The Good Rain Quotes

“Sometimes the wind along the Pacific shore blows so hard it steals your breath before you can inhale it.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Here in the corner attic of America, two hours’ drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees—more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to. Rivers without salmon have lost the life source of the area.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Chief Sealth, appalled at how his emerald garden had been trashed so quickly, wrote a letter in 1854 to President Franklin Pierce. “The whites, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than the other tribes,” he wrote with the help of a translator. “Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in waste.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“no river in North America except the Mississippi is more powerful than the Columbia; it carries a quarter-million cubic feet of water per second to the ocean, ten times the flow of the Colorado, twice the discharge of the Nile into the Mediterranean.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“The Columbia River Bar has swallowed more ships, about 2,100 at last count, than any other location on the Pacific north of Mexico.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Every bit of water falling on all of France, channeled into one drainpipe—that’s similar to what goes into the Columbia, or at least a shallow part of it. The river’s source is a glacial drip 2,619 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Canadian Purcells; by its midway point in a high desert, the Columbia has a depth several hundred feet below the ocean plane.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Beckey's fame spread through word of mouth. There were stories about his wolf howl, a blood-chilling sound, which Beckey would use to scare tourists away from his favorite campsites.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“The moisture is predatory in this part of the world, and no element, be it stone or wood or tin or steel, lasts very long without losing some part of its composition to the nag of precipitation.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“As to Baker, that name should be forgotten,” Winthrop wrote in The Canoe and the Saddle. “Mountains should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds.…”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“shout takes several seconds to land, and then bounces away.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“In scale and audacity, the dam was astonishing; engineers were going to anchor a mile-long wall of concrete in bedrock at the bottom of a steep canyon in the Columbia. They would excavate 45 million cubic yards of dirt and rock, and pour 24 million tons of concrete. Among the few dams in the Northwest not built by the Corps of Engineers, the Grand Coulee was the work of the Bureau of Reclamation. When completed, it was a mile across at the top, forty-six stories high, and heralded as the biggest thing ever built by man. The dam backed up the river for 151 miles, creating a lake with 600 miles of shoreline. At the dam’s dedication in 1941, Roosevelt said Grand Coulee would open the world to people who had been beat up by the elements, abused by the rich and plagued by poor luck. But a few months after it opened, Grand Coulee became the instrument of war. Suddenly, the country needed to build sixty thousand planes a year, made of aluminum, smelted by power from Columbia River water, and it needed to build ships—big ones—from the same power source. Near the end of the war, America needed to build an atomic bomb, whose plutonium was manufactured on the banks of the Columbia. Power from the Grand Coulee was used to break uranium into radioactive subelements to produce that plutonium. By war’s end, only a handful of farms were drawing water from the Columbia’s greatest dam. True, toasters in desert homes were warming bread with Grand Coulee juice, and Washington had the cheapest electrical rates of any state in the country, but most of that power for the people was being used by Reynolds Aluminum in Longview and Alcoa in Vancouver and Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane and Tacoma.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl’s or the logger’s? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Sealth died in 1866, one year after the city which bore his name passed an ordinance to ban Indians from town.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can’t find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Seattle gets less rain than New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“one cubic foot of tidepool can support more than four thousand living things.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Two of the biggest volcanoes in the Northwest, Hood and Rainier, are named for wartime enemies of America.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“A third of all loggers in the Northwest will be seriously injured at some time during their careers. According to medical insurance records in Washington and Oregon, only two lines of work are more dangerous than logging - professional football and crop-dusting.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Eighty-four islands in the San Juan chain are wildlife refuges; of those, humans are allowed to visit only three.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“the Allotment Act of 1887. Under this act, each male Indian head of household was given a chunk of reservation land, between 40 and 160 acres, which he could then sell as an individual... Nationwide, Indian landholdings shrank from 140 million acres to 48 million in less than fifty years... Today, two-thirds of all Indian-reservation property is not owned by the tribes, a legacy of the Allotment Act.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“while the number of Cascade hikers has increased sixfold since 1960, nearly a third of the trail mileage has been lost to logging and neglect.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Loveliness, he said, is paid for in the currency of suffering.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“The vices of these savages are very few when compared to ours... One does not see here greed for another man's wealth, because articles of prime necessity are very few and all are common. Hunger obliges no one to rob on the highways, or to resort to piracy. The natural bounty was so great that the natives actually fought some wars with food, trying to outdo one another with culinary gifts at their potlatches.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and philosopher who thought reality was best experienced through a soul in tune with the rhythms of the earth.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

“the mist of early morning peels away to reveal the same sight, the untended casualties of Western man's war with the rain forest.”
― Timothy Egan, The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest