Pacific Northwest March 2025

Seattle > Olympia > White Salmon > Portland

Yesterday I noted and experienced five incredible fruits of men and nature.

The tiny house and family property in White Salmon.
Multnomah Falls. (Stop and see this if you can – it’s awesome)
The Japanese Garden in Portland.
The Portland airport. (Renovations render it quite a sight)
My home.

Portland Airport

Nature’s hand was heaviest in White Salmon. The bodies that use that property can only afford so much time to exercising their will and, while nature is slower at her task, she is persistent – even her yearly sleep is generative.

I am always triggered by the Japanese Garden – triggered into some kind of reverie of what teams of humans are capable of when they work very intentionally with nature. We are good at some things. Nature is good at others. When we lean into our human strengths and make room for the strengths of nature, we get something that walks the edge between sublime and familiar.

Something submiliar? I don’t know.

What might future projects look like when we share a piece of this collaborative pie with AI?

Sylvia and I took a Pacific Northwest vacation this first part of her Spring Break. It was quintessential Pacific Northwest weather – at least how it’s represented in media.

Seattle > Olympia > White Salmon > Portland.

In Seattle, Sylvia got to meet my grandparents Brown and some of the Lee family as well. I was happy to see those folks again – I don’t get to spend much time with that limb of my family tree. We had Persian, Chinese, mega omelets, and tasty Trevor Waffles™ which came with homemade blueberry sauce. We got a tour of the second floor quilt factory and learned detail about familial resilience in the face of a two story house move – a literal moving of the house, not of moving between houses.

In Olympia, Sylvia got to meet the Shawn Brown family she hadn’t quite met yet. We did not spend much time there – this whole trip was an exercise in driving from one wet place to the next – but we ate tri-tip and talked. Conversations with Uncle Shawn are high quality conversations – investing, politics, patterns and strategies. I look forward to them whenever they’re oncoming. Sylvia also got to pack run with two dogs – I didn’t get to see it but it sounded very primal and deeply relational in a kind of way we might not get with humans we can verbalize with. It sounded awesome.

She also got to meet a lot of cats.

In White Salmon, we both got to meet Paul, my mom’s partner. He cooked us filet mignon and let us bask in the wondrous view of Mt. Adams from his back porch. We also got to eat Korean BBQ with him on his birthday and, when we arrived, it seemed like the restaurant’s playlist was shuffling through exclusively happy birthday songs. Was pretty funny.

Sylvia has a good post-travel discussion question. “At what point did you feel furthest from home?”

It’s a very good question.

I felt furthest from home on this trip in downtown Seattle. We went to the Chihuly Garden and Glass exhibit under the Space Needle but we also walked around downtown Pike’s Place and downtown Seattle. After we parked, I lost the parking ticket and was still pretty well under the effects of flight and Dramamine. There was a new place to navigate with a lot of stimulus and losing the parking ticket is not something I would normally do, so I couldn’t get my mind off it. It didn’t help that I was hungry.

We ended up getting the Persian food and then some coffee from Freya’s and I was doing much better afterwards. There was this shop, though, that acted as a kind of refuge from whatever far-from-home chaos swirl I had caught myself up in. It didn’t seem like that good of a shop from the outside, but Sylvia was bright and interested and inside it was actually a well curated respite of like-but-not-same artists’ works. Definitely commercial and all that, but what struck me was how well the original artist (I assume) was able to add to their wares by forging a venue for other artists to sell through. The Robot vs Sloth mascots that the store was named after were a little meh, but… I don’t know. They’ve got other stuff there that was good to look through.

Anyway… I also cut my thumb brushing my teeth, there was a lot of wedding talk and showing off my beautiful fiancée to family members and the whole Pacific Northwest. We went to Multnomah Falls which deserves attention than it got in this travel log. We saw people parasailing, launched from the higher elevations of the Colombia Gorge, and we got to see them land right next to us in the dog park we visited even – good inspiration for the game I’m working on. Sylvia introduced me to The Hazards of Love album by The Decemberists which was great to listen to while driving alongside the gorge in misty mountain weather.

Also, we saw an orange koi that literally had an aura of light around it. Something about the mud in the semi-clear water with the way the cloudy sky was… I can see how people would register those fish as magical. The image of that thing is stuck in my mind like some brain burrowing blessing.

More happened and there was this fountain with squares, a diamond, and ripple water that I’m including reference to here at the end mostly for myself and Sylvia. This is the gist of the trip, though. It was good and now I am glad to be home.