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“As the summer dries out and the pink glow off the western glaciers of Mount Baker disappears earlier and earlier, I begin to feel like a spiritual delinquent, holding up a long-planned reunion of body and soul.��

This book is the perfect combination of travel writing, history and nature, all wrapped in adept and often lovely prose with a dose of humor as the bow set firmly on top. If The Good Rain was a novel rather than a work of non-fiction, I’d say author and journalist Timothy Egan deftly presented the reader with a powerful dose of man versus nature conflict. Egan has a wish to fulfill from the start. I’ll let him explain it to you himself, so you can get a feel for the tone of his writing:

“All summer long Grandpa remains in the basement, two pounds of cremated ash in a plain cardboard cylinder. I can’t get used to the idea of this odorless beige powder as the guy who taught me how to land brook trout with a hand-tied fly, the son of a Montana mineral chaser, the teller of campfire tales about hiding from the Jesuits with his schoolboy chum, a jug-eared kid named Bing Crosby.��

“I will take a year�� from Oregon desert to green-smothered rain forest, from storm-battered ocean edge to the inland waters, from the new cities of the Northwest to the homesteads of the Columbia Plateau, to see what a century can produce from scratch, and maybe�� come to some understanding of why Grandpa belonged in the wellspring of the White River, as do I.��

I traipsed with Egan across the Pacific Northwest, more specifically through Oregon, Washington and parts of British Columbia. I spent time in the temperate rainforest, the volcanic mountain ranges, the Columbia River gorge, and the Pacific coast. He touches on a lot of the history from the indigenous peoples to the first white settlers to the timber and salmon fishing industries. He caused me to add a trip to the San Juan Islands to my list when I finally make it to this region of the world. I learned a bit about the plight of the sea otter and the orca, the pleasures of wine and apples, and the harnessing of the powers of the mighty rivers. As per usual, when man plants himself in the natural world, we begin to see the demise of some of our most abundant resources.

I wish I had more time to dive into the particulars of Timothy Egan’s knowledgeable discourse, but I find that commodity lacking these days. Suffice to say that I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn more about the Pacific Northwest. With that said, keep in mind that this was published in 1990. I’m hoping a lot of advances in the protection of those endangered resources will have been put in place since that time. I’ll be on the lookout for more recent works concerning the region in the future. Any suggestions are welcome! I’ll leave you with some of the highlights of my reading with the goal of enticement.

“But he (John Muir) would most likely disapprove of the odd distinction the camp named after him has gained: it is the site of the world’s most expensive outhouse, a $50,000 solar shitter which uses high-altitude ultraviolet rays to cook and compost climbers�� waste.��

“Before the dams, some chinook would swim as far inland as the Continental Divide, deep in Idaho, Montana and British Columbia, before committing the final act of fornication, a very proper squirt before death. Like British sex, it is dignified and oddly ritualistic, following a strict set of biological rules, most of which seem to make sense at first glance.��

“Most of my life, I’ve stared out at The Brothers from Seattle �� a two-breasted beauty that seems to sweep up from the very surface of Puget Sound. From the city, the tips turn pastel in sunset and then dark in silhouette, a very theatrical mountain, almost a custom fit of Winthrop’s description of a peak that, viewed from a seat in civilization, stirs the soul.��

“It was the British, the apostles of rose gardens and high tea, who nicknamed this place “England of the Pacific,�� and sent boatloads of pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing, Queen-loving, tea-drinking gentlemen here to settle it. Unlike the American settlers, who brought bibles and guns to their new land, the British immigrants were urged to arrive with cricket bats, carriage harnesses and a library of the classics.��

“Full moon over Puget Sound, the last one of summer. Look at the sky, all full of doubt. The light is gone from the back side of Mount Rainier, leaving a coned cutout on the horizon.��

“Any doubts that the land is alive and in command of all that lives atop its surface are removed by the view to the south. Still smoking and stuffed with debris, Mount St. Helens, the youngest of all Cascade volcanoes, looks like an ashtray after an all-night party. Denuded, it nonetheless pulses with new life as the dome inside the crater rebuilds.��

“My past is imprinted on me, a tattoo of sensory dimensions, released by a breath of fog-dampened air or the sight of a leaf of faded color. So it is with the Pacific salmon, who are guided home by the smells from their juvenile days.��