The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (44 page)

And in all that period while I was so near Nature, the great lessons of the wilderness deepened into my heart day by day, the hedges of conventionalism withered away from my horizon, and all the pedantries of scholastic thought perished out of my mind forever.

In the near century and a half since Winthrop passed through the Pacific Northwest, the East has retained much of its dominance. The media centers are still there, as are government, and publishing, and finance, and most of the people. But everything Winthrop reveled in, the glaciers, the virgin forests, the green islands, the plump rivers, the fir-mantled volcanoes, the empty range of the high desert, Grandpa’s trout streams, and the alpenglow, are here—a land that has yet to give up all its secrets.

About the Author

Timothy Egan is the Pacific Northwest correspondent for
The New York Times
. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Joni Balter, and two children. He is at work on a second book.