Wild Washington; or, The Living Pacific Northwest

In the Pacific Northwest, it is always better to be outside.  I've learned this.

Whenever you're feeling down, or lethargic, or uninspired, in the Northwest you but need to step outside a moment and breath in deep, and that richly oxygenated air will fill up your lungs, awaken your soul, and press thickly against your skin, as you feel renewed and rejuvenated immediately.  Even when it's raining--especially when it's raining--it is always better to be outside in the Northwest! 

That is not the case in the Midwest, where, between the sweltering, heat-stroking summers that soak your clothes in sweat, and the frigid, frost-bitten winters that cut through all your layers to chill you to the bone, you spend half the year racing to get back in doors--with the Catch-22 that the longer you stay inside, the more Cabin Fever you have.

For in the Midwest, these wide open spaces ironically make you feel more cloistered and isolated; the flat, ever-extending sameness of the landscape ironically limits your views, shrinks your world; the agoraphobia becomes claustrophobia at last.  Breath in deep, but the air does not rejuvenate, but stifles you.

Compare that to, say, Utah (where I lived prior) with its wild, un-tameable landscapes, and its mountaneous views that open up before you and open your mind with them!  In the deserts there, you witness the tenacity of life, its ability to not just survive but thrive in hostile environments.  There is something inspiring, even life-affirming, about encountering life in the deserts; it is a relief to visit Utah.

But then compare that to the Pacific Northwest, where, on top of the mountains and stunning vistas, you behold life not just surviving, not just thriving, but flourishing.  You see life growing on top of life, where even the rocks feel alive:

Leaves grow atop grass atop moss atop lichens:

 

Full-grown Pine Trees arise on cliff-sides:

 

You behold not desert fawna in survivalist mode, but towering trees hundreds of feet high and hundreds of years old, above you, over you, overpowering you:

 

 You behold what life looks like not in too little water, but too much; not in scarcity, but abundance:

(Multnomah Falls, Oregon)

Even the mountains of the Northwest, the Cascades, are not the dead stones of some countless-millennial tectonic movements, but active volcanoes--that's right, even our mountains live!  And the Ocean to our West, the largest in the world, is not static, not flat, not oppressive sameness, but ever flowing, ever waving, ever changing, mysterious, beyond comprehension, profound, teeming with life, alive, free!

Where there is so much abundance of life, your mind is liberated, for you begin to think less in terms of scarcity, but surplus.  A number of Socialist experiments were run in the Seattle-area and Olympic Peninsula in the late-19th century, and it's easy to see why: for when you no longer worry about chronic lack, when there is enough and to spare, it is easier to contemplate an economy without competition, without rivalry, without oppression.  Even the Conservatives of the region are of decidedly the more libertarian variety--for how can you not feel free amidst such abundance of life?

For this reason too, there is a warmth to Northwesterners--this is no mere politeness or suppressed anger, but a genuine friendliness, for when you no longer have a scarcity mindset wherine every human being around you is your potential rival for scant resources, it is far easier to relax around each other; and without extremes of hostile weather, it is easier to avoid extremes in behavior, too.  Here, we are only angry when we have been wronged--there is far less suppressed rage bubbling beneath the surface.

"But Seattle sports fans are insufferable!" I can hear you protest--and indeed, I rush to agree with you.  And you know why we can be such poor sports a-times?  Why our tempers can get the best of us?  Because we have so little real experience with being constantly angry!  Seriously, who can stay mad in paradise?  You rarely see Hawaiians angry either--something has to be genuinely enraging to fire our blood.

For Northwesterners are not in a constant state of suppressed anger, carefully controlling our passions for the sake of civility in an existentially-exasperating environment, no--we get so little practice controlling our passions that we let them all out when we are impassioned.  Our civility is not practiced; our passion is not an affectation; here we let life flow through us, for here we do not wrestle with the climate, but flourish with it.  Our souls move with the Oceans, our gazes rise with the trees--the Pacific Northwest is a living thing.