Back in Lower Alaska

Puget Sound, on the Whidbey Island ferry.

I jokingly refer to Puget Sound as "Lower Alaska." It's typically wet, damp and cold, just like the Alaska panhandle coastline. The regular rain makes trees so giant you can't see the sky. Actually, you ordinarily can't see the sky anyway. It's hidden by overcast.

We drove for two and a half days and 1600 miles from Tucson to Whidbey Island. The road in Arizona, Nevada and Idaho is almost entirely through open desert. Big sky. Huge terrain. Even most of Oregon and Washington is open country. Only in the Blue Mountains, around Baker City and La Grande in Oregon, did we see a bit of evergreen forest, followed by the open land of the Inland Empire. Finally, we reached Ellensburg and things got really green. Heading up and over Snoqualamie Pass, we drove through dense forest. Familiar, dense forest.

Shari and I entered a time warp. Were't we in the Mojave Desert yesterday? And the Sonoran Desert the day before? Where did all this dense forest come from? Where's the dirt and the rocks?

Dense forest, vegetation everywhere, and the familiarity of an area where I have lived for four decades but now seems foreign, all that makes for a culture shock and a time warp.

They say it's been unusually hot and dry in Washington this summer so it's unfair to refer to Puget Sound as Lower Alaska. Hard to tell today.

Maybe the local weather spirits wanted to welcome us Baja Arizonans to Lower Alaska. What was cloudy at the Pass became overcast in North Bend. Then as we got off the ferry in Clinton, it started to rain. Welcome home, Whidbey Island ex-pats. Welcome home to Lower Alaska.