'Being is bliss' in Timothy Egan's 'The Good Rain' — and still is three decades later

This is the KUOW Book Club, and we’re wrapping up "The Good Rain" by Timothy Egan. I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell.

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runing the passages I want to share from each month's KUOW Book Club pick is always a chore for me. I frequently pause while I read to scribble down this illustrative paragraph or that poignant quote into my notebook. Then, I have to cull my darlings, these words I took time to transcribe by hand, and decide which are worth dwelling on for a third time in my analyses.

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But there was one line in Egan's "The Good Rain" that has stuck in my head:

Egan drops this line into a description of the world around him, as seen from "the American side of the Tweed Curtain on the west shores of San Juan Island." Here's the full passage:

On its own, the one tidbit I picked out of this — "Being is bliss." — is almost trite, like someone saying, "Oh, buck up, buttercup! Life ain't that bad!"

But taken as a whole, punctuated with landmarks and an atmosphere residents of the Pacific Northwest probably felt in their bones as they read the full passage, the line morphs. It doesn't say, "Life ain't that bad!" It says, "Life was once not what you wanted it to be, so you came here. And isn't it a miracle, a kind of bliss, to get to witness this corner of the world?" It carries the awe people like me, who are not from the PNW, feel when they arrive here, like Theodore Winthrop before us — the "ghost" Egan followed across the region to tell its story.

"As long as I have a pulse and can run and climb, I'm going to keep doing this research by walking around," Egan told me. "A lot of people just read the sources, the secondary sources, and that's good. I do that. I go to the libraries. I like doing all the research, but then I have to go to the places. I want you to know what it smells like, what it feels like, what the wind temperature is, what the people eat, all these textural details that bring a non-fiction book alive."

Ho, buddy, "The Good Rain" has texture all right.

Egan follows the path Winthrop set out on long before places like Olympic National Park had that designation to protect its vitality. Tracing Winthrop's journey, as documented in "The Canoe and the Saddle," Egan lends the reader his senses: He's bucked and drenched in the violent waters off Cape Disappointment, he soars over the wreckage of Weyerhaeuser clearcuts that are mistaken for the destruction left by Mount St. Helens' eruption, and he feasts on the bounty of the land out east, apples and wine and fresh-caught trout.

All the while, he set out to answer one big question: "Are we going to do what the early Seattleites did [to the land], and grind it, chain it, kill it, dam it, cut it?"

Will will we make the same mistakes and try to change this land, or will we heed Winthrop's prophecy and be changed?

Egan quotes Winthrop:

Honestly, I didn't realize until now, as I write this, that Egan had borrowed those words about bliss from Winthrop. That just speaks to how immersed Egan was in the journey and the ghost he followed.

RELATED: Egan's 'The Good Rain' is still a prescient exploration of the PNW more than 30 years later

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gan joined me on Oct. 24 for our second live KUOW Book Club author interview in front of a small audience. I wouldn't do this job if I didn't get a little giddy from reading great literary works and getting to talk to their creators. But this was special because it gave us a chance to bring Egan's first book, published in 1990, into 2024.

"One thing that people often cite still, I try to define what the Northwest is," he said. "My definition was the Northwest is wherever the salmon could get to. ... If we can't keep this thing that sustained people for 10,000 years alive, you know, how do we become the stewards of this place?"

The answer seems to be: by heeding the warnings of people like Chief Sealth, for whom Seattle was named and who warned President Franklin Pierce: "continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in waste."

And you may be heartened to know, reader, that Egan sees signs that we are listening at last.

"When I was writing this book, we were in the middle of this slaughter of our old-growth forests," he said. "These are biological mysteries. These are complex systems, evolved over thousands of years. These are 500-year-old trees, things that have been standing before white man put a foot on this continent. And we were just knocking them down. ... That's what the timber wars were all about. It's over. We don't kill old-growth forests anymore."

He recalled editorial meetings at The New York Times, deciding to put his reporting on spotted owls on the front page, and Billy Frank Jr., once an "outlaw" for fighting for tribal rights, now one of two figures representing Washington in the Capitol's National Statuary Hall.

There's still plenty of work to do to truly live up to Winthrop's prophecy. But "The Good Rain" surely kept the old ghost's spirit alive.

Egan hoped so: "My hope still is that 200 years from now, if we're still crawling around this planet, someone will go back and use my marker in time."