Time for some good old fashioned travel journalism in the style of James Anthony Froude: a road trip survey of America's human and natural geography from a Volkswagen camper van. With my family of 6 (4 kids including a newborn), we're driving around the minor highways of America visiting kith and kin and the occasional national park. We expect to be at it for six months at least. This week, we launched. I'll blog about it here if there is interest.

Our trip started at the old family home in Vancouver, Canada. The conversion of the garden to predominantly native flora is coming along nicely, though not yet on the level of some of the neighbors. The lupines, salal, and nootka roses were especially beautiful and prolific, and the vine maples are coming up slowly but surely. Many of the old Edwardian houses in the neighborhood are newly restored, with lush gardens in tastefully informal style.

The people there are still good looking and seemingly carefree, especially in summer. The neighborhood has a mixture of social classes of mostly British descent, with a large summer population of especially healthy Irish lads and lasses. One or two characters seemed down on their luck as usual, but nothing like the masses of human tragedy you find in other towns.

The first leg of the trip was the Salish Eagle ferry over to Mayne Island for a weekend with the extended family. The cabin we stayed in on a beautiful little bay belonged to some friends of the family. We rowed with the kids across to the far side of the bay, to a rugged point overlooking the Straight of Georgia. We saw the usual seals, cautious on their rocks, ready but reluctant to bounce off into the water to escape us apparent predators. The honeycomb cave rock formations in the sandstone just above high tide were striking and curious. I speculate that they must be the result of a bio-chemical process hardening the outer weathered shell of the rocks while the crystallizing salt spray works away at the interior. Some rocks were outright hollow. I've seen this only in the gulf islands.

On our way out, we visited the Japanese garden that commemorates the families that had lived in the gulf islands before they were imprisoned and robbed of their land in the second world war. It was beautiful, with newts in the pond to the delight of the children, but bittersweet. Elsewhere the island was generally beautiful and felt like it had its own strong Gulf Islands culture, though the full time residents must be mostly wealthy and retired, or back to the land hippie types from the 1970s, rather than being there for productive reasons.

Hopping on another ferry, we made our way to the Saanich peninsula. Southeastern Vancouver Island in general appears to be some kind of utopia. Everything is clean and green and well-run and lush. The people are attractive and friendly. The sun is warm and the weather is mild. The countryside is surprisingly pleasant relative to its lack of prestige or the usual trappings of wealth. Southwestern Vancouver Island is disproportionately Christian and I think dutch. It is also very close to the historic capital (Victoria) and probably also got a lot of good English settlers. The Island again has its own local culture, and a strong well of productivity and goodwill to draw on if it were ever called. But as with the incident with the Japanese, I fear any mobilization wouldn't be for the best.

We stayed with a couple different friends in the area, and I was reminded that brilliant capable people with philosophical taste still lurk in institutions you've never heard of maintaining infrastructure you didn't know we needed. It's nothing out of the ordinary, even, just a quiet backbone of good people that keeps everything going.

Taking the ferry across the straight to Port Angeles and the USA, the contrast was apparent. Even the handsome young man working the ferry terminal was marked out by his pit viper shades and blond mullet as a member of an American political tribe that I haven't seen in Canada. After him though, the human quality and prosperity visible in public noticeably declined. The towns we saw in the west of Washington mostly seemed run down and depressed. Still, the woody mountains of the pacific northwest are some of my favorite places.

Olympic national park is amazing of course. The forests are some of the lushest I've ever seen, despite growing up in the woods of British Columbia. Just overflowing with life in a way you love to see. We saw a bear, many deer, chipmunks, and some marmots.

Heading west towards Forks on the 101, the highlight was Crescent Lake. It has deep pure blue glacier water, but warm enough to swim at the pullouts by the side of the road. The lakes are one thing I love about these glaciated areas and will miss further south. On the far side of the lake we could see occasional summer cottages and a railway. We were inspired by Saanich and dreamed of one day living the country island dream like that somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. But probably this area isn't quite right.

Forks itself was ok. An unremarkable frontier town with some logging related industry and people of humble british and native stock. A sign told us "Twilight Central" was off to the left, but we saw no other sign of vampires. Despite its reputation for rain, it was rather too sunny for them to be out.

We saw various signs, many literal, that we were in Trump country. One handpainted barn-sign said "Recycle congress, replant jobs". An understandable sentiment. Overall, the American political spectrum is depressing. The poorer and harder put but basically capable populations rightfully dream of prosperity, respect, patriotism, and the old days of American industrial progress. But many in those areas also abuse drugs and destroy themselves, leave themselves and their places in a less than dignified state, and create much of their own misery (with the eager help of the powers that be, of course). This may be the natural result of being left behind without leadership by the more respectable folk, and their own elites being mercenary and politically useless.

Getting out to the coast and especially into Oregon, things pick up and start to look idyllic again. Scandinavian flags, architecture, and signage proudly declare nordic descent as a suggestive correlate. The comforting sight of intersectional pride flags marked our return to the white man's civilization.

But past the nordic ethnic areas, coastal Oregon was noticeably apolitical compared to the central cities, where they won't let you miss their leftist sympathies. Overwhelmingly the most important sociopolitical symbols were American flags and beautifully maintained weathered shingle cottages. Overt "luxury beliefs" seem to be more for the strivers and activists than the comfortable.

The whole north coast of Oregon is beautiful, with each small town quainter than the last, and each rugged beach more striking. Parts of it have an air of tasteful luxury that aspires to kinship with New England. Tillamook itself is more like Saanich in feeling rich in productivity rather than social power.

It was a good start overall. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what would be most interesting to document as we go along. Next week we'll continue down through the lost coast to San Francisco.

Thank you for the journal of the trip through the Pacific Northwest thus far. My expectation is that most of us here are urbanites who only venture into the hinterlands occasionally. I'm curious about the state of other left coast cities, as seen from a more central location. Are the ideological markers of intersectional pride flags on the major cities of the lost coast a defensive mechanism? A kind of gleichschaltung? How is governance? Perhaps also technology and industry? Though I understand that relevant surveys might be a tough sell to young children.

The idyllic description of your neighborhood in Vancouver is in stark contrast to the situation on Hastings, though I suppose that circumstances may have changed since the Teochew mayor got elected. It seemed to me from other accounts that luxuries were insufficient to defend against the collapse of the social fabric. This is quite specific to Vancouver but have there been more changes since you were last there?

>>1895
For interpretation of fashionble moralistic livery, gleichschaltung is certainly part of it, but it's not that forceful in most social circles. Summer 2020 felt like that, but where's BLM now? Rolling in cash, sure, but with little social currency. I think a lot of it is a) people just having leftist politics for various biological and social reasons, b) strivers trying to signal that they're up on the latest thing.

What I'm noticing, which may be my imagination, is that this stuff is rapidly moving downscale. The respectable types tolerate it and even pretend to celebrate it sometimes, but the people who get really into it are basically the lower class. It felt way more upscale a few years ago. The strivers are keeping up faster and faster with the new stripes on the flag, and so it's no longer a marker of education or social upstream. I predict some new logic will have to be found, because everyone basically understands the metagame of intersectionality now. I wonder what the game is with this "queer majority" thing that seems to be plastered wall to wall for the last few days.

As for seeing this on the ground, I'll write up some more on the ground reports for week 2 once I'm settled in SF.

>Hastings
Vancouver has its tragic neighborhoods and they seem to ebb and flow. I haven't noticed any recent inflection with mayors except the huge increase in random third world foreigners since 2015 or so. The changes in my neighborhood are what I mentioned: the gardens are getting nicer and the houses are getting restored. All very slowly though.