The north-south line of 'the mountains,' meaning the Cascade Range, forty miles east of Seattle, is a rigid political frontier.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.
I'm from Oakland and San Francisco, so I feel like the Pacific Northwest starts there and goes north - so, it's home to me.
What strikes me when I leave Washington is the extent to which there's a huge disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country. The rest of the country is not hyper partisan.
The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
There was a windstorm in L.A., and the morning after there was no smog, and I could see the mountains. And I was like... 'There's mountains? Snowcap mountains?' That's insane; I've been there for thirteen years, and I've never seen that view before, seeing the mountains in the distance.
To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.
Democrats inhabit the low shores of Puget Sound, mostly on its eastern side, in a ragged trail of port-cities that stretches from Bellingham, close to the Canadian border, through Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma, to Olympia, the state capital, at the southern end of the sound.
In California, there is a strong tension between north and south.
I always think of the Pacific Northwest as giant trees and rain and clouds and dampness, like the Native American art from that area. That all says Pacific Northwest to me. Salmon. It really only exists on the Western side of the Cascades.