Pacific Northwest Quotes

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.

Those born under Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain.

I miss it if I’m not in it for any length of time; I don’t feel comfortable. I want trees and I want frequent rain.

Sometimes the wind along the Pacific shore blows so hard it steals your breath before you can inhale it.

I balked. Another vampire? I guess it made sense; the states of the Pacific Northwest were known for their lenient monster laws.

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.

We need a new ethic of place, one that has room for salmon and skyscrapers, suburbs and wilderness, Mount Rainier and the Space Needle, one grounded in history.

But in late March in the Pacific Northwest, a cease-fire on precipitation only meant the clouds were taking a coffee break.

To our indigenous ancestors, and to the many aboriginal peoples who still hold fast to their oral traditions, language is less a human possession than it is a property of the animate earth itself, an expressive, telluric power in which we, along with the coyotes and the crickets, all participate. Each creature enacts this expressive magic in its own manner, the honeybee with its waggle dance no less than a bellicose, harrumphing sea lion. Nor is this power restricted solely to animals. The whispered hush of the uncut grasses at dawn, the plaintive moan of trunks rubbing against one another in the deep woods, or the laughter of birch leaves as the wind gusts through their branches all bear a thicket of many-layered meanings for those who listen carefully. In the Pacific Northwest I met a man who had schooled himself in the speech of needled evergreens; on a breezy day you could drive him, blindfolded, to any patch of coastal forest and place him, still blind, beneath a particular tree -- after a few moments he would tell you, by listening, just what species of pine or spruce or fir stood above him (whether he stood beneath a Douglas fir or a grand fir, a Sitka spruce or a western red cedar). His ears were attuned, he said, to the different dialects of the trees.

Here in the corner attic of America, two hours’ drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.

The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.

Reader, do you remember that ridiculous movie Volcano, the one with Tommy Lee Jones? Do you remember how they stopped eruption in the middle of downtown Los Angeles? They diverted it with cement roadblocks and pointed fire hoses at it, and rerouted the lava to the ocean, and everything was fine? Sweet reader, that is not how lava works. Anyone can tell you that. Here is the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant, but it won’t. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can. My heart is closer to Dante’s Peak of Dante’s Peak. My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.

The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to. Rivers without salmon have lost the life source of the area.

My anger dissolves grandmas in acid lakes and razes quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier.

Shadow Star lowered his leg. “Did you just … kiss my head?” Nick forgot how to human. To his horror, he fell back on old habits with the sound he made: that of an amorous elk in the Pacific Northwest, bleating and terrible.

Enjoyment is always greatest when you have enough contrast to measure it by.

And I'm pretty sure that everyone in the Pacific Northwest heard Ryan Dean West shout, "YOUSTEPPEDONMYFUCKINGNUTSYOUSONOFABITCH!

Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for "making poetry" is the same as the verb "to breathe.

Though it was mid-July, the morning was brisk, the sky a gray cotton of clouds, and Puget Sound a steely, cold blue. Most of Seattle grumbled, worn with winterish weather, impatient for the elusive summer sun. With umbrellas tucked away in the trunks of cars, sunglasses lost and separated from their original purchasers, the Pacific Northwest was a bastion of misty air and pale, complaining residents.

Fuck me,” he said, running his hand through his hair in frustration. “Gladly, bend over,” she shot back.

Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth.

the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees—more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.

Only in the campfire-stoked stories of Boy Scouts, bedtime tales baby-sitters employ to frighten bratty charges, or in the sweet delight of grandpas who never grew up, would the stories live on.

Maybe all American families play the togetherness game—the one where you talk about sports and dine on casseroles (in the Pacific Northwest, it’s gluten-free and organic), fight about politics and act like you have meaningful relationships when you’re actually dying of loneliness.

Rain in the Northwest is not the pounding, flashing performance enjoyed by the eastern part of the nation. Nor is it the festive annual soaking I'd been used to in Southern California. Rather, it's a seven-month drizzle that darkens the sky, mildews the bath towels, and propels those already prone to depression into the dim comforts of antihistamines and a flask.

The Bella Coola and the Kwakiutl societies of the Pacific Northwest provide a striking example of how establishing connections between kin groups sometimes took precedence over sexual or reproductive issues in determining marriage. If two families wished to trade with each other, but no suitable matches were available, a marriage contract might be drawn up between one individual and another’s foot or even with a dog belonging to the family of the desired in-laws!

The Columbia River Bar has swallowed more ships, about 2,100 at last count, than any other location on the Pacific north of Mexico.

In planting trees, aim to perpetuate an ecosystem, not a plantation.

Spring is when the weather in the Pacific Northwest gets confused, bouncing between hail and sun and rain all in the same day. Sometimes all in the same hour.

Monday nights always brought in the worst kind of crazy. Tonight that crazy came in the form of Paul Cross, town hermit. One of them, anyway. This was the Pacific Northwest.

Native Americans cured Cartier's men of scurvy near Montreal in 1535. They repaired Francis Drake's Golden Hind in California so he could complete his round-the-world voyage in 1579. Lewis and Clark's expedition to the Pacific Northwest was made possible by tribe after tribe of American Indians, with help from two Shoshone guides, Sacagawea and Toby, who served as interpreters. When Admiral Peary discovered the North Pole, the first person there was probably neither the European American Peary nor the African American Matthew Henson, his assistant, but their four Inuit guides, men and women on whom the entire expedition relied. Our histories fail to mention such assistance. They portray proud Western conquerors bestriding the world like the Colossus at Rhodes. So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say "discover," they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.

If we treat our forests right, we can at least ameliorate the declines in forest extent and diversity and the consequent impoverishment of the aesthetic, economic, climatic, and spiritual benefits we count on from them.

His words made Mei Lien stumble. How could this be happening? How could these men barge in here and force them to sail “home” to a country where Mei Lien had never been? A country her father had bid farewell to with no intention of returning?

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,

no river in North America except the Mississippi is more powerful than the Columbia; it carries a quarter-million cubic feet of water per second to the ocean, ten times the flow of the Colorado, twice the discharge of the Nile into the Mediterranean.

Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for "making poetry" is the same as the verb "to breathe." Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem.

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky. Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe. The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop. Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite. Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips. The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm. But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

Spring is when the weather in the Pacific Northwest gets confused, bouncing between hail and sun and rain all in the same day. Sometimes all in the same hour. There’s something playful about it, as if the weather is enjoying every facet of its personality, appreciating all the ways in which it covers the earth.

Chief Sealth, appalled at how his emerald garden had been trashed so quickly, wrote a letter in 1854 to President Franklin Pierce. “The whites, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than the other tribes,” he wrote with the help of a translator. “Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in waste.

I've been thinking about what it means to bear witness. The past ten years I've been bearing witness to death, bearing witness to women I love, and bearing witness to the [nuclear] testing going on in the Nevada desert. I've been bearing witness to bombing runs on the edge of the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, bearing witness to the burning of yew trees and their healing secrets in slash piles in the Pacific Northwest and thinking this is not so unlike the burning of witches, who also held knowledge of heading within their bones. I've been bearing witness to traplines of coyotes being poisoned by the Animal Damage Control. And I've been bearing witness to beauty, beauty that strikes a chord so deep you can't stop the tears from flowing. At places as astonishing as Mono Lake, where I've stood knee-deep in salt-water to watch the fresh water of Lee Vining Creek flow over the top like water on vinegar....It's the space of angels. I've been bearing witness to dancing grouse on their leks up at Malheur in Oregon. Bearing witness to both the beauty and pain of our world is a task that I want to be part of. As a writer, this is my work. By bearing witness, the story that is told can provide a healing ground. Through the art of language, the art of story, alchemy can occur. And if we choose to turn our backs, we've walked away from what it means to be human.

As the campfire burned to an ashy bowl of red-hot embers, the boys would ramble on, piling up horror upon horror, like cordwood stacked under a blood-red-barked madrona tree.

Two of the biggest volcanoes in the Northwest, Hood and Rainier, are named for wartime enemies of America.

Seattle gets less rain than New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami.

one cubic foot of tidepool can support more than four thousand living things.

Americans seem to want the product, at the cheapest possible price, while objecting loudly to its harvest.

Sealth died in 1866, one year after the city which bore his name passed an ordinance to ban Indians from town.

As to Baker, that name should be forgotten,” Winthrop wrote in The Canoe and the Saddle. “Mountains should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds.…

We’re

shout takes several seconds to land, and then bounces away.

Beckey's fame spread through word of mouth. There were stories about his wolf howl, a blood-chilling sound, which Beckey would use to scare tourists away from his favorite campsites.

Every bit of water falling on all of France, channeled into one drainpipe—that’s similar to what goes into the Columbia, or at least a shallow part of it. The river’s source is a glacial drip 2,619 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Canadian Purcells; by its midway point in a high desert, the Columbia has a depth several hundred feet below the ocean plane.

All those bodies floating in the water next to the ship. I couldn’t get them out of my mind so I looked again at newspapers from that time. Three Chinese bodies were found washed ashore within

The moisture is predatory in this part of the world, and no element, be it stone or wood or tin or steel, lasts very long without losing some part of its composition to the nag of precipitation.

Mei Lien nodded. “Yes, Bàba. Can you carry our things? I’ll get Năinai.” Grandmother needed to be carried wherever she went because her deformed feet prevented her from putting much weight on them. Mei

The school was located on its own private island in the Pacific Northwest not far from the small community of Gold River, British Columbia, Canada. Through natural means it could only be reached by boat or float plane.  However, many students reached the school by means that were far from natural. There were portals in various parts of the world that brought students to Fairhaven the moment one stepped through them.

A new generation of satellites carries highly sensitive radars that can measure the size of waves on the water surface. Making use of the relationship between wind speed and the amplitude of small surface waves, a wind-speed map...was created.

Your jam puts store-bought to shame. As I ate it on a fresh croissant from the French bakery at the Farmers Market down the street from my house, I savored the image you painted with your words. I would love to spend a summer morning in the Pacific Northwest sunshine picking wild blackberries. I also crave your backyard access to crisp apples, plums, and pears, although I am not sure I would trade them for the grapefruit and oranges I pluck from my own trees for breakfast whenever I like.

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.

It was very damp and misty–which some people from outside the Pacific Northwest consider to be rain, but I do not. This is typical weather for the Pacific Northwest and Olympia. It is often wet in Olympia, but we have an average of only 49.95 inches a year of actual precipitation. That’s less than in Denver. In Olympia, the air is damp, and water collects and drips from everywhere. We do not get big downpours, but we get damp and spongy. I don’t care. It helps the trees grow, and I climb the trees.

In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl’s or the logger’s? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America.

There are five species of Pacific salmon in North America: the chum, the coho, the sockeye, the pink, and the Chinook. Each has its own diminutive: the chum is the dog, or the keta, the coho the silver, the sockeye the red, the pink the humpy, and the Chinook is the king. The original Chinook are people of the Pacific Northwest, and their language formed the core of Chinook Jargon, a pidgin trading language that stretched from Alaska to the Columbia River, along what now forms the border of Washington and Oregon, and incorporated the words of many tribes, as well as French and English. Any Canadian will still say Chinook for king, the best and biggest of the fish that the Chinook people traded.

To avoid corrosion of the steel structure, the designers have implemented a clever air-conditioning system that circles 45,000m³ of warm air per-hour within the vicinity of the shelter’s cladding. “There are steel structures that have lasted 100 years, such as the Eiffel Tower, but they last because they’re continually repainted,” said Dr Eric Schmieman, a senior technical advisor from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the US, to Wired magazine in 2013. “We’re not able to do that once we slide this into place - the radiation levels are so high we can’t send people in. So what are we going to do? We are going to condition the air that goes into that space. We’re going to keep the relative humidity in there at less than 40 percent.”278

More often, I’d meet people like Brett Favre. Not literally like Brett Favre, in the sense that they were forty-year-old football players, but that they were people who loved Wisconsin but couldn’t find a way to make it work there, took off for NewYork, crashed and burned, and then found a home for themselves here in the City of Lakes. Minneapolis is where the drama queens and burnouts and weirdos and misfits of the rural and suburban Upper Midwest wind up. It’s a city full of people who, though they’d never say it, secretly suspect they don’t belong here, that they’re not Minneapolis enough, because they didn’t go to a city high school, or because they didn’t hang out at First Avenue when they were teenagers, or because they came from the suburbs, or from outstate.They came from the Iron Range or Fargo–Moorhead or Bloomington or White Bear Lake or Collegeville, or from Chicago or California or the Pacific Northwest or Mexico or Somalia. Wherever they came from, Minneapolis is their home now, and it belongs to them. It belongs to us.

Finally, the ambassadors concluded their task of keeping Europe not only out of American affairs but, indeed, out of the entire Western Hemisphere. In 1846 President Polk observed: “We must have California.” Since that Pacific littoral was part of Mexico, Polk provoked Mexico into a war with the United States. California, Arizona, and Utah were ceded two years later. More peacefully, the tidy-minded Polk acquired the Pacific Northwest by treaties with England. With the acquisition of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, the Union now filled the continent from sea to shining sea. In 1867 the Russians sold us their icebox, Alaska, while Hawaii was annexed in 1898, along with Puerto Rico and the reluctant Philippines. While this filling in of vast spaces with neatly ruled new states, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams produced for President James Monroe a doctrine declaring that the two American continents were off limits to Europe, as Europe would be to us. In 1917, by entering World War I, we in effect voided the Monroe Doctrine. But that was to gain yet another world, one that is currently—optimistically—called “global.” Benjamin

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can’t find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world.

Many real-world Northwestern endonyms have European origins, such as “Portland,” “Victoria,” “Bellingham,” and “Richland.” To address this phenomenon while also contributing a sense of the fantastic, I chose to utilize a forgotten nineteenth century European artificial language as a source. Volapük is clumsy and awkward, but shares a relationship with English vocabulary (upon which it is based) that I was able to exploit. In my fictional universe, that relationship is swapped, and English (or rather, “Vendelabodish”) words derive from Volapük (“Valütapük”). This turns Volapük into an ancient Latin-like speech, offering texture to a fictional history of the colonizers of my fictional planets. Does one have to understand ancient Rome and medieval Europe and America’s Thirteen Colonies to understand the modern Pacific Northwest? Nah. But exploring the character and motivations of a migrating, imperial culture certainly sets the stage for explaining a modernist backlash against the atrocities that inevitably come with colonization.             The vocabulary of Volapük has also given flavor that is appropriate, I feel, to the quasi-North American setting. While high fantasy worlds seem to be built with pillars of European fairy tales, the universe of Geoduck Street is intentionally built with logs of North American tall tales. Tolkien could wax poetic about the aesthetic beauty of his Elvish words all he wanted, since aesthetic beauty fits the mold of fairies and shimmering palaces, but Geoduck Street needed a “whopper-spinning” approach to artificial language that would make a flapjack-eating Paul Bunyan proud. A prominent case in point: in this fictional universe, the word “yagalöp” forms the etymological root of “jackalope.” “Yag,” in the original nineteenth century iteration of Volapük, means “hunting,” while “löp” means “summit.” Combining them together makes them “the summit of hunting.” How could a jackalope not be a point of pride among hunting trophies?

Each scenario is about fifteen million years into the future, and each assumes that the Pacific Plate will continue to move northwest at about 2.0 inches per year relative to the interior of North America. In scenario 1, the San Andreas fault is the sole locus of motion. Baja California and coastal California shear away from the rest of the continent to form a long, skinny island. A short ferry ride across the San Andreas Strait connects LA to San Francisco. In scenario 2, all of California west of the Sierra Nevada, together with Baja California, shears away to the northwest. The Gulf of California becomes the Reno Sea, which divides California from Nevada. The scene is reminiscent of how the Arabian Peninsula split from Africa to open the Red Sea some 5 million years ago. In scenario 3, central Nevada splits open through the middle of the Basin and Range province. The widening Gulf of Nevada divides the continent form a large island composed of Washington, Oregon, California, Baja California, and western Nevada. The scene is akin to Madagascar’s origin when it split form eastern Africa to open the Mozambique Channel.

Big anniversary coming up for you next year.” I nodded. Next year would make me a thirty-year man. Sixty per cent of my life spent in Shawshank State Prison. “Think you’ll ever get out?” “Sure. When I have a long white beard and just about three marbles left rolling around upstairs.” He smiled a little and then turned his face up into the sun again, his eyes closed. “Feels good.” “I think it always does when you know the damn winter’s almost right on top of you.” He nodded, and we were silent for awhile. “When I get out of here,” Andy said finally, “I’m going where it’s warm all the time.” He spoke with such calm assurance you would have thought he had only a month or so left to serve. “You know where I’m goin, Red?” “Nope.” “Zihuatanejo,” he said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. “Down in Mexico. It’s a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway Thirty-seven. It’s a hundred miles northwest of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?” I told him I didn’t. “They say it has no memory. And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.

My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction. A good night kiss. Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other - and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life and unpredictable adventure rather that a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composed music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things. Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest's customary climate is perfect for a writer. It's cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called "the bottom below the bottom," those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria's Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs. Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they're missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as they non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they're too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete's foot), the roof leaks, they can't stop coughing, and they feel as if they're slowly being digested by an oyster. Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. "Paradise!" you'll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.

Then, just as we were to leave on a whirlwind honeymoon in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, a call came from Australia. Steve’s friend John Stainton had word that a big croc had been frequenting areas too close to civilization, and someone had been taking potshots at him. “It’s a big one, Stevo, maybe fourteen or fifteen feet,” John said over the phone. “I hate to catch you right at this moment, but they’re going to kill him unless he gets relocated.” John was one of Australia’s award-winning documentary filmmakers. He and Steve had met in the late 1980s, when Steve would help John shoot commercials that required a zoo animal like a lizard or a turtle. But their friendship did not really take off until 1990, when an Australian beer company hired John to film a tricky shot involving a crocodile. He called Steve. “They want a bloke to toss a coldie to another bloke, but a croc comes out of the water and snatches at it. The guy grabs the beer right in front of the croc’s jaws. You think that’s doable?” “Sure, mate, no problem at all,” Steve said with his usual confidence. “Only one thing, it has to be my hand in front of the croc.” John agreed. He journeyed up to the zoo to film the commercial. It was the first time he had seen Steve on his own turf, and he was impressed. He was even more impressed when the croc shoot went off flawlessly. Monty, the saltwater crocodile, lay partially submerged in his pool. An actor fetched a coldie from the esky and tossed it toward Steve. As Steve’s hand went above Monty’s head, the crocodile lunged upward in a food response. On film it looked like the croc was about to snatch the can--which Steve caught right in front of his jaws. John was extremely impressed. As he left the zoo after completing the commercial shoot, Steve gave him a collection of VHS tapes. Steve had shot the videotapes himself. The raw footage came from Steve simply propping his camera in a tree, or jamming it into the mud, and filming himself single-handedly catching crocs. John watched the tapes when he got home to Brisbane. He told me later that what he saw was unbelievable. “It was three hours of captivating film and I watched it straight through, twice,” John recalled to me. “It was Steve. The camera loved him.” He rang up his contacts in television and explained that he had a hot property. The programmers couldn’t use Steve’s original VHS footage, but one of them had a better idea. He gave John the green light to shoot his own documentary of Steve. That led to John Stainton’s call to Oregon on the eve of our honeymoon. “I know it’s not the best timing, mate,” John said, “but we could take a crew and film a documentary of you rescuing this crocodile.” Steve turned to me. Honeymoon or crocodile? For him, it wasn’t much of a quandary. But what about me?” “Let’s go,” I replied.

In scale and audacity, the dam was astonishing; engineers were going to anchor a mile-long wall of concrete in bedrock at the bottom of a steep canyon in the Columbia. They would excavate 45 million cubic yards of dirt and rock, and pour 24 million tons of concrete. Among the few dams in the Northwest not built by the Corps of Engineers, the Grand Coulee was the work of the Bureau of Reclamation. When completed, it was a mile across at the top, forty-six stories high, and heralded as the biggest thing ever built by man. The dam backed up the river for 151 miles, creating a lake with 600 miles of shoreline. At the dam’s dedication in 1941, Roosevelt said Grand Coulee would open the world to people who had been beat up by the elements, abused by the rich and plagued by poor luck. But a few months after it opened, Grand Coulee became the instrument of war. Suddenly, the country needed to build sixty thousand planes a year, made of aluminum, smelted by power from Columbia River water, and it needed to build ships—big ones—from the same power source. Near the end of the war, America needed to build an atomic bomb, whose plutonium was manufactured on the banks of the Columbia. Power from the Grand Coulee was used to break uranium into radioactive subelements to produce that plutonium. By war’s end, only a handful of farms were drawing water from the Columbia’s greatest dam. True, toasters in desert homes were warming bread with Grand Coulee juice, and Washington had the cheapest electrical rates of any state in the country, but most of that power for the people was being used by Reynolds Aluminum in Longview and Alcoa in Vancouver and Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane and Tacoma.

If you’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for long you’ve probably figured out that you reside in one of the greatest places on Earth.

The UW keeps a drum recorder in the basement so television crews have something to film after a quake.)

Stories which have failed either to become popular folk lore or to be embalmed in old newspaper files are in great danger of oblivion. If they are saved, often it is by the merest chance. And that chance may well depend upon one individual with a treasure-story bent and a retentive memory.

Sunlight is great in a convertible, but it is not convertible to lemonade or love, and it’s not containable and easily shipped. It’s too bad, because when I moved from the Pacific Northwest, I left my sunny disposition there and accidentally grabbed an overcast attitude.

Henry sailed from England in July of 1776. The stated objectives of Cook’s third expedition were twofold. The first was to sail to Tahiti, to return Sir Joseph Banks’s pet—the man named Omai—to his homeland. Omai had grown tired of court life and now longed to return home. He had become sulky and fat and difficult, and Banks had grown tired of his pet. The second task was to then sail north, all the way up the Pacific coast of the Americas, in search of a Northwest Passage.

A popular quip in geographically divided Idaho is that the state has three capitals: Spokane for the northern half,

But pinning a size on an earthquake remains such a convoluted process that seismologists break out in a sweat trying to explain it to a layperson.

Claire and Dorothea are ill because they can afford to be ill.

I mouth “thank you” softly to the lake and its inhabitants for shaking me out of the doldrums of fatigue then turn up the Pacific Northwest Trail for one last climb to the connector trail that takes me back to the forest trails that lead to the bike path. It wasn’t my body, it was my mind that was tired. The pause at the lake took away the day’s fixation on being tired by reminding me that we are to see while out here—not just pass through.

I can see no greater sign of God’s glory than the trees around us in the Pacific Northwest. All you have to do is look outside to see God—there are trees everywhere.

I cannot see in the dark like the Northern flying squirrel—Glaucomys sabrinus—who lives in the trees of the Pacific Northwest and is strictly nocturnal. So I take a flashlight.

Outside the Pacific Northwest, Florida is among the most bustling areas for bigfoot, according to BFRO reports, getting as much activity as Ohio and Texas. In Florida, though, the creatures are called Skunk Apes, smaller, leaner, and far-stinkier cousins that have a strong, foul odor reminiscent of a dead skunk mixed with cow manure and rotten eggs.

I don’t want to go,” she whispered. “Then don’t,” he said between kisses.

She has no idea who we are and I need to figure out how to tell her before we can take the next step.” “How about, hey baby, I’m a bear, rawr,” Wyatt offered, making claws with his fingers. “Or how about, hey honey, sometimes I get hairy and like to rub my big butt on trees to scratch an itch?” Conner offered bending over laughing at his hilarity. “Either both of you find something to do or I’m telling mom your interfering in

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

Canadian missionaries promoted legislation in 1884 that made giving or assisting in a potlatch dance a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison. That law remained on the books until 1951.

Because whites only poorly understood that decentralized arrangement, they eventually forced the notion of a single tribal chief upon the Indians. Prior to Euro-American intrusion, the Nez Perces had a permanent governing council, a political organization that could speak for all of them, but they had no head chief empowered to sign away their lands in treaties.

Over a three-year period the Chinook population declined to one-tenth its former size, and riverbanks were strewn with the unburied dead. “The depopulation here has been truly fearful,” observed the physician John Kirk Townsend in his eyewitness account of the lower Columbia River in 1834. “A

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.

That Euro-Americans ultimately prevailed over Indians was less a matter of warfare than of disease. It was neither the guns of the whites nor their whiskey that really decimated the Indian population, but their germs. Violent

It was believed that salmon represented a race of supernatural beings who dwelled in a great house beneath the sea. When a salmon died, its spirit returned to its place of origin, and thus it behooved humans not to offend the salmon people by the careless disposal of their bones. If the bones were properly returned to the water, the being resumed a humanlike form without discomfort and could repeat the trip next season. All

Few regions of the present United States were more inhospitable to human habitation than the lands of the Great Basin, the high desert country of southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, Nevada, and Utah. Indians of the Great Basin spent much of the year foraging for food in small and dispersed groups, although several families might come together for a communal rabbit drive or to dig for camas bulbs. It was common for Shoshonis to name their subgroups after the food most abundant in their customary dwelling grounds: thus among the Shoshonis were groups whose names translated as “seed eaters,” or “fish eaters,” or “mountain-sheep eaters.

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 crisis at Nootka thus sparked the first cabinet-level foreign policy debate in the United States under the new Constitution of 1787.

the Pacific Northwest has a climate and a geography that makes human beings feel very welcome on the planet.

She decided to whip up a little honey butter too, to go with the pancakes and berry compote. She noticed there were huge gallon jars of honey stashed not only in the fridge, but the kitchen as well. She discovered them when she was taking inventory. Someone must really like honey.

Many of the agents Douglas met during his travels had much more soul than a beaver skin, and developed lifelong friendships with the collector. One of those was Archibald McDonald, whom Douglas had asked to help replace his chewed-up grouse skins. Archie’s mixed-blood son Ranald, who knew Douglas between the ages of one and ten, later recalled him as a close companion of his youth. John

Northwesterners coined the term “sun break,” a notion completely lost on most of the country.