Cut down all the firs that suck up the rain and suddenly you’re hip deep in mud during the nine months of the year that it rains. It’s a devouring mud: the city builds boardwalks, lays cobblestones, and the mud swallows them whole. Potholes yawn wide in the intersections, deep enough to drown in, and a cottage industry springs up to raft pedestrians to the other side of the street across the reeking, stagnant water.

You didn’t move out west because you were skilled or determined to live a clean life: those folks are doing just fine back east. It was the losers who moved west, the weirdos, the loners, the queers, and the outcast, folks who couldn’t be bothered to clean the mud off their boots until they physically couldn’t lift their feet anymore and who were fine if more than half the water that washed back in with the tide was their own discarded shit, piss, semen and menstrual blood.

But if you didn’t mind the stench and the theft and the rain, you could mostly get on with your own personal vision of life. Change your hair, your name, your gender, your fortune, if you wanted. Sell blue jeans to gold rushers and tar soap to loggers and walk to work through the ghosts of the people you murdered to get here. Tell yourselves, once you’ve adapted to skunk cabbage milk and rhododendron honey, that you’re a special breed of survivor.