Puget Sound

In the rain, in the night, across the water are the orange lights of the airport and Burien. The sky is orange too from their glow, or rather it's that color-wheel defying purple-orange. It is raining in the light northwestern way. I am high up on a balcony, on a hill, over the beach and the waves. It is windy tonight and you can hear the rushing of the water on the shore.
The spirit and vigor of the ocean is in the Puget sound expressed subtler tones. The plants and animals are the same, but gone are the massive rocks and the unending crash of the breakers. The weather is bleak, but less so. The waters of the sound calmer, navigable and in fact pacific.
The sound is so much more amenable to human settlement that it feels almost that man must have made it so. If the ocean is wild and untamed, the sound appears to be its domesticated form, shaped by thousands of years of careful human cultivation and selection for its most fruitful and benign traits.
It's not hard to imagine that the Salish people who lived in the inland waters of the northwest might have conceived of their home in the same way that other cultures regarded domesticated crops like wheat or corn, as a gift from the gods that elevates man above the rank of animals.