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The for sale sign is in the front yard. The house is listed online. The time has come. After almost 10 years of residing in Oregon, my wife and I are packing up and moving back to California. I am starting a new job with a wonderful nonprofit organization dedicated to the scientific study of…

I met Luigi Tinonga when I was too young to remember meeting him. My family lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1980s before I entered kindergarten. My aunt and uncle lived in Oakland and they were neighbors and friends with Luigi and his wife Calleen. My parents would take my sister…

For college baseball in Oregon, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. When I moved to Eugene in 2013, the state’s two major college baseball programs were in very different places. The Oregon State University Beavers had recently won the national championship in 2006 and 2007. Inching their way toward…

It is often said that state capitols do not make for great cities. This is undoubtedly true along the West Coast. Sacramento is exceedingly lame compared to its much cooler cousins San Francisco and Los Angeles. Salem is fairly forgettable and not so interesting when lined up against Bend, Ashland, or Portland. And then there’s…

A boat takes you from Vancouver to Victoria? I’m in. For reasons unknown to myself, I’m a sucker for traveling by boat. Mind you, I’m not talking yachts or luxury cruise liners, but neither am I endeavoring to brave the high seas on a clipper ship. You know, a relatively safe aquatic journey where you…

I shouldn’t complain, so I won’t. My wife and I just spent a brilliant week on the Big Island of Hawaii in mid-December to celebrate her birthday. Warm, sunny weather, exploring black sand beaches, swimming with sea turtles, downing mountains of poke, and quaffing rum-soaked cocktails with little umbrellas. It was everything a Hawaiian vacation…

The day’s final meeting had concluded. Following hours consumed with discussion of Puget Sound’s water quality, Clean Water Act intricacies, and prospects for litigation, my coworker and I fancied a beer. Thus, on a cloudless Friday afternoon in Seattle we ambled a block or two over to the pub, settled at a table, and ordered…

People will tell you that there are really only two religions in Oregon—craft beer and college football. Undoubtedly there were numerous stimulating things happening on October 13, 2018 around the Pacific Northwest. But for sports fans, football fans in particular, there was only one thing happening: the Washington Huskies were playing the Oregon Ducks at…

Want some crack, eh? No, thank you. Ok, no worries. Sooory. Want some company for the night big guy? No, I’m ok thank you. Oh, ok, sooory. The drug dealers and prostitutes in Vancouver, British Columbia were most cordial. It was 2002, I was living in San Francisco and primed for adventure. While an undergraduate…

The moment I walked into the office I was breathlessly accosted: somebody called this morning and said that there’s a dead whale on the beach by the Prom! I nabbed a pen and a pad of paper, swiped a camera off the shelf, pocketed a couple of rolls of film, and hopped in my car….

The San Francisco of my youth was eternally foggy, cold, and wet. It was chilly nights on Nob Hill dining at Vanessi’s and aweing at the enormous Christmas tree in the lobby of the Fairmont. It was fog lingering for days outside the eighth floor window of my Park Merced apartment. It was braving a…

In Ketchikan, Alaska, you can acquire an Omega Seamaster wristwatch on a stainless steel bracelet with the coaxial escapement. The 41mm version of the quintessential dive watch retails for around $6,000. The population of Ketchikan is a few ticks over 8,000. None of this made any sense to me as I stood baffled in one…

The restroom at Powell’s City of Books is not the dirtiest public facility I have encountered. Actually, given the volume of foot traffic trouncing about the labyrinthine literary vault, the bathroom at Powell’s is relatively clean. At least it was when I visited the lavatory circa 2012. It all started across the street at Stumptown…

The sun beamed gloriously as I motored into Astoria. That, in and of itself, was a revelation. Astoria is many ways favorable: historic, quaint, picturesque, fortuitously sited at the mouth of the mighty Columbia—but sunny it is not. Gray and silver, alloyed with an understated mousy ashen hue, serve as the team colors. It rains….

Dusky gloom holds court daily, refusing to yield but for a handful of colorless hours. Scant daylight accompanied by a thermometer declining a meaningfully rise. Christmas and New Year’s celebrations long passed. Wintry doldrums rest heavy on the psyche; emerging at daybreak from the blanketed cocoon grows increasingly burdensome. At this station on the annual…

What’s it called again? Not Vashon. Vancouver, no, I know it’s not that! Brisbane? No, it’s… Bainbridge? Yes! Let’s take the ferry to Bainbridge Island! My wife and I were in Seattle doing Seattle things. After enough big city shopping, Pike Place Market touring, and clam chowder munching, we sought a new adventure. She had…

Screen doors slumbered, sedans snoozed, spaniels snored. Subwoofers sat silent. Trucks denied their evening driveway idles. Cell phone blathering had long ceased or else faded toward a swallowing ether. Dinner dishes washed, dried, and shelved. Homework finished and the little ones off to bed. Crickets deigned to elicit a peep. Empty windless deserts; slipper-shod ghosts…

I spoke with Bill Devall only once. Our discussion took place via telephone. The call lasted approximately five minutes. Before our phone conversation, although we had never met, Bill Devall had played a seminal role in changing my life. In preparation for graduate school, I read Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. The book,…

“Some people think Jim Dodge is actually Thomas Pynchon.” Those words, followed by a broken chuckle from my professor, were all I needed to hear. I was transfixed. He had spoken the sentence with a mischievous implication of knowing. I looked about the room; nobody else appeared taken aback or affected. I half raised my…

At the firmament an assemblage of islands, inlets, fjords, and coastlines. Boreas a galloping cascade of sleeveless coattails descending the mountain’s face. Glacial, limpid waters define the arena; but in the naked open it is abruptly uneven and now eight-foot crests are blasting the bow in sonorous rhythm. The locals munch chowder and shrug. The…

In the beginning a cathedral of trees. An ingress, a threshold to a world aloft. North through the enshrouding mist; striding ashore amid boggy seas teeming of unbounded ferns, fecund skunk cabbage, and fairy tale amanitas. Emerging from dusky Gaelic clouds, a locus bearing treasures: ancient promises, silver-handed kings, biophilic fables, and lesser esoterica. Behind…