Des Moines, Washington (just south of Seattle)

The woman who checked me in to the motel last night was not a native speaker of English. The hotel, right next to the Midway Casino and Restaurant, stands on a little pocket of reservation; the woman who checked me in was a Native American.

Seattle/Tacoma ariport has electronic signs giving information in some East Asian language (Japanese?).

It’s fall, so you see the occasional tree with bright red or yellow leaves: sweet gum, red maple, sugar maple, ash. But the most common trees are dark firs, or trees that drop big brown leaves without any show.

Weather today: Clouds. Clouds and mist. Sunny and warm. Clouds. Partly sunny. Clouds.

A different aesthetic from the East Coast: –no hulks of old brick industrial buildings; –trees everywhere; –bright colored accents on houses; –balconies even on cheap apartments and condos; –plenty of trees in the trailer parks. Even the ugly buildings seem to fit the landscape. A differnt landscape from New England: the land drops dramatically in big steps and swoops down to Puget Sound, which glows silver gray under the broad cloudy sky.

It’s a world away from the south coast of Massachusetts.