"If landscape is character, then northwesterners are most like water. We are shaped by the voluptuous shores and salt tides of Puget Sound, the deep currents of the Columbia, Salmon, and Snake rivers; finally, we are held back from falling off the proverbial edge of the world by a Pacific coastline whose nurturing rain forests and rocky peninsulas face the sea like guardians. So surrounded by water, we cannot impose our own rhythms on nature as easily as a bulldozer does on a southern California canyon. It is we who find ourselves subtly in sync with the rise and fall of tides, the ebb and flow of the natural world.
"This distinction that northwesterners are more changed by their environment than it is by us is crucial to understanding our character. Recently, a convention of New Yorkers visited Seattle. On the harbor cruise to Blake Island, birthplace of Chief Sealth (Seattle), for a salmon feast hosted by Native Americans to re-create the first salmon bake and potlatch ceremonies that defined tribal life here for thousands of years, the tourists commented that everything seemed in slow motion.
" 'We've had to shift gears,' said one New Yorker, somewhat anxiously. 'Everything's so laid back. Maybe it's all those negative ions in the atmosphere.'
"Another visitor said, 'How do you stand traffic jams on those floating bridges. Can't they just pave a part of Lake Washington?'
"Finally, a rather pensive, bespectacled literary agent remarked, 'Now I know why Seattle is singlehandedly keeping New York's book business alive. You have to go inside in all this gray and wet. I feel like I'm dreaming.'
" 'Must be why Seattle has espresso carts on every corner and some of the world's best coffee.' Someone laughed. 'It's to keep yourselves awake!'
"Northwesterners are a dreamy lot. We're in a fine tradition of dreamers. According to the Wasco Indians along the Columbia River, the tribe knew long before the white people came to settle at Alki Point, in 1851, that a change was coming. As told in Ella E. Clark's classic Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, one of the Wasco elders dreamed that 'white people with hair on their faces will come from the rising sun.' The strangers were prophesied to bring with them 'iron birds that could fly' and 'something — if you just point it at anything moving, that thing will fall down and die.' They also brought new tools such as axes, hatchets, and stoves. Along with this new technology, the white people brought a philosophy of individual ownership of the land.
"The Native Americans knew that the land could never be owned, just as it was impossible to section off the vast winding lengths of the emerald-clear body of Puget Sound, so like a watery dragon embracing the land. Even now, after over a century of non-Indian dominance, Puget Sound property rights ebb and flow according to the tides, not the set boundaries of so-called landowners. If even our ownership of northwest land is called into daily question by changing tides, how much more deeply are we affected by water?
"Physicists posit that by observing something, we subtly change it; does what we deeply gaze upon, then, also change us? Northwesterners not only reckon with water shaping our physical boundaries, we must also learn to live most of the year as if underwater. Rain is a northwest native. Our famous rainfall is perhaps all that shelters us from the massive population and industrial exploitations of nearby California. The rain is so omnipresent, especially between late October and even into June, that most northwesterners disdain umbrellas, the true sign of any tourist.
"Widely acclaimed Port Angeles poet Tess Gallagher tells it this way, 'It is a faithful rain. You feel it has some allegiance to the trees and the people. . . . It brings an ongoing thoughtfulness to their faces, a meditativeness that causes them to fall silent for long periods, to stand at their windows looking out at nothing in particular. The people walk in the rain as within some spirit they wish not to offend with resistance.'
"One must be rather fluid to live underwater; one must learn to flow with a pulse greater than one's own. A tolerance for misting gray days means an acceptance that life itself is not black and white, but in between. If the horizons outside one's window are not sharply defined but ease into a sky intimately merged with sea and soft landscape, then perhaps shadows, both personal and collective, are not so terrifying. After all, most of the year northwesterners can't even see their own literal shadows cast on the ground. We live inside the rain shadow. We tolerate edges and differences in people and places perhaps because our landscape blends and blurs as it embraces.
"There is a strong Asian influence here in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle's expansive harbor is a gateway to the Orient, and the strong, graceful pull of that more feminine culture is felt here. In fact, the classic Tao Te Ching, by the ancient Chinese master Lao-tzu, could well have described the Puget Sound landscape and character:
" 'Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.'
"Our northwest character is fluid and flexible. . . .
If water is our northwest character and rainy reverie our temperament, it follows that those of us who stay long in the Pacific Northwest must develop an inner life to sustain us through the flow of so many changing gray days. This means that ambition is not only an outward thrust toward manipulating our environment; ambition may also be an inner journey, not to change but to understand the often unexplored territory within, what Rilke calls 'the dark light.' Are we a more mystical region and people? Let's just say the climate is there and so is the Water way."
