By the time our own check comes, I have constructed an entire story around the couple. Several stories, actually. She’s his mother and he’s depressed, which I call the Canadian version. She’s his high school English teacher, trying to seduce him or, having already seduced him, trying to hang on to him (the British version). Or she’s his father’s new wife, wanting to win him over (the wine) and yet smart enough to know not to say anything against his mother (“She’d never do anything to hurt you”). This sparse scenario seems quintessentially American to me, a little mini-drama about the breakdown of the nuclear family. It reminds me of Gary Snyder’s remark, in his essay “White Indians,” that “the modern American family is the smallest and most barren family that has ever existed.” I’d like to see how it turns out, but as with the tossing of the child into the air at the border, the finale remains a mystery as we climb the stairs from the cafe and make our way back to the street.
MEGALOPOLIS. That’s what demographers call this part of the Pacific Northwest. After we leave Fairhaven, signs along the I-5 point to a succession of towns—Mt. Vernon, Arlington, Marysville—but the urban sprawl is more or less continuous. A conurbation. A megacity.
Most of the population of the Pacific Northwest is concentrated here, clustered like crystals in a supersaturated solution on this thread of an interstate that dangles south from Vancouver through Seattle to Portland. Nine million Americans, almost a third as many people as live in the entire country of Canada, occupy the thin strip of land between the coastal mountains and the sea, as if those who surged west across the United States during the last century were suddenly stopped in their tracks by the ocean, piling up on one another, nowhere else to go.
A trip never really begins until you put some distance between yourself and home, so we are speeding through the landscape at sixty miles an hour, which is the speed we usually drive at home, though it’s legal here. I take note of these subtle differences, trying to feel like an explorer in a strange land.
“Do you suppose there is some international agreement that regulates the colour of highway signs?” I muse, as we whip past blue Adopt-a-Highway signs, green exit signs, exactly what we would see at home.
“Canadians probably order their signs from American companies,” Wayne says. “Just like our computers, which keep telling us we’re spelling ‘colour’ wrong.” He’s still tense from the border crossing, though it was the driver ahead of us who was handed the orange card and directed to the covered bays, where cars and trucks and RVs had their doors flung wide, like prisoners being strip-searched, and men with knee pads crouched, strafing the undercarriages with beams of light.
“Adrenalin can take up to seventy-two hours to dissipate,” I say, patting his knee.
We’re crossing a long bridge over yet another river. The body of a dead deer is slung over the railing. Wayne looks at it bleakly and mutters, “Compared to him, I’m fine.”
On the political map of the United States, this part of the country is painted Democrat blue, which I always find confusing, since we Canadians paint our Liberal ridings red. Abortion, gay marriage, women’s rights: all the items on the left-wing agenda have been taken up with enthusiasm here in the Pacific Northwest, even the right to die by your own hand. It’s always had a reputation as the home of radicals. At the turn of the last century, this part of the world was a stronghold of the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World. Anarchists set up communes all along this coast. One of the longest-lasting was Home, started by three men who, in the summer of 1895, rowed into Puget Sound in a boat they’d built themselves and bought some land around an isolated bay, and within a few years dozens of anarchists, communists, food faddists, and freethinkers were living there.
These humid, forested slopes tucked up into the far corner of the country seem to attract people of an independent mind, or maybe people are transformed once they get here. It’s true that humans have an impact on a landscape, but it works the other way, too. We are like Darwin’s finches, whose beaks change shape almost annually depending on the food supply: there’s no reason to expect humans to be any less susceptible to the place in which they find themselves.
I think of something Byron wrote in Don Juan: “As the soil is, so the heart of man.” It’s a Romantic notion, I suppose, that landscape can influence character, but observation makes me think it’s true. When driving through Europe one autumn, I noticed how differently farmers in each country cured their hay: in bales, in stooks or stacks like enormous hives, layered on wooden ricks. John Ruskin tried to prove the principle in The Poetry of Architecture, using variations in cottage design to illustrate the effect of landscape, which he called a “gigantic instrument of soul culture.”
The people who settled this landscape sit between a metaphorical rock and a hard place—between the turbulent ocean and the Cascades, which are part of the volcanic Pacific Rim of Fire. Easterners who ended up here from their cozy New England villages and sprawling Great Plains farms had a choice: tough it out, or leave. It’s a form of natural selection. The stubborn and the single-minded stayed, reproduced, and proliferated.
Wayne and I are birdwatchers, observers of nature. We’re inclined to think of humans not as civilized beings but as just another species. When we travel, we look at all the populations—feathered, furred, clothed—with a curious eye.
So, thinking about the kind of people who ended up here, I expect them to be self-reliant and freethinking, something Americans claim as a national birthright. Historically, Americans seem always to be running from home, whether from England or New England, resolutely heading into the setting sun, away from family and tradition, looking for places to survive on their own. But once they arrived here in the Northwest, they became social-minded. Not only did they elect the first woman mayor and erect the first Hispanic college, but this is the home of consumers’ co-ops, mutual aid societies, and publicly owned utilities. Internet cafes, emblems of both real and virtual connectivity, were spawned here. They may have the lowest rate of church attendance and the highest percentage of atheism in the country, but social conscience runs high: three of the ten greenest communities in the United States are part of this I-5 megacity. And the two biggest online magazines devoted to environmental sustainability are produced out of Seattle. Maybe that’s because they still have an environment to save—over half of the land mass of Washington, the Evergreen State, is still covered with forest.
At least, that’s the way it looks on the map. From where I sit, though, gridlocked in traffic in the endless urban sprawl that is Seattle, this could just as easily be Mississauga or Washington, D.C. Fifty years ago, when John Steinbeck approached Seattle after decades living away from the Pacific, which he called his home ocean, he wrote that he “remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage—a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land.”
The highway is twelve lanes wide now, and we can hardly see the earth for houses. We certainly can’t see the matchless harborage: skyscrapers block the view. Wayne counts twelve building cranes rising above the downtown high-rises. The rain pours down. The traffic is going nowhere. Clouds settle like tired Sasquatches onto office tower roofs.
“Let’s just drive on,” Wayne says. He would rather be moving. Something about sitting behind the wheel of a car sucks the curiosity out of him. He’s not venturing through new territory, he’s locked in a video game, earning points for every car he passes. Sitting still is not sitting well with him.
“How