an owl, the satin stroke of fur against a twig, the tick and rasp of small claws climbing up, clambering down. In these woods, bear is the big boy, the top of the chain, but even he goes quietly and mostly by day. It is a place of mosses and liverworts and ferns, of filmy green that curtains the branches and cushions the soil, a wet place, a still place.

But now 'tis the modern ole Coast Division S.P. and begins at those dead end blocks and at 4:30 the frantic Market Street and Sansome Street commuters as I say come hysterically running for ther 112 to get home on time for the 5:30 televisions Howdy Doody of their gun toting Neal Cassady'd Hopalong childrens. 1.9 miles to 23rd Street, another 1.2 Newcomb, another 1.0 to Paul Avenue and etcetera these being the little piss stops on that 5 miles short run thru 4 tunnels to mighty Bayshore, Bayshore at milepost 5.2 shows you as I say that gigantic valley wall sloping in with sometimes in extinct winter dusks the huge fogs milking furling meerolling in without a sound but as if you could hear the radar hum, the oldfashioned dullmasks mouth of Potato Patch Jack London old scrollwaves crawling in across the gray bleak North Pacific with a wild fleck, a fish, the wall of a cabin, the old arranged wallworks of a sunken ship, the fish swimming in the pelvic bones of old lovers lay tangled ath the bottom of the sea like slugs no longer discernible bone by bone but melted into one squid of time that fog, that terrible and bleak Seattlish fog that potatopatch wise comes bringing messages from Alaska and from the Aleutian mongol, and from the seal, and from the wave, and from the smiling porpoise, that fog at Bayshore you can see waving in and filling in rills and rolling down and making milk on hillsides and you think, "It's hypocricy of men makes these hills grim.

The Sumerian pantheon was headed by an "Olympian Circle" of twelve, for each of these supreme gods had to have a celestial counterpart, one of the twelve members of the Solar System. Indeed, the names of the gods and their planets were one and the same (except when a variety of epithets were used to describe the planet or the god's attributes). Heading the pantheon was the ruler of Nibiru, ANU whose name was synonymous with "Heaven," for he resided on Nibiru. His spouse, also a member of the Twelve, was called ANTU. Included in this group were the two principal sons of ANU: E.A ("Whose House Is Water"), Anu's Firstborn but not by Antu; and EN.LIL ("Lord of the Command") who was the Heir Apparent because his mother was Antu, a half sister of Anu. Ea was also called in Sumerian texts EN.KI ("Lord Earth"), for he had led the first mission of the Anunnaki from Nibiru to Earth and established on Earth their first colonies in the E.DIN ("Home of the Righteous Ones")—the biblical Eden. His mission was to obtain gold, for which Earth was a unique source. Not for ornamentation or because of vanity, but as away to save the atmosphere of Nibiru by suspending gold dust in that planet's stratosphere. As recorded in the Sumerian texts (and related by us in The 12th Planet and subsequent books of The Earth Chronicles), Enlil was sent to Earth to take over the command when the initial extraction methods used by Enki proved unsatisfactory. This laid the groundwork for an ongoing feud between the two half brothers and their descendants, a feud that led to Wars of the Gods; it ended with a peace treaty worked out by their sister Ninti (thereafter renamed Ninharsag). The inhabited Earth was divided between the warring clans. The three sons of Enlil—Ninurta, Sin, Adad—together with Sin's twin children, Shamash (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus), were given the lands of Shem and Japhet, the lands of the Semites and Indo-Europeans: Sin (the Moon) lowland Mesopotamia; Ninurta, ("Enlil's Warrior," Mars) the highlands of Elam and Assyria; Adad ("The Thunderer," Mercury) Asia Minor (the land of the Hittites) and Lebanon. Ishtar was granted dominion as the goddess of the Indus Valley civilization; Shamash was given command of the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. This division, which did not go uncontested, gave Enki and his sons the lands of Ham—the brown/black people—of Africa: the civilization of the Nile Valley and the gold mines of southern and western Africa—a vital and cherished prize. A great scientist and metallurgist, Enki's Egyptian name was Ptah ("The Developer"; a title that translated into Hephaestus by the Greeks and Vulcan by the Romans). He shared the continent with his sons; among them was the firstborn MAR.DUK ("Son of the Bright Mound") whom the Egyptians called Ra, and NIN.GISH.ZI.DA ("Lord of the Tree of Life") whom the Egyptians called Thoth (Hermes to the Greeks)—a god of secret knowledge including astronomy, mathematics, and the building of pyramids. It was the knowledge imparted by this pantheon, the needs of the gods who had come to Earth, and the leadership of Thoth, that directed the African Olmecs and the bearded Near Easterners to the other side of the world. And having arrived in Mesoamerica on the Gulf coast—just as the Spaniards, aided by the same sea currents, did millennia later—they cut across the Mesoamerican isthmus at its narrowest neck and—just like the Spaniards due to the same geography—sailed down from the Pacific coast of Mesoamerica southward, to the lands of Central America and beyond. For that is where the gold was, in Spanish times and before.

Though I was there only a short time, one thing about the Relay Station did impress me very strongly. Everywhere else I’d been, one could look “down” at the earth and watch it turning on its axis, bringing new continents into view with the passing hours. But here there was no such change. The earth kept the same face turned forever toward the station. It was true that night and day passed across the planet beneath, but with every dawn and sunset, the station was still in exactly the same place. It was poised eternally above a spot in Uganda, two hundred miles from Lake Victoria. Because of this, it was hard to believe that the station was moving at all, though actually it was traveling round the earth at over six thousand miles an hour. But because it took exactly one day to make the circuit, it would remain hanging over Africa forever—just as the other two stations hung above the opposite coasts of the Pacific.

didn’t plan this,” Jack said. “But since it’s you and me—tell me about Brie.” “Tell you what, Jack?” “When she was leaving… It looked like there was something….” “Spit it out.” “You and Brie?” “What?” Jack took a breath, not happily. “Are you with my sister?” Mike had a swallow of his whiskey. “I’m taking a day off tomorrow—taking her down the Pacific Coast Highway through Mendocino to look for whales, see the galleries, maybe have a little lunch.” “Why?” “She said she’d like to do that while she’s here.” “All right, but you know what I’m getting at—” “I think you’d better tell me, so I don’t misunderstand.” “I’d like to know what your intentions are toward my sister.” “You really think you have the right to do that? To ask that question?” Mike asked him. “Just tell me what was going on between the two of you while I was gone.” “Jack, you’d better loosen your grip a little. Brie’s a grown woman. From where I stand, we’re good friends. If you want to know how she sees it, I think she’s the one you have to ask. But I don’t recommend it—she might be offended. Despite everything, she tends to think of herself as a grown-up.” “It’s no secret to you—she’s had a real bad year.” “It’s no secret,” Mike agreed. “You’re making this really tough, man…” “No, I think you are. You spent some time with her tonight. Did it look to you like anything is wrong? Like she’s upset or anything? Because I think everything is fine and you worry too much.” “I worry, yeah. I worry that maybe she’ll look to you for some comfort. For something to help her get through. And that you’ll take advantage of that.” “And…?” Mike prompted, lifting his glass but not drinking. “And maybe work a little of your Latin magic on her and walk away.” Jack drank his whiskey. “I don’t want you to do that to her.” Mike put down his glass on the bar without emptying it. “I would never hurt Brie. And it has nothing to do with whose sister she is. Good night, Jack.

THE PARTY And at last the police are at the front door, summoned by a neighbor because of the noise, two large cops asking Peter, who had signed the rental agreement, to end the party. Our peace can’t be disturbed, one of the officers states. But when we receive a complaint we act on it. The police on the front stoop wear as their shoulder patch an artist’s palette, since the town likes to think of itself as an art colony, and indeed, Pacific Coast Highway two blocks inland, which serves as the main north-south street, is lined with commercial galleries featuring paintings of the surf by moonlight —like this night, but without anybody on the sand and with a bigger moon. And now Dennis, as at every party once the police arrive at the door, moves through the dancers, the drinkers, the talkers, to confront the uniforms and guns, to object, he says, to their attempt to stop people harmlessly enjoying themselves, and to argue it isn’t even 1 a.m. Then Stuart, as usual, pushes his way to the discussion happening at the door and in his drunken manner tries to justify to the cops Dennis’ attitude, believing he can explain things better to authority, which of course annoys Dennis, and soon those two are disputing with each other, tonight exasperating Peter, whose sole aim is to get the officers to leave before they are provoked enough to demand to enter to check ID or something, and maybe smell the pot and somebody ends up arrested with word getting back to the landlord and having the lease or whatever Peter had signed cancelled, and all staying here evicted. The Stones, or Janis, are on the stereo now, as the police stand firm like time, like death—You have to shut it down—as the dancing inside continues, the dancers forgetting for a moment a low mark on a quiz, or their draft status, or a paper due Monday, or how to end the war in Asia, or some of their poems rejected by a magazine, or the situation in Watts or of Chavez’s farmworkers, or that they wish they had asked Erin rather than Joan to dance. That dancing, that music, the party, even after the cops leave with their warning Don’t make us come back continues, the dancing has lasted for years, decades, across a new century, through the fear of nuclear obliteration, the great fires, fierce rain, Main Beach and Forest Avenue flooded, war after war, love after love, that dancing goes on, the dancing, the party, the night, the dancing

That afternoon I say about five thousand cars or probably three thousand passed me not one of them ever dreamed of stopping -- Which didnt bother me anyway because at first seeing that gorgeous long coast up to Monterey I thought "Well I'll just hike right in, it's only fourteen miles, I oughta do that easy" -- And on the way there's all kindsa interesting things to see anyway like the seals barking on rocks below, or quiet old farms made of logs on the hills across the highway, or sudden upstretches that go along dreamy seaside meadows where cows grace and graze in full sight of endless blue Pacific -- But because I'm wearing desert boots with their fairly thin soles, and the sun is beating hot on the tar road, the heat finally gets through the soles and I begin to deliver heat blisters inmy sockiboos -- I'm limping along wondering what's the matter with me when I realize I've got blisters -- I sit by the side of the road and look -- I take out my first aid kit from the pack and apply unguents and put on cornpads and carry on -- But the combination of the heavy pack and the heat of the road increases the pain of the blisters until finally I realize I've got to hitch hike a ride or never make it to Monterey at all. But the tourists bless their hearts after all, they couldnt know, only think I'm having a big happy hike with my rucksack and they drive on, even tho I stick out my thumb

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel - forbidding - now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop. Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there. Ahab turned. "Starbuck!" "Sir." "Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!

Another episode startled Trump’s advisers on the Asia trip. As the president and his entourage embarked on the journey, they stopped in Hawaii on November 3 to break up the long flight and allow Air Force One to refuel. White House aides arranged for the president and first lady to make a somber pilgrimage so many of their predecessors had made: to visit Pearl Harbor and honor the twenty-three hundred American sailors, soldiers, and marines who lost their lives there. The first couple was set to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits just off the coast of Honolulu and straddles the hull of the battleship that sank into the Pacific during the Japanese surprise bombing attack in 1941. As a passenger boat ferried the Trumps to the stark white memorial, the president pulled Kelly aside for a quiet consult. “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Trump asked his chief of staff. Kelly was momentarily stunned. Trump had heard the phrase “Pearl Harbor” and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else. Kelly explained to him that the stealth Japanese attack here had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet and prompted the country’s entrance into World War II, eventually leading the United States to drop atom bombs on Japan. If Trump had learned about “a date which will live in infamy” in school, it hadn’t really pierced his consciousness or stuck with him. “He was at times dangerously uninformed,” said one senior former adviser. Trump’s lack of basic historical knowledge surprised some foreign leaders as well. When he met with President Emmanuel Macron of France at the United Nations back in September 2017, Trump complimented him on the spectacular Bastille Day military parade they had attended together that summer in Paris. Trump said he did not realize until seeing the parade that France had had such a rich history of military conquest. He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.” A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.” Tillerson developed a polite and self-effacing way to manage the gaps in Trump’s knowledge. If he saw the president was completely lost in the conversation with a foreign leader, other advisers noticed, the secretary of state would step in to ask a question. As Tillerson lodged his question, he would reframe the topic by explaining some of the basics at issue, giving Trump a little time to think. Over time, the president developed a tell that he would use to get out of a sticky conversation in which a world leader mentioned a topic that was totally foreign or unrecognizable to him. He would turn to McMaster, Tillerson

If Walt Marlow opened the window, he would be able to hear the breakers crashing along the Pacific Northwest coast and breathe in the damp salty air. He missed the soothing sound of the sea, but he just couldn’t seem to get the windows open these days. Perhaps they were rusted shut; salt air did that sometimes, he told himself.

Opal Raines stood on a cliff high above the surf that beat into the rocks on Cape Point at the southmost tip of the African continent. In front of her was the Indian Ocean and the islands of the Far East; to her right the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, and the icy bottom of the earth; at her back the Atlantic and the Americas; and on her left the vast plains of Africa where she had sometimes lived, and where she had been worshiped by wild lions. She read again the notification that had come today from Switzerland: Dear Ms. Raines. This is to notify you that the sum of ten million dollars (US) was transferred today into your account at Credit Suisse by Stella Clair Rose. Opal tore the notice into small pieces, and watched them fly from her hand, blown by the African breeze out across the ocean water. Her laugh followed the pieces as they floated away, drifting out wherever the wind would take them, toward Indonesia, the Banda Sea, Papua New Guinea, the great expanse of the Pacific — all her world, the world of the statistical outlier merging time past, and time not yet come, with this moment. All as unpredictable as shadows, as ghosts. Sometime later, that laugh, floating on an eastbound wind, would reach the California coast and come to rest where it did once before — on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles where Heron White’s body landed after he crashed through a twelfth-floor window at the end of a hallway outside a dentist’s office one rainy day at noon.

Although his log entries do not speak of America per se, a chart created by Admiral Zheng was used to make a detailed map of the world. A copy of this map, drawn in 1763, was found in a second-hand bookshop and was offered as evidence that Zheng’s fleet was the first to discover America. At the age of 61, Admiral Zheng died aboard ship and befittingly was buried at sea. The Chinese sailed on very large ships, some of which were 450 feet long and 180 feet wide, in fact larger than any other of that time. They were certainly large enough to circumnavigate the world. Typical donut-shaped stone anchors of the type used by the Chinese have been found off the coast of California, as well as the west coast of South America, substantiating their claims. Zheng’s journal states that it took 270 days to sail from China to California on his voyage across the Pacific. On another expedition, he described rounding the bottom of Africa and sailing into the Atlantic, to what could well have been South America and the Caribbean.

At first, the stricken ship was just a smudge on the horizon, a formless mirage, visible only from the tops of the swells. As the Gale Force plowed closer, the smudge separated, and McKenna could see the Coast Guard cutter, stately and proud, and the Pacific Lion herself, a half-sunk bathtub toy on an enormous scale, ungainly and wallowing in an uneasy sea.

another true Death Valley Days story is presented for your entertainment by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, producers of that famous family of products—20 Mule Team Borax, 20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips, and Boraxo. Well, Old Ranger, what’s your story about tonight?” Through many changes of format, it remained a hardy perennial, eventually becoming a filmed TV series with Ronald Reagan as host.

A second famous person became involved with the Manson Family around the spring of 1968. Two of the Manson girls, Patricia and Ella Jo, were hitch-hiking on the Pacific Coast Highway when Beach Boy Dennis Wilson picked them up and invited them to his house. The girls complied, and after spending an afternoon with Dennis, they returned to Manson and told him about their famous new friend. Over subsequent days, Manson managed to worm his way into Dennis’ life, taking advantage of his extreme generosity to move his family into Dennis’ house. Manson also hoped that Dennis would be able to help him boost his music career, a dream Manson had never let go. But any opportunities Dennis threw Manson’s way, he squandered. It became clear to anyone with musical training that Manson could only play a few chords on his guitar and none of his songs were good enough to record. After a few months, Dennis was desperate to part ways with Manson and even moved out of his own home, leaving his landlord to deal with evicting the Manson Family.

Only three years after American soldiers seized the Mexican province of California, the Swamp Land Act of 1850 passed Congress, granting new states the right to sell flood-prone land to individuals as long as the water could be drained from it. The legislation sparked the nationwide annihilation of wetlands from the Florida Everglades to the San Francisco tidelands. The Swamp Land Act was a classic form of the get-rich-quick scheme that defined the colonial project: steal indigenous lands, auction them off to the highest bidder, and then enforce property taxes, guaranteeing a long-term source of funds. It would transfer the promise of future financial security away from the country’s first inhabitants. In just two years’ time, nearly 790,000 acres of California’s wetlands were shifted into the hands of fewer than two hundred private owners, who, having paid the bargain rate of $ 1.25 per acre with no money down, proceeded to dam, dike, drain, and fill the largest estuary on the Pacific coast.

THE JACK WEBB SHOW, madcap comedy-variety. BROADCAST HISTORY: Spring 1946, ABC West Coast, from KGO, San Francisco. 30m, Wednesdays at 9:30 Pacific time, premiering March 20. This insane bit of fluff was one of Jack Webb’s earliest efforts, so out of character for the man who created Dragnet and airing three years before that landmark police show.

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two. Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic. Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl — or the girl you wanted to score with — for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told.

We went everywhere. I gave him the grand tour, the best the Pacific Northwest has to offer, which is nothing short of spectacular. Everything revolved around wildlife. We hiked the Coast Range out of my parents’ beach cabin to look for black bears, and traveled to eastern Oregon to see white-tailed deer, coyotes, and the eastern Oregon antelope, animals that Steve had never experienced before. He skied Mount Bachelor. I wasn’t much of a skier, so I went off to track down wildlife while he had a great time on the slopes. Meeting him at the lodge afterward, I had to head off a leggy blonde who was intent on teaching Steve how to use an American pay phone. Not the kind of wildlife I was interested in him experiencing.

The Coast peoples were hunters and gatherers. The land and sea around them was so rich in food that they did not need to cultivate crops. Their only domesticated animals were dogs, used mainly for deer hunting or for fibers: one woolly breed of dogs was kept in pens and sheared twice a year. Anthropologists once considered cultures so heavily dependent upon naturally occurring products for their sustenance to be primitive in comparison to those based on agriculture, yet therein lay an anomaly. The environment yielded such a surplus of natural resources that Coast Indians had no trouble feeding themselves and finding enough leisure time to improve and elaborate their material culture and to conduct a lively trade. At the same time they developed a highly stratified and class-conscious social structure atypical of other North American maritime hunting and gathering groups.

But life in the Coast culture area was hardly idyllic. Warfare aimed at driving out or exterminating another lineage or family was an established practice in the northern portion of the region. Peoples to the south carried on feuds much more limited in violence and extent. After a successful attack, the northern warriors sometimes beheaded their victims, brought the heads home, and impaled them atop tall poles in front of their villages. Only

An even more important intertribal gathering took place at the Grand Dalles of the Columbia River, the home territory of the Wishrams, Wascos, and other peoples. It was the most important point of contact between Coast and Plateau cultures. Here was the cosmopolitan center of Northwest Indian life, site of great month-long trade fairs analogous to those held in medieval Europe, a time for trading, dancing, ceremonial displays, games, gambling, and even marriages. The

Once it was believed that the Coast culture was essentially an extension of that of Asia. Anthropologists now argue that it was derived from that of ancient Eskimos and spread through the interior to the coast. Although no definitive answer is yet possible, it has been documented that Indian civilization on Washington’s northwestern coast has existed continuously for nearly six thousand years, and some scholars estimate that human habitation of the Pacific Northwest dates back twelve thousand years.

The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier at the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, is still regarded by scholars as the largest single land migration in history.

In 1857 a revival swept over this country in the east and on to the western cities, clear over to the Pacific coast. It was God calling the nation to Himself. Half a million people united with the Church at that time. Then the war broke out. We were baptized with the Holy Ghost in 1857, and in 1861 we were baptized in blood. It was a call of mercy, preceding judgment.

The mythical Thunderbird, in one form or another, was held in awe by practically all of the Indian tribes. On the Great Plains, where the phenomena of thunderstorms was very striking, the Thunderbird was supposed to be a deity in the form of a bird of enormous size, which produced thunder by flapping its wings, and lightning by opening and closing its eyes. These great birds were thought to carry a lake of fresh water on their backs, which caused a great downpour when they flew through the air. Tribes of the Pacific Coast thought the Thunderbird caught whales during a thunderstorm and used its wings as a bow to shoot arrows. Each tribe interpreted the bird differently in its art, as shown on these two pages. The design of the Thunderbird was used to decorate war drums, pottery, and walls and was supposed to protect individuals and tribes from the Evil Spirits.

Send your kid to a summer camp focused on free play. One such place is Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School—a sleepover summer camp in Half Moon Bay, California (half an hour south of San Francisco, on the Pacific coast). • Consider schools that value student-driven learning and play, such as Montessori schools, which exist nationwide. 10.

MARTIN SHEEN: Terry called me one night, and he had done so after finally making a decision. His gut hunch was to hire me, but he had other considerations, or an obligation to sort through his casting agent’s suggestions. He asked me if I was still interested. I got up just before sunrise and started driving the Pacific Coast Highway to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Road.” It was one of the most profound moments of my life. Dylan, who was one of my personal heroes, had cracked something wide open inside of me. I was experiencing an epiphany. There was a realization of what just happened to me. I started to weep, and pulled the car over on the highway and reflected on this. My happiness. Before that phone call, I would have never thought that such a thing would happen to me. I realized that acting was no joke. You don’t show up on a set and just decide that you are going to throw yourself out there without preparation. Me being there was no accident. The stars had aligned and Badlands was a role of a lifetime. I have Terry Malick to thank for it.

Brandt stood at the gate as a garden club arrived at his nursery. One of the women reached over the fence and picked a rhododendron flower. Brandt immediately closed the gate and told the group to go home.

If Walt Marlow opened the window, he would be able to hear the breakers crashing along the Pacific Northwest coast and breathe in the damp salty air.

During that century the two countries nearly went to war again at least three more times. As prime minister in the 1840s, Sir Robert Peel was acutely conscious of the American threat to Canada, and warned Parliament of possible war. This was the age of ‘manifest destiny’, which for many Americans meant their country’s destiny to rule the whole of North America, including Canada. At the 1844 presidential election James Polk and the Democrats campaigned on a bellicose platform, demanding the territory which would become the Canadian province of British Columbia, the Pacific coast from Oregon north to the 54th parallel and the border with Russian America, now Alaska: hence the unwieldy slogan ‘Fifty-four forty or fight!’ When Polk was elected, he backed off and found an easier target to the south, embarking on the Mexican–American War of 1846.

The centre of power is no longer on the seaboard. Books and newspapers vie with one another in describing the wonderful growth, and the still undeveloped riches, of the interior. Capital there finds its best investments, labor its largest opportunities. The frontiers are neglected and politically weak; the Gulf and Pacific coasts actually so, the Atlantic coast relatively to the central Mississippi Valley. When the day comes that shipping again pays, when the three sea frontiers find that they are not only militarily weak, but poorer for lack of national shipping, their united efforts may avail to lay again the foundations of our sea power.

I'm coming to that. Ericksen had come from the Pacific Coast to find you—in person; mark that down as Point One, upper case!

On the Plains, as in the Eastern woodlands, as on the Pacific Coast, there were irreconcilable differences between the Indians’ way of life and the life the white immigrants wanted to build. One had to give way. The white man had the numbers and the technology. It is easy to today to sit back and criticize the United States for its treatment of the Indians, or the individual settlers and frontiersman for what they did to the Native Americans, but for them the choices were to go back to where they came from or to go forward and seize what they wanted or needed.

You’re like the sunset on the Pacific coast. You’re every color from the color wheel, the different hues and shades swirling together. You’re a fucking masterpiece and I could stare at you for the rest of eternity.

One such place is Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School—a sleepover summer camp in Half Moon Bay, California (half an hour south of San Francisco, on the Pacific coast).

But he lacked a sense of urgency at key periods, and lacked a firm hand when one was sometimes called for. His greatest strength may have proved his greatest flaw—one that finally sunk John Jacob Astor’s West Coast empire. Wilson Price Hunt vastly preferred cooperation to confrontation.

Since boyhood, the sandy coast of Southern California with its mazes of rocky crags towering high above the Pacific had been Gower Champion’s refuge for reflection.

opportunity of comparing the San Francisco of 1852 with that of 1853. As before stated, there had been but one wharf in front of the city in 1852 – Long Wharf. In 1853 the town had grown out into the bay beyond what was the end of this wharf when I first saw it. Streets and houses had been built out on piles where the year before the largest vessels visiting the port lay at anchor or tied to the wharf. There was no filling under the streets or houses. San Francisco presented the same general appearance as the year before; that is, eating, drinking and gambling houses were conspicuous for their number and publicity. They were on the first floor, with doors wide open. At all hours of the day and night in walking the streets, the eye was regaled, on every block near the water front, by the sight of players at faro. Often broken places were found in the street, large enough to let a man down into the water below. I have but little doubt that many of the people who went to the Pacific coast in the early days of the gold excitement, and have never been heard from since, or who were heard from for a time and then ceased to write, found watery graves beneath the houses or streets built over San Francisco Bay.

Seattle sports had once risen briefly to international prominence, in 1917, when the city’s professional hockey team, the Metropolitans, became the first American team to win the Stanley Cup, defeating the Montreal Canadiens. But the Metropolitans ordinarily played only in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, and when the owner of their arena did not renew their lease in 1924, the team folded. Given

That’s the cruddy view from the Pacific coast this week. How’s the world facing the Atlantic? Miss you. Love,

With agencies in Oahu and Honolulu and in central city hubs in other states, World Wide Movers, Inc. has established a large terminal network along the Pacific Coast and in the Pacific Northwest.

George, please sit down,” Luke said. “Visit a while.” “Thanks, don’t mind if I do.” George pulled a chair over from an empty table and sat right beside Maureen so that she was sandwiched between himself and Art. “What brings you back to town so soon?” he asked her. “I’m, ah, visiting.” “Fantastic,” he said. “A long visit, I hope.” Luke took his seat, chuckling as he did so. “I have a brother here right now—Sean. You might remember him as my best man. He just discovered he has a young daughter in the area. Mom is visiting us and getting to know her first granddaughter, Rosie, three and a half and smart as a whip.” “How wonderful!” George said enthusiastically. “You must be having the time of your life!” Maureen lifted a thin brow, wary of his reaction. “I am enjoying her, yes.” “First one? I suppose before too much longer the other boys will be adding to the flock.” “Only the married ones, I hope,” Maureen said. “Do you have grandchildren, Mr. Davenport?” “Oh, let’s not be so formal—I’m George. Only step-grandchildren. I had no children of my own, in fact. Noah’s the closest thing to a son I’ve ever had, but I started out as his teacher. I’m a professor at Seattle Pacific University. I’ve known him quite a few years now. I’m here to be his best man on Friday night. I hope you’re all coming to the wedding.” “Wouldn’t miss it,” Luke said, grabbing Shelby’s hand. “And…Maureen?” George asked pointedly. “I’m not sure,” she said evasively. “Well, try to come,” he said. “These Virgin River people know how to have a good time. In fact, I have an idea. Once I have my best-man duties out of the way, I suggest we go to dinner. I’ll take you someplace nice in one of the coast towns, though it’ll be hard to improve on Preacher’s cooking. But we deserve some time away from all these young people, don’t you think?” “Excuse me, George?” she asked. “I assume you were married?” “Twice, as a matter of fact. Divorced a long time ago and, more recently, widowed. My wife died a few years ago. Maybe we should pick an evening and exchange phone numbers,” he suggested. “That’s very nice of you, but no. I don’t go out with men.” “Really?” he asked, surprised by her immediate refusal. “And why is that?” “I’m a widow,” she said. “A single woman.” “What a coincidence. And I’m a single man. I’m all for free thinking, but I wouldn’t ask you to dinner were I married. Are you recently widowed?” Out of the corner of his eye, George saw Luke snicker and look away. “Yes,” Maureen said. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I was under the impression it had been years. When did you lose your husband, Maureen?” She looked a bit shocked to be put on the spot like that. It was apparent she was trying to gather her wits. She put out her hand. “It was so nice to see you again, Mr….George. I’m glad you sat and visited awhile. Maybe I’ll see you at the wedding this weekend if I’m not needed for anything else. I should probably get on the road—I have to drive to Eureka.” She stood and George did, as well. “Eureka? You’re not staying here in Virgin River with your son?” “I’m staying with a friend just down the street from my granddaughter so I’m free to pick her up after preschool. We spend most afternoons together. Really, nice seeing you.” She turned to Luke. “I’m going to head back to Viv’s, Luke. Good night, Shelby. ’Night, Art. Thanks for dinner, it was great as usual.” “Wonderful seeing you, too,” George said. “Try to come to Noah’s wedding. I guarantee you’ll enjoy yourself.” Luke

first-ever professional check. For writing and performing a smash hit routine on a national coast-to-coast radio program, I received the magnificent sum of seven dollars and fifty cents, less seventy-five cents commission to the Thomas Lee Artists’ Bureau (Tommy was Don Lee’s son). The thrill of leaving on our trip around the world was dampened considerably when Harrison Holliway asked me to do the character on a weekly basis. I was heartbroken, but I had to tell him that we were leaving in five days. The continuation of the great career that had begun that Monday would have to wait until my return. •   •   • Just a few words about our trip, which lasted for six interesting and delightful months. The cost, for the three of us, was just under five thousand dollars. In 1934 the only way to cross an ocean was by ship, and the seas were dotted with literally hundreds of vessels carrying their passengers and cargo from one end of the world to the other. Many lines provided ships to service the large and profitable business of transporting people and things from place to place. The Dollar Line, the President Line, Matson, Canadian Pacific, British and Orient, and North German Lloyd were just a few of the many companies, each of which had as many as a ship a week visiting any given

An example is the campaign that Goodby, Berlin & Sil- verstein produced for the Northern California Honda Deal- ers Advertising Association (NCHDAA) in 1989. Rather than conform to the stereotypical dealer group advertising ("one of a kind, never to be repeated deals, this weekend 114 Figure 4.1 UNUM: "Bear and Salmon. Figure 4.2 UNUM: "Father and Child." 115 PEELING THE ONION only, the Honda-thon, fifteen hundred dollars cash back . . ." shouted over cheesy running footage), it was decided that the campaign should reflect the tone of the national cam- paign that it ran alongside. After all, we reasoned, the only people who know that one spot is from the national cam- paign and another from a regional dealer group are industry insiders. In the real world, all people see is the name "Honda" at the end. It's dumb having one of (Los Angeles agency) Rubin Postaer's intelligent, stylish commercials for Honda in one break, and then in the next, 30 seconds of car salesman hell, also apparently from Honda. All the good work done by the first ad would be undone by the second. What if, we asked ourselves, we could in some way regionalize the national message? In other words, take the tone and quality of Rubin Postaer's campaign and make it unique to Northern California? All of the regional dealer groups signed off as the Northern California Chevy/Ford/ Toyota Dealers, yet none of the ads would have seemed out of place in Florida or Wisconsin. In fact, that's probably where they got them from. In our research, we began not by asking people about cars, or car dealers, but about living in Northern California. What's it like? What does it mean? How would you describe it to an alien? (There are times when my British accent comes in very useful.) How does it compare to Southern California? "Oh, North and South are very different," a man in a focus group told me. "How so?" "Well, let me put it this way. There's a great rivalry between the (San Francisco) Giants and the (L.A.) Dodgers," he said. "But the Dodgers' fans don't know about it." Everyone laughed. People in the "Southland" were on a different planet. All they cared about was their suntans and flashy cars. Northern Californians, by comparison, were more modest, discerning, less likely to buy things to "make state- ments," interested in how products performed as opposed to 116 Take the Wider View what they looked like, more environmentally conscious, and concerned with the quality of life. We already knew from American Honda—supplied re- search what Northern Californians thought of Honda's cars. They were perceived as stylish without being ostentatious, reliable, understated, good value for the money . . . the paral- lels were remarkable. The creative brief asked the team to consider placing Honda in the unique context of Northern California, and to imagine that "Hondas are designed with Northern Californi- ans in mind." Dave O'Hare, who always swore that he hated advertising taglines and had no talent for writing them, came back immediately with a line to which he wanted to write a campaign: "Is Honda the Perfect Car for Northern Califor- nia, or What?" The launch commercial took advantage of the rivalry between Northern and Southern California. Set in the state senate chamber in Sacramento, it opens on the Speaker try- ing to hush the house. "Please, please," he admonishes, "the gentleman from Northern California has the floor." "What my Southern Californian colleague proposes is a moral outrage," the senator splutters, waving a sheaf of papers at the other side of the floor. "Widening the Pacific Coast Highway . . . to ten lanes!" A Southern Californian senator with bouffant hair and a pink tie shrugs his shoulders. "It's too windy," he whines (note: windy as in curves, not weather), and his fellow Southern Californians high-five and murmur their assent. The Northern Californians go nuts, and the Speaker strug- gles in vain to call everyone to order. The camera goes out- side as th

Their resumés read like a fat stack of adventure porn: While Kreek brought the muscle and hard-core athleticism, Hanssen had rowed the North Atlantic, canoed the Rio Grande and biked across Australia; Pukonen had cycled the U.S. Pacific coast and paddle-boarded across the Georgia Strait; and Fleming had worked as a wilderness EMT and dropped bombs for avalanche control. Their internal compasses are all calibrated a little differently, magnetically drawn toward the life-shaping adventures most people admire from the couch, and steadied by the confidence that they could handle anything.

The Castilian officials had legitimate grounds for concern about the possible actions of a Portuguese fifth column. As early as May 1641, Portuguese warships leagued with the English and began to press against the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and along the Pacific coast.4 In

Still, a part of me will never stop thinking of her as my sergeant. She’s the toughest, most competent, and most evenhanded soldier I’ve known, and she runs her squad as a strict meritocracy. If only a tenth of the military consisted of people like Sergeant Fallon, we would have kicked the SRA off of every inhabited celestial body between Earth and Zeta Reticuli fifty years ago already. As things stand, we’re weighed down by people like Major Unwerth, who coast through the system doing only the expected minimum. If a military is the reflection of the society it serves, it’s amazing that the Commonwealth is still at the top of the food chain on Terra. Even with all the dead wood in our ranks, we have been able to hold the line against the SRA and the dozens of regional powers in the Middle East and the Pacific Rim that are short on resources and long on grievances with their neighbors.

a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast - and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage

There was no mass public outcry to Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. No huge demonstration in Washington. Even the liberal newspapers barely objected. Columnist Walter Lippmann, the voice of progressive policies and individual liberties during the New Deal days, supported the internment, calling the Pacific Coast a “combat zone.”7

I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.

Friendship among thieves only goes so far. Look at the fact that dirty cops will try to frame other cops and even kill other cops. A crook is a crook, blue suit or jeans.

He could, but he loves us too much. He wants us to love him because he first loved us, not because he snaps his fingers. It may not make sense, but God made us this way, with the capacity for good and evil, because he loves us. Look, I know you hate being pushed into anything. God doesn’t push. We aren’t puppets. He’s waiting for you to ask, to choose him.

Frankly I was a little surprised at the unfair press coverage you and your partner received. Sometimes I wonder at people who live their safe lives on the sidelines, yet still want to make all the calls.

I have my faith, and that is a strong anchor. I will not stop praying. I believe all things happen for a reason. We may not see it right now, but Londy will be vindicated, and God will work all this out for the best.

people made their own heaven or hell on earth.