Archives: Pacific Northwest

Pacific Northwest Coastal Thoughts

Good — even great — writers develop and thrive in every climate and every locale. I’m not going to pretend they don’t. But, as I’m writing this in my hotel room on the beach in the Pacific Northwest Coast, I’m going to ignore all that pesky reality and posit reasons why the PNC matrix grows and nurtures superlative writers. N.B. I’m not counting myself among them; I’m a long time resident of Portland and its environs (soon to stretch the practical definition of ‘environs’), and not a coastal denizen.

Gloomy leaden skies threaten rain and reliably deliver on those threats. Monotonous drizzle, wind-driven sheets of icy sleet needles, torrents. Sodden evergreen forests soak up the constant precipitation, storing it up to deliver bucket loads to the fiddlehead ferns and assorted undergrowth below that turns the ground to an unbroken stretch of sponge. It’s wet, is what I’m saying. People stay indoors. Might as well write.

And what goes on in those vast tracts of rainforest? Dense, trackless. Why not Sasquatch? Elves or aliens. There’s a reason Mulder and Scully spent so much time blundering about through Pacific Northwest forests, right? Couldn’t just be the Vancouver, B.C. shooting location. Don’t be a cynic.

Over the dunes the gray expanse of the Pacific beckons. Waves pound irregularly on the rocks and sand, suggesting to the imaginative a syncopation one could grasp if one listened long enough. It is tantalizing. What is the rhythm? The off-beat drives the offbeat imagination.

The Pacific Northwest Coast restaurants abound in clam chowder, Dungeness crabs, fresh caught salmon, beer brewed not too far from that very spot. Fuel for the imagination.

The funky little towns tucked into coves and straddling headlands offer quirky antique shops and used bookstores. The kind of tiny, bric-a-brac filled establishments that seem to promise a long-forgotten magical relic or tome of lore, if one searches long enough through overlooked alcoves.

The people who wash up on the coast from inland like flotsam and jetsam offer model fictional characters. The burnouts, ex-hippies, retirees, seekers of second, third, fourth chances, the eternal optimists who think this business venture will really get traction.

Are any one or combination of the above the answer, or even an answer? I don’t know. All I know is that recent series of crashing waves had a pretty catchy hook.