Metronatural: Inventing and Taming Nature in Seattle - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 95

nothing more than a hard drizzle. 18 What defi nes Seattle's precipitation
pattern from other cities is its temporal distribution that results in an
incessant light sprinkle, sometimes referred to paradoxically as a “dry
rain.” 19 A local newspaper columnist writes:
It's not the amount of rain that defi nes the Northwest. It's the persistence. Our rain
is a relative you thought you knew until the day he showed up on your doorstep.
He came in for the night, stayed through the weekend. Monday, he missed his
plane. By Thursday, he had migrated from the spare room to the kitchen to the
living room, devouring space as he went. Pretty soon he'd taken control of the
refrigerator, the television and the stereo. Eventually, it dawns on you, he's taken
over your life. Rain moves in and sets up shop in the imagination. 20
This mental preoccupation with rain by Seattle residents involves not only
precipitation but the unavoidable cloudy and dark conditions. Seattle is
in the Puget Sound Convergence Zone between the Cascade and Olym-
pic Mountains, where clouds and rain are trapped for three-quarters of
the year. 21 A journalist notes that “if the climate were not so dark and
rainy . . . everyone would want to live here.” 22 The bright side of Seattle's
climate is that the moderate conditions also result in a lack of severe
meteorological events such as droughts and fl ooding, although long-term
risks of earthquakes and volcanoes are a continual threat. 23
The preponderance of water in Seattle and the Pacifi c Northwest also
touches on another important defi ning element of the region: salmon. The
salmon is a totem of the region, similar to the crab of the Chesapeake Bay,
the walleye of the Great Lakes, and the lobster of New England. 24 Writer
Timothy Egan has controversially defi ned the Pacifi c Northwest as any
place where salmon can reach. 25 Historian William Cronon adds that it
is impossible to separate the species from the region: “The salmon is not
just a keystone species but a cultural icon of the fi rst order, a powerful
symbol of all that the Pacifi c Northwest is and has been.” 26
With the introduction of canning technologies in the late nineteenth
century, salmon became an economic opportunity of global proportions
for Pacifi c Northwest fi shermen; people throughout the world could now
sample a taste of the region. 27 Industrial-scale salmon harvesting, along
with the destruction of habitat for hydroelectric dams and urban develop-
ment, resulted in signifi cant declines in salmon populations; by the turn of
the twentieth century, Pacifi c Northwest salmon populations were on life
support, with wild populations sustained and supplemented by human-
managed fi sh hatcheries. Historian Joseph Taylor refers to the challenges
of maintaining salmon populations in the Pacifi c Northwest as an “en-
during crisis” that continually attempts to reconcile human connection