America’s “Left Coast” is a place at peace with an omni-present grey, a patience I mistook at first for aloofness. America’s most wayward children went as far west as they could, until they reached the mystic fog of the north Pacific. It’s a waywardness I shared with them, passing through the urban gateways of Portland and Seattle to endless, lush wilderness… but a waywardness shared by the rampant homelessness that seek the cities’ temperate air. The mariner spirit boldly ignores state lines — outside of docks at Seattle themselves, it felt most pronounced in the unsung Californian towns of Mendocino and Crescent City. It’s a land built on harbors in line to chart westward off what for thousands of years was the edge of the Earth. Thousands of miles of ocean can’t shake off the passing similarities that the Space Needle and Mt. Rainier give Seattle with its latitudinal neighbor Japan. Rushing water runs through every empty space, creating towns not build alongside nature, but inside of it.