Not Knowing Until You’ve Done It

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I visited Seattle and its environs for the first time in the mid-90s. All the reading and discussion could not have prepared me for three physical realities that tempered its culture and evolution. It’s features are big, the land and forces of nature get primitive fast, and the powerful effect of the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades—the rock barrier—ensured a civic orientation both imaginative and pioneering and directed westward toward Alaska and the Pacific. It got to define itself and it did.

The two articles —“On the Edge of America” and “Implicit Danger”— are derived from adventure of a kind both unique and commonplace to the Pacific Northwest. Like many others, I had experienced forms of physical risk, some knowingly, but not where physicality and nature conflicted, and when measuring safety reflected incalculable threats where nature had the upper hand and misadventure lurked with careful conduct or inadvertence. Hiking the Dungeness Spit and sailing in the San Juan Islands posed threads of that threat. Both experiences also provided a special vehicle for thinking and writing broadly. Seeing the physicality and nature in ways that resonated to me in history and analogues and joy-filled moments among friends.