Not D.C., the other one. There’s a story about that. In 1858, when Congress separated the Washington Territory from Oregon, the locals wanted to name the new territory Columbia. Congress wanted more done to honor President Washington, and so now we have both a state and a district. Laudible, and he is certainly worthy of honor, but my guess is whoever chose Washington had never done a Google search.
If friendly and delightful sea otters hadn’t been trapped and clubbed into oblivion, Washington State might be Canadian. The British wanted the Canadian border south at Oregon, at the Columbia River. We wanted the border considerably north, at 54°40′ north, well into British Columbia. In his 1844 presidential campaign James K. Polk made 54-40 or Fight the Make America Great Again of its day. Along with beaver, sea otter fur was the economic pile driver of the Pacific Northwest, but without that economic spur the British weren’t going to fight over a bunch of trees, and Polk got distracted by the Mexican-American War. In 1846 both sides compromised on the 49th Parallel. Meanwhile the sea otter population has recovered to about 100,000 animals.
Washington is our 13th largest state by population, with an estimated population of 7,535,591, not including sea otters. It is more diverse than predominately white Oregon, with Asians, 9.3%, the largest group after Anglos, 68%, and Hispanic whites, 10.9%. Blacks are 4.3%. Washington ranks 11th in household income. Its economy is driven by technology and engineering, trade with Asia, by my purchases at REI, and by all those lines at all those Starbucks. Big names, Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and REI, are based in Seattle.
It is a liberal state, or at least a Democratic state. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 54.3% of the vote. There are states where she did better, but there are states where she did much worse. Washington tends Democratic, but not overwhelmingly so. In the 2018 senate election, the Democratic incumbent, Maria Cantwell, received 58.4% of the vote, but the increased percentage over 2016 may only mean that Senator Cantwell was a popular incumbent.
In 2016, the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, got 5% of the Washington vote. Nationally he received only 3.8% of the vote. One suspects that in Washington there isn’t so much a deep well of Libertarian notions as there is a bunch of traditional Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for President Trump, nor Hillary. That 5% was likely driven as much by protest as conviction.
Rural areas voted for President Trump, urban areas, the area around Puget Sound and the southern Portland suburbs at Vancouver, voted for Clinton. Only one rural western county, Whitman County, voted Democratic. Pullman, its largest city, is a university town, home of Washington State. It’s also directly across the border from Moscow, Idaho, an outlier Democratic area in Idaho’s 2016 election and home of the University of Idaho. Like begets like.
The other rural area to vote Democratic, that dark blue bar on the left that bisects the Olympic Peninsula, roughly corresponds to Olympic National Park. Not many votes, but I figure the rangers knew on which side their bread was buttered.
Geographically Washington divides into six regions, and the regions correspond to (1) annual precipitation (no surprise there) and (2) voting patterns (I guess there should be no surprise either). With one exception it’s also the geography of our Northwest Coast, not confined peculiarly to Washington State, but running south to Northern California and north all the way to Alaska. It just goes to show how arbitrary our borders can be.
In the far west is the Coast Range, which, not surprisingly, is along the Pacific coast. Who knew? It’s a relatively temperate zone, with rare snowfall but plenty of rain. East of the Coast Range are the Puget Sound Lowlands, the Cascade Range, the arid Columbia Plateau, and in the far northeast a tiny sliver of the Rockies.
The exception, the peculiar feature and the area where we’re scheduled to fish for winter steelhead in February, is the temperate rain forest in the upper left on the Olympic Peninsula. It’s annual temperatures in low elevations occasionally dip to freezing, but are generally mild, if someone from Houston could ever consider 40 degrees mild. What it does have is rain. Constant rain. A drip drip drip of up to 140 inches in the lowlands during the winter season, while at elevation there may be up to 35 feet of snow.
One of my doctors went to the University of Washington for medical school, across Puget Sound from the Peninsula. He tells me that it is so spooky and dense that it’s no wonder all those teen vampire movies are filmed there. I came home after we talked and watched the first Twilight, and while I wouldn’t recommend the movie, the landscape may be the best character.
Meanwhile we’ll be fishing for winter steelhead in and around Olympic National Park, fishing with extra-long two-handed Spey rods with Jack Mitchell’s The Evening Hatch, swinging flies out and across big rivers. I understand that temperatures will be cold, but likely not freezing. It will be wet. Winter is the rainier season, and the rainfall is measured in 10s of inches only after you clear the first 100. The fish are theoretically bigger than the summer steelhead we fished for last year in Oregon. Summer steelhead might be six pounds, winter up to 20, but the winter steelhead are even harder to catch. The winter fish are sexually mature when they come into the rivers and focused on the spawn and less likely to take a fly. They are the totem fish of the strange cult of Northwest Pacific steelheading. Maybe Kris and I have joined the cult. Kris didn’t hesitate when I asked if she wanted to try it.
So we will go to Seattle, maybe take a day or so to look around, maybe even cross to Victoria so Kris can finally say she’s been to Canada, but mostly we’ll stand around in a river in the rain and dodge the vampires while the steelhead dodge us. There’s always next winter.
