Raban on Northwest Nature in New Granta

In the Summer 2008 issue of Granta--theme: the new nature writing--Seattle adoptee Jonathan Raban has an Columbia-River-sized essay titled "Second Nature." He's comparing the wilderness of the American West (the Northwest, most specifically) with the more domesticated natural landscape of England--and subsequently, the frame of mind where you inhabit a spot, or are just passing through. In the Northwest, he says:

The real thing–-the pricelessly antique antique–-is deep forest, the river running wild, the open prairie. There is no second nature here to fall back on, only an either/or choice between nature as it was before we came and the dreck we’ve piled on it in the recent past.

On the way, he touches on carp fishing, WWII, J.M.W. Turner, urban wildlife, dam breaching, national forests, blue cities and red countryside, the Great American Desert, the Tri-Cities, WPA dams, Hanford radiation, Wood Guthrie's BO, eastern Washington wines...shoot, our fingers are seizing up and we're not even close to the end. It's exceptional writing, we think. But we're biased, because we arrived at the same conclusion in an epistle of a poem we wrote "to" English poet Ted Hughes while sitting in the Blackbird Bakery on Bainbridge Island:

Ted, across the street is a store called "Heart,"
with a pierced icon sign. I remember you said
she drew hearts on everything.
But this is no English coastal town to summon memories from.
Here pines stab upward. This land would forget us
all in a generation; still we pioneer, homestead.