Rain O'er Me
Summer visitors like to say
that it doesn't rain that much in Seattle. With a thumb in the almanac, they'll
tell you that the city collects less annual precipitation than New York City,
which is true. What they don't tell you is that come November, as the last
supersaver flies out of SeaTac, the clouds roll in from the Pacific Ocean and
hang around Western Washington like the stink of a dead rat in the wall. The
inexorable damp persists until June and washes away the civility that
Northwesterners wear like hand lotion. Managers snap at their departments or
turn scarily morose; the cubiclebound browse Webzines (hello, reader!) and
engage in marathon e-mail bitch sessions. It feels like nobody's showered or
shaved for three days.
Few
artists have captured the condition well. Robert Altman came close in the
opening scene of McCabe and Mrs. Miller , his Western in which Warren
Beatty rides through a shower into a logging camp whose residents resemble
nothing so much as wet cats. However, no account of the Northwest's soaked
misery surpasses that of the great American explorer and abysmal speller
William Clark, who recorded his observations nearly 200 years ago. Clark spent
a winter on the Oregon-Washington coast, which is to rain as the Antarctic is
to snow. "Rained all the after part of last night, rain continues this
morning," he wrote in late 1805. "We are all wet cold and disagreeable." During
their coastal wintering, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery enjoyed a
total of 12 days without rain. At one point it poured 11 days straight "without
a longer intermition than 2 hours at a time." The word "disagreeable" is
repeated like a mantra in Clark's journal. It's a curiously evocative
description; "miserable" would be the natural choice, but Clark's word captures
a quality of the Northwestern damp that, as Ken Kesey once wrote, you have to
go through a winter here to understand. The stuff puts you on edge. About the
ninth or 10 th day, everybody looks at each other and says, "God
damn it's been raining." This is what William Clark felt, I think. On
Nov. 15, 1805, he wrote, "The rainey weather continued ... from the
5 th in the morng. untill the 16 th is eleven days rain,
and the most disagreeable time I have experienced. ..." Cold, wet, cooped up,
and hungry. I imagine Clark waking to the sound of skyspatter on the morning of
Nov. 16 and thinking: "I can't believe this shit."
Ithought we'd settled the fight between free will and
predestination with a sophomore reading of Erasmus, but lately, it's popping up
all over life's syllabus. For the past couple of years my family, born of an
Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother, has been cracking wise about who got Gram's
gene. Now they tell us that anxiety has its own causal gene, which has spawned
so many jokes about worrying about carrying the worry gene that I'll spare you
my own. The coming of the rain has only added weight to the sinking realization
that I'm about as free as Pavlov's best friend, acting as it does as cold
evidence of geographical determinism--the idea that the landscape shapes the
human culture that thrives within it.
There are
two cultures in the state of Washington: dry and wet. Both are determined by
the raw fact of mountains and an ocean. The Pacific Ocean generates warm, moist
air, which flows into Western Washington and bumps into the Cascade Mountains.
The air condenses into clouds; it rains.
The fact that we're locked into this bowl of
rain has given rise to some of the Northwest's distinctive (read: "bizarre")
subcultures. A few years ago, writer Tim Egan branded as "Northwest Noir" the
dark, damp movements that creep out of this moldy greenhouse: grunge music,
Twin Peaks , serial killers. The alternative to Egan's alternative is the
equally strange culture of people who, given eight months of February, choose
to fly straight into the teeth of the beast. I'm talking about the REI Army,
those legions of gear-obsessed soldiers who suit up every weekend and drive
into the hills, dead set on hunting down and killing their God-given portion of
wilderness transcendence. Over the past couple of years I've joined their
ranks. Enlistment begins with the $500 purchase of a Gore-Tex jacket and rain
pants, and thereafter requires monthly tithes for boots, socks, gloves,
goggles, trekking poles, interior-frame backpacks, gas stoves, and a really
cool wrist altimeter.
REI
recently cashiered its funky Capitol Hill warehouse store for a palatial
flagship pavilion visible from Interstate 5, the Space Needle, and probably the
space shuttle, too. The store's prime attraction is a three-story climbing
pinnacle that looks like a schmoo constructed of stucco. Shopping in the new
boot-hut-cum-theme-park is daunting, a little like leaving the roadside chapel
for Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. And while the soul of local outdoor
culture still thrives at the new store, this is not necessarily a good thing.
Just below the happy nature's-bounty song promoted by REI lies the low hum of
outdoor culture's ugliest trait, a possessive paranoia that keeps outsiders out
and insiders in. A humorless sense of moral superiority is de rigueur ,
fostered by the belief that those of us who go out and stomp the natural world
under our Vibram soles are healing Gaea while the rest of the world is tearing
her down. Anyone who began hiking/climbing/skiing/boarding the day before you
did is considered an experienced pro; you and all those who purchased their
fleece jackets the day after you did are pathetic wannabes. A rock climber who
trains with some of the world's most experienced crag-hangers recently told me
she still considers herself a novice. "I figure you've got to put in 20 years
before you get past amateur status," she said. Nothing commands instant respect
in Seattle like a low REI number. The co-op's membership list began with No. 1
in 1938 and now runs into the low 4 millions. Jim Whittaker, the first American
to climb Mount Everest, is No. 647. I am No. 3,538,286. I bear the shame every
day of my life.
In Japan, climbing Mount Fuji is a rite of the Shinto
religion. A sign near its summit reads, "Only a fool has never climbed Mount
Fuji; only a fool has climbed it more than once." Washingtonians haven't based
a religion on climbing Mount Rainier--yet--but, in all other ways, it assumes
the prominence of Fuji in local culture. We name beers and baseball teams after
it, which gives you some idea. Like the Japanese peak, Rainier draws 10,000
fools every year who strap spikes to their feet and attempt to walk nearly
three miles in the sky. Last summer I was No. 10,001. Climbing Rainier is a
rite of passage for some Northwesterners, an obsession for others. Some fathers
take their sons up it before their 10 th birthday. Local climbers
with ego-insecurity issues often scoff at Rainier. Nothing but a long hike,
they say, putting me in mind of the old Monty Python skit about who grew up
poorest. Climbing with shoes on your feet? Ooh, luxury !
In a sense, the climbing of
Rainier has become the sacred rite of REI culture. It is a long, brutal slog up
dangerous gable-steep glaciers in which at least 50 previous aspirants are
buried. Those who make it up ("summit" as a verb) are offered the cruelest sort
of spiritual enlightenment: the realization that there is no spiritual
enlightenment on mountain tops. If I had kept a journal on the summit, it would
have read remarkably similar to William Clark's: "We are all cold wet and
disagreeable." I may have added two words. "Get down." Sometimes rites of
passage, like the experience of suffering, lead to great wisdom. And sometimes,
suffering in the wilderness is just suffering in the wilderness, and the only
wisdom you gain is the knowledge that you don't want to do it again.
