Thirty years ago this month, I took a trip to Seattle and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. I hadn’t been there before and I haven’t been back, though I want to go. That was where I saw an enormous fallen tree in Mount Rainier NP and the excellent-in-every-way Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC.

I took no camera. It was that kind of trip. I did return with a lot of ephemera, though. Such as a Washington State Ferries schedule. I was staying with a college friend of mine the first weekend I was there, and took the ferry with him and friends of his. From Seattle to Winslow, I think, but in any case across Puget Sound.

We were the last car in, shoehorned into the back of the ferry, and during the crossing mostly sat in the car listening to a tape of United States Live by Laurie Anderson, which was fairly new at the time. I distinctly remember her relating a story about an obscure Chinese dialect in which the word for “Heaven” and “Moon” are the same, and how it was reported in this part of China that American astronauts had traveled to Heaven. If I were feeling that kind of ambition, I’d listen to the five disks of United States Live to find out where this bit occurs. I don’t feel like it — I’d rather retain this odd amalgam of a memory, made up of her strange story and the trip across Puget Sound, unimpaired by hearing the story again.

That weekend we also spent some time under gray skies on one of the beaches on the sound, playing volleyball and hunting geoduck. Or at least one or two members of the party were looking for geoduck, which I’d never heard of before. From a hole in the sand, they managed to pull up the neck of one of those clams, which was long and gross, but not the body. “That’s one hurting geoduck,” said one of the fellows who pulled it up.

It’s pronounced “gooey duck,” incidentally, and later at the Seattle Aquarium, I saw an entire geoduck. They might be good eating (I didn’t eat one), but they’re also remarkably ugly.

It was also on that beach that I found a shell partly covered in barnacles. It’s a little hard to get an image of it, but here it is anyway, top and bottom.

I’ve had the shell ever since, though some years ago a child managed to break it. I glued it back together. There’s something about it.

There was nothing much as memorable about crossing from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay in British Columbia. That time I was in my own rental car, and drove to Victoria, a fine little city.

On this trip I covered a lot of ground in my car, admiring the forests, except where they’d been clear-cut, and fond of the fields of blooming Scotch broom, which I later learned is an invasive species in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe not quite in a league with kudzu, but bad enough.

One more item, which I kept because you don’t see this kind of thing inland so much: a tide table. It was a lagniappe from the handsome Kalaloch Lodge, which is on the Pacific coast, and actually within the boundaries of Olympic National Park. I spent the night there. Lovely place, though most of the scenery was obscured by drizzly clouds. Still glad I went. If only to go to a place that gives out tide tables to its guests.