The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I’ve visited 36 states, but one is my favourite’
For its coastline, wild mountains and what was once the coolest city on Earth: Washington wins, says Chris Leadbeater
The very idea of a “favourite US state” is intensely subjective. Fifty is a big number – especially if you are Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, contemplating a half-century of hard-boiled eggs – and personal opinions will always vary. The potato fields of Maine are not the hickorysmoked swampiness of Louisiana; the country twang and lush mountain vistas of Tennessee are not the winter-glazed pizzazz of Minnesota and its Twin Cities. We all have our chosen places, and if you have spent time in America, you will have yours.
In the course of two decades as a travel journalist, I have wandered through 36 states – and I have plenty of affection for the four pieces of the jigsaw I have name-checked above.
Nonetheless, I do have a favourite, and it is not in New England, the Deep South or the Midwest. It sits in the Pacific Northwest, a long way from Nashville and New Orleans. It is very different to the states east of the Mississippi and below Mason-Dixon. It is an outsider, and I like the fact that, whenever I write about it, I have to put the word “state” in brackets to distinguish it from the capital city. With which it also has little in common.
Like many who came of age in the 1990s, I fell for Washington (state) via its music. I can’t recall when I first heard the word “Seattle”, but it quickly went from being a city I didn’t know existed to one of the planet’s cultural hotspots. The groups that emerged from it – Nirvana, Pearl Jam et al – seemed a separate breed from the bighaired guitar-bands of the 1980s, glowering in photos, indifferent to your love. A marketing trick, of course, but it worked. For a while, Seattle looked like the coolest place on earth.
I wanted to see it. At the start of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged show in 1993, Kurt Cobain, ever the grouch, introduced About A Girl by saying: “This is off our first record. Most people don’t own it.” I did (and do) own the album in question (Bleach). But, to my ears, the comment sounded more than an ungrateful jibe at the late-coming fans who had made the band so successful. “You don’t know us; you can’t until you’ve seen where we come from.” I doubt he did mean that, and he would soon find a desperately destructive way to escape people second-guessing his words. But my fascination with Washington lingered, long after Cobain was dead, long after grunge had ceased to be the musical thing du jour.
It would take me more than a decade to get there. By then Seattle was no longer newsworthy, but it welcomed me as the city I’d imagined it to be.
Perhaps “welcomed” is the wrong term. The Seattle I’ve experienced never feels broad-of-grin. But it shares qualities with those bands of 30 years ago. It is arty and clever – in its bars, restaurants and galleries (Seattle Art Museum, with its modern installations is, to my mind, as fine an institution as any in New York). It is hard-working – Pike Place Market is a tourist attraction, but walk around it and you will see that it is as much a vast fishmongers as a place to eat. It knows its worth, but isn’t obsessed with praise. The fact that Starbucks originated opposite the market – but if you ask a local about a good latte, they will point you towards a brilliant independent coffee shop – is, if you will, “so Seattle”. Contrary to image, it has a sense of humour, too. On my last visit, in a damp August, a cider company was running a billboard campaign that declared its product to be “perfect for those 17C Seattle summer days”.
There is, of course, a Washington beyond Seattle, and its weather is integral. There is a reason the Olympic Rainforest is so-named, sprawling over its craggy peninsula with a verdancy that would be impossible without the soggy mood swings. Head across to Olympic National Park, taking a ferry from the downtown dock to Bainbridge Island or Bremerton, and you might forget you were ever in a city, the treeline rapidly obscuring the skyscrapers back on the east bank of Puget Sound. What awaits is utterly removed from caffeine and guitar chords. Mount Olympus wins no prizes for originality of identity (perhaps the lightning that flashes above it is Zeus asserting copyright), but hike the trails that tame its sides, and you could be in another continent.
Then there is the coast. Washington has 157 miles of it. Like California, it faces the Pacific, but it looks nothing like the golden sands of Santa Monica, sounds nothing like the jangle of a Beach Boys song. This is the ocean’s edge as a war of attrition, the waves assaulting the shingle as if taking its presence as a horrible insult. Ruby Beach is especially beautiful, the outcrop in its bay doing its best to stem the flow, the corpses of giant fir trees littering the shore – their trunks smashed back to land by the tide. It does not need a sunset to make it a formidable view.
I have followed this line of surf all the way south to the “border” with Oregon. Past Forks (the setting for the Twilight books and movies; the gloom between the branches around this former logging town is a plausible backdrop to a tale of vampires), before cutting inland into Aberdeen, where Cobain grew up amid these shadows.
There is more I need to see. Recently, I chanced on a documentary about the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, one of the deadliest seismological events in US history. The 8,363ft (2,549m) beast behind it has long intrigued me, and is on my to-do list.
Perhaps mentioning this paints Washington as too dark a picture; all ash and cloud. And there is endless light to go with the shade, not least the wineries of the Columbia Valley. But a destination where a volcanic kraken broods is also “so Washington” – that outsider vibe rearing its head as starkly in angry geography as in the bassline to Come As You Are.
Chris Leadbeater is The Telegraph’s travel correspondent
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