medulla oblongata

northwest gothic, burning barns, and the wet death.

Over half of my life has been spent in the Pacific Northwest, and the longer I’m here, the more I’m sure that this place is not passive. No natural place is— the land is not engineered for our comfort, and since modernity allows us a certain degree of separation from it, we are no longer engineered for our own survival within the land because we don’t need to be.

But I digress. Ultimately, if you spend enough time moving around a certain place, it gains anatomy. The entire Western half of the United States makes up a body. Where you are on the body— and how deep you are inside it— differs from place to place. The salt flats stretching across the Nevada-Utah border will always remind me of skin. Traveling through California can feel like traveling through an intestine. Colorado is made of bone. Idaho is made of hair. Wyoming is a mouth, dry teeth and wet flesh. Washington is a little more complicated, because there are actually two Washingtons. On the Eastern side of the Cascades, it’s the rolling curvature of an eyeball. On the Western side, where Washington becomes the Pacific Northwest, it’s a brain. And I’m not just bestowing the honor of being a brain upon it because it’s probably my favorite part of the country, even though it is. I say it’s a brain because its a fucking brain.

So no, this place is not passive. It is beyond not passive. The difference between the rest of the West and the Pacific Northwest is that even though everywhere is alive, the Pacific Northwest is awake. It is sentient in its living. You’re conscious of the environment wherever you go, but over here, the environment is conscious of you. It gossips about you behind your back. It watches you move through the spinal cord mountain ranges. It hides things away in coves and deep, dark forests, anticipating your arrival. It’s not the only place in the country like this— I’ve heard there are some spots in the South and on the East Coast that are also awake— but it is the only place in the West where it feels like it’s actively making decisions based on what you do.

Whenever my sibling or I asked, the distinction my parents made between the East and West was that if you were being haunted in the East it was a person, and if you were being haunted in the West it wasn’t human and never was. There’s a difference between a dead man taking residence in a tree and the tree itself being alive. Probably not the best idea to say that to a child, but they did it anyway, and I don’t regret hearing it. It aligned with the other things I had been told. I had inherited superstitions and folk tales from both my parents— faerie stories from a Celtic mother and Anglicized spirits and demons from a Lenape and Mexican father— so being told that there was something beyond human comprehension living in the woods with us seemed obvious. It was a natural progression of the pseudo-animism we unconsciously practiced.

If I lived somewhere different, somewhere less awake, maybe it would’ve been harder to believe. But I lived here, so I believed it. The environment supported the stories. If you’re told that the forest reclaims everything eventually and then, over the course of years and despite intense preservation efforts, you watch campsites and buildings and entire chunks of towns get swallowed by pines and lichen and fog, rotted into a mere suggestion of civilization by salt erosion and constant rain, you believe it. If you’re told that there are unknown forms of life just out of view and then, when you’re in a place where it’s physically impossible for there to be an echo, hear the tune you were humming rasped back to you note for note, you believe it. If you’re told that the land has secrets it doesn’t want told, stumble upon something’s remains, and suddenly find yourself unable to lead others there even though you’ve perfectly retraced your steps, you believe it.

I consider myself a skeptic, by the way. I am not typically a believer. And what I believe, in relation to the Pacific Northwest, cannot be categorized as supernatural or paranormal in good faith. The same goes for my beliefs about the world. What I do believe is that there are some things about the world that we don’t know how to explain, a rationale that will be parsed apart by science when science finally discovers it— things that only seem supernatural or paranormal because we don’t know how they tick, but fit into this planet and dimension so perfectly that discovery of it will fill the gaps in our knowledge about things we thought were unrelated.

I believe the world is a mysterious place only to humanity. I believe in the land more than I believe the people on the land. Most of all, I believe that when I was ten years old and singing quietly to myself in the rusted stomach of a beached shipwreck, which I probably shouldn’t have been doing, the ship really did sing back. It vibrated around me— not the vibration of shifting deeper into the sand or becoming extra-hazardous, but the vibration of sound coming from somewhere I couldn’t see. I don’t care if it was physics or a haunting or neurons in the brain of the Pacific Northwest. I trusted it and I still trust it today, because that’s the only way to exist in an unbelievable world. Trust in the cerebrum of trees, the glandular rock formations spiking out of the water, the streams like veins and fatty tissue of moss that glazes everything. If you can’t trust it, you can’t yourself.

But that’s no fun, is it? Let’s entertain the theoreticals and the abstracts. Say that demons and ghosts and undefinable spirits do exist. There are beings and they walk the earth and some of them even bait humanity into doing terrible, terrible things. This is not difficult to believe because we don’t like to think that the people we love are capable of doing those terrible things without an external force making them do it. Where in the body would those sentient beings live, evil or not? Do they occupy the entire thing all at once, wearing your body like a cheap suit? How does something made of energy expend energy? How much energy can it afford to spend before it dies, or some equivalent of death that we don’t know how to accurately label and describe yet?

Obviously, it’s all conjecture, so who knows. What I do know is that if I was a sentient ball of energy moving into a body, I would go for the most efficient place possible, which is the brain. And if the brain holds spirits— which it does, even if you don’t believe in the supernatural, because the brain is exactly where all of humanity’s demons come from— then the Pacific Northwest does too. Which also isn’t hard to believe at all.

If you asked me what it smells like here, I would tell you it smells wet and dead. The kind of death it is, rotting wood or rotting kelp or rotting meat, depends on where you are. Everywhere has a bit of all three, though. That’s part of the charm. Everything that dies here truly does act as a sort of whale fall, beginning to feed the ecosystem immediately after it dies, but the smell of all that growth is synonymous with dead things. In a healthy ecosystem, you can only have as much life as you have death— there will always be balance, unless an external force disrupts that balance. So when I say that the Pacific Northwest is firmly alive and awake, it doubles as saying that the Pacific Northwest is firmly dead and asleep. Inhuman, too. Never was, never will be.

You can’t kill the wet-dead. You can erase it in isolated areas through some form of total destruction, but once it’s gone, the land— and what remains from the destruction, because no destruction is ever total— is ceded back to the wet-dead.

I remember being fourteen and lighting a barn on fire. It had gone abandoned for ages because every time someone stepped foot inside, they would get a Bad Feeling. Paranoia, maybe, but when you’re forty miles away from any neighbors, the sensation of being watched is a little more alarming than usual. Any animals that stayed there would get sick or die. The wood was rotting and the windows were broken. It had to go. We doused it in gasoline, fire starter, hairspray, vodka, acetone— my skepticism didn’t save me from hearing scratching like something was clawing on the walls or from the Bad Feeling or from the hot air on the back of my neck, completely out of place in the dead of winter. But I didn’t die. We stayed up all night and well into the day, watching the fire crumple two stories of wood into 25 square feet of charred dirt, burnt lumber, and nails. Then we burnt everything that remained, just to be safe. The fire killed the wet-dead, if only for a moment, and beat the darkness all the way back into the tree line. We sat on folding chairs and assured ourselves that the scream coming from the fire was just the wood squealing from sudden dryness.

There have been other things, of course. Something wet grabbed my leg when I was alone in a bunker from World War II. My sibling and I couldn’t play certain songs in our room because their closet door would start rattling like something was trapped inside, and you can’t say it’s just the wind after the rattling consistently proves itself to only start once Pretty or You does. It left when they did. We shared dreams, too, always the night before someone we knew would die, but apparently things like that are a common experience for the women in our family. Things always happen to me about two weeks after my birthday, but I don’t like talking about those. And outside of the Pacific Northwest, in another part of the body, the things turn humanoid and then to dead humans. Hand prints on a mirror in a Montana bathroom. Cold spots in a Southern California summer. A dark figure on the prairie that drained the blood right out of my cousin’s face. My grandmother’s stories of ghosts and demons and my uncle being possessed, the visual of him foaming at the mouth and screaming just as haunting as the things in their old house. Hell, both sides of the family have enough supernatural tales to fill a book— different kinds of creepy, desert-creepy on one side and Alaska-creepy on the other, but all of them good enough to keep you up as a child.

And I did stay up. I considered them. I had faith in them, knowledge of them, which is different from believing them. It’s belief without credence. When teachers made us write short stories in class, mine consistently started with the idea of something big and old and incorporeal asleep in the earth, even in elementary school. I have faith in the stories I told myself. Especially the ones I told to survive myself.

For what it’s worth, I do think there’s something living under my feet. It’s asleep, but don’t mistake “sleeping” for “passive”. We do it a disservice by assigning it morality— it’s not good or evil, and it doesn’t care about the labels we give to actions. The thing in this corner of the world is big, powerful, and impossible to reach. It stretches itself through the mycelium network, which in turn stretches itself through the innumerable dead things that coat the region so thoroughly it’s impossible to escape them. The things that are awake on top of it walk lightly enough to not disturb it or speak in tongues too young to rouse it. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s something else. Whatever it is, it’s not human and it never was.

Didn’t I tell you? I believe in the land. I trust in the land. I have faith in the land. I live the brain of the land. And what’s God in the face of that?

Wet. Wet and dead.