Travelers, note: There seldom is.įor Peterson, Washington is a "shamanistic state," where the visible world and the invisible world are very much connected. "I'm convinced that at some point those of us who stay in the Northwest do become one with our inward, watery winters," and thus, she explains, feel exposed and quite disoriented if there is too much sunshine. This extolling of the elements is shared by newcomer Brenda Peterson ("Living by Water: Essays on Life, Land and Spirit," Alaska Northwest Books, 1991), who finds a mystical pull in the weather. This is a man who declares there is "no better music than a winter storm on the Northwest coast." home for dialogue in many languages." Read Egan at your risk. Egan is an unabashed booster: "I live at the dawn of the Century of the Pacific," he writes, and he envisions Seattle as the "Geneva of the Pacific. He uses the literary device of comparing the country today with descriptions of it written 150 years ago by Theodore Winthrop, a traveler from the East, as Egan follows Winthrop's route through Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. Egan is the Seattle bureau chief for the New York Times and his prose is fact-filled and sprightly. Timothy Egan explains those forces in "The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest" (Vintage Books, 1991). Tisdale captures some of those exhilarating experiences that I too had known growing up in the Northwest and will always associate with it: diving into glacier-cold water with a thrilling sense of bravery anxiously grasping wet foliage to cross log bridges over deep streams lying beneath towering trees on a mountainside as dark clouds roll in from the ocean, making one acutely aware of being "a very small thing in a very large place, at the mercy of great forces." I was melting like Lewis and Clark's muddy fort." Her hauntingly beautiful book, "Stepping Westward: The Long Search for Home in the Pacific Northwest" (HarperPerennial, 1992), mixes memoir, history and travel: "When I was last in Astoria, late in the spring, I was caught in a rain so traditional, so relentless and drenching and ceaseless, I felt borne back to history. Sallie Tisdale, a novelist and essayist whose work appears in The New Yorker, Harper's and Esquire, lives in Portland. Both are rooted to this far corner of the United States in which their families settled. Two native-born writers offer excellent introductions.
Jan Morris, the doyenne of travel writers, confessed that her book about the Cascade Mountains (a volcanic range that marks the eastern edge of the Pacific Northwest from British Columbia to Northern California) died a stillborn death because of her "unquenchable antipathy to the Douglas fir." Therefore, it behooves travelers to dip into some of the literature about the area: Most know that the Northwest is not Provence, but they may not be aware of how much the trees and mountains and rain define its ambiance.
Research sent Raban to Seattle then he took his own advice and settled there.īut not everyone is so attracted. "If I were seeking a fresh start in America, I'd go to Seattle," declared English travel writer Jonathan Raban in "Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America" (HarperCollins, 1991). The green, clean and gorgeous Pacific Northwest is the place of the moment.
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