LETTER TO NEW ENGLAND

1.

You ask me, “What’s it like in Washington?”

In some ways, it’s a lot like New England.
We have an ocean here, a lavish sprinkling
of town and country; more farmland here,
which means vistas: once, on the drive west
from Spokane, I stopped at a rest area
in central Washington (which is quite flat)
and walking back to the car observed that
I could turn three hundred and sixty degrees
and see in every direction to horizon.
No trees, no hills or buildings blocked my view.

The principle of vistas also means
that every so often you come around
a corner and get a sudden glimpse of
something your New England-trained eye perceives
as an interesting, horizon-hugging
cloud; then you realize you’re looking at
a snow-capped mountain—for much of the year,

the Cascades to the east, Olympics west,
have snow—though the Olympics are often
hidden by clouds. (In Galway there’s a saying:
“If you see the Aran Isles, it’s gonna
rain; if you can’t see them, it is raining.”
It’s like that with the Olympics.) But if
you’re facing north, Mount Baker has snow all
year; south, Ranier. There are places on I-5
where you can see Mount Baker in front of you
and Mount Ranier in your rear view mirror.
And by September, the snow you’re looking
at has been there ever since the Ice Age.

Summers here are blessedly cool, winters
mild to the point of boredom. Seattle
might get snow once or twice a winter, tops;
except for highways, they don’t even plow.
I miss my cross-country skiing. But there’s
always plenty of snow in the mountains
when you feel like driving to it. Whereas
in New England, all the snow comes to you.

Seattleites—I love it that they call
themselves Seattleites: that’s why they have
a Space Needle: because they’re Seattleites
themselves, yuk yuk—Seattleites will tell
you, defensively but accurately,
that in inches, Boston gets more rain a year
than here; Seattle just gets more days when it
rains a little. And yes, there is this low gray
cloud-ceiling that settles in for much of
the year, raining or intermittently
sprinkling. I’m told some find this depressing;
me it makes think of when I was a kid
and I would stretch a blanket from one chair
to another, crawl in under my tent
and feel secure and secret—protected.
In Ireland, they describe days like that as
“soft” days. The downside is you miss the stars.

I miss thunderstorms. You see thunderheads
here all the time, huge masses of black cloud
bearing down on you; but at most you get
one lightning flash, one lousy thunderclap.
After that, just another rainy day.

There is, alas, no autumn here to speak
of. Oh, there are trees than turn; September
through November, some each day—December
even; but every species, maybe
every individual tree, on
a schedule of its own, never the great
unison profusion of New England.
Here you have to go where the color is;
in New England it’s everywhere you look.

Driving is easier here; people here
know better than to block intersections,
so there’s less gridlock. There are entire lanes
just for left hand turns, and streets that make sense,
in that when you’re looking for 7th Street,
and you’ve just passed 4th and 5th, you can be
reasonably sure that 7th will come
up pretty soon. The nearest thing that you
have is South Boston, and everyone there
always knows where they’re going anyway.

But I will admit that here it can be
quite off-putting when you realize
for the first time that 7th Avenue
North isn’t the same street as 7th South,
but parallel, and you just paid to park
fifteen blocks from the place you need to be
five minutes from now. And when you’re looking
for an address on 72nd Street,
the fact that you’re on 72nd
is no guarantor of success; most streets
here get interrupted every few blocks. The best
that can be said of this is that even
at the best of times it’s off-putting too.

And it isn’t enough to know the streets
here, you have to know the lanes, or you can
find yourself compelled to turn right when you
wanted left, and by the time you get turned
around, you’ve lost your bearings hopelessly.

The ocean here is never warm enough
for swimming. Going toward the ocean
means going west; you will make that mistake
a few times before you’re oriented.

Here we have “the Cascade Curtain:” west of
the Cascades is a blue state, east is red.
It’s a lot like crossing the border from
Methuen Mass to Salem New Hampshire.

Distances between venues are greater,
but poetry here is a lot like there;
80% of what I hear here, I
might as easily hear at the Cantab.
But that one stunning poem that comes out
of nowhere, that makes it worth going out
in the evening—that makes it worth getting
up the next morning—I’m marginally
less likely to hear that one poem here—
or maybe I’ve just been less likely here
to be the poet who writes that poem.

Washington is passionately in love
with salmon. I’ve eaten at a restaurant
that serves five different kinds—I don’t mean
salmon cooked five different ways, I mean pink,
sockeye, chinook, coho, and chum, cooked in
every way imaginable. The floors
at Sea-Tac airport are decorated
with mosaic salmon. Carol brought home
salmon pajamas for me. Salmon are
inescapable.

Less omnipresent
but maybe equally exciting to
a Massachusetts boy are the eagles.
You’re walking on a sunny day; you sense
shadow passing, Nazgul-like, overhead,
and you look up and see the flash of white
on head and tail and think, “We are indeed
come a very long way from Dorchester.”
Out my office window in New Hampshire
I used to see a chipmunk; here I see
eagles, hawks, herons.

In my next letter
I’ll talk about blackberries—no two in
a row ever taste the same. And if man
ever abandons Washington, even
for a little while, the blackberries are
waiting to take over. I’ll talk about
orcas, developers, convergence zones,
the infinite variety of clouds
and the way they play with the mountaintops.

2.

Oh, what you really wanted to know was
how I liked Washington. That’s a shorter
answer: if I had to leave New England,
this was an inspired choice; although I miss
my family and friends; not spring or summer,
but I miss autumn, and the winter snow.
And sometimes I even miss that chipmunk.