A beer ad caught my attention this morning, and I watched the whole thing. That’s good advertising! Except for the fact that it didn’t motivate me to buy any beer at all. It’s titled “The Most Washington Man in the World,” and some of it was true.
I remember refusing to own or use an umbrella, but it was more because I was going to get wet no matter what…but later I learned it was probably more because Washington rain was a continuous gentle drizzle. Midwestern rain is about getting pelted with fierce wind-blown drops, and you need shelter. Worse, I experienced southern rainstorms along the gulf coast, and no way can you ignore that and amble along.
The stuff about beer in the ad is nonsense. When I was growing up, the only debate was between two mass produced cheap beers, Rainier and Oly, and I didn’t care much about either. I was drinking coffee from an early age, though, and yeah, we grew up with Sasquatch lore and would look for him in the woods. Never found him. Also, I-5 is a hellish choke point.
Otherwise, though, the scenes of misty fog and big trees on steep hillsides and seastacks off the coast did make me a little bit homesick.
It’s an odd phenomenon. I lived near Seattle from birth to age 22. I’m 68 now, which means I spent 46 years living in Oregon, the Midwest, Utah, and Pennsylvania, and none of those places made the impression on my identity and self that the Pacific Northwest did. I suspect that if we asked my kids, my oldest might have a strong connection to Philadelphia, but the other two are Minnesota kids. There is such a thing as a sense of place that get fixed in our brains at an early age.
Ah, for the mating calls of the tree-squid in the morning!
So PZ experienced his own version of the Duff / Fudd beer rivalry.
Yes, and neither of the beers were very good. Watery, weak, barely beer.
I grew up with Jax and Pearl. Occasionally, Dad got all fancy with Pabst Blue Ribbon.
I grew up in Kent (the original one in South-East England) until I was ten, but I have no sense of belonging to the place. I hardly ever go back, and I find it quite horrible when I do. I have much more connection with Somerset (South-West England), where we moved to and where I still consider home and go back to in the holidays between teaching terms. Somerset is much more rural and idyllic and laid-back, and you’re much less likely to bump into wild Tories. I spent seven years living in Oxford for university (South-Central), and it felt more like home than Kent, but still not home. Now when I go back it’s the younger generation’s place, not mine, because my experience was so tied to the university and I’m only loosely affiliated as an alumnus now. These days I spend more of my life in Surrey (also South-East, but more central), where I work, now, but Surrey is almost as bad as Kent, in some ways worse (it’s more affluent, full of wealthy Tories).
I went to the North once. I didn’t like it.
Rainier had great commercials.
I’m not disputing that claim, but I don’t think I fit that mold. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. I went to college in East Tennessee and worked a couple of years in Sarasota, Florida then back to Jacksonville for several years. I married another Jacksonville native, who came out west with a friend and visited San Francisco for 22 hours before returning to Jacksonville. We moved to San Francisco within a year. I had never been to “The City” before crossing the Bay Bridge mid-evening in late August 1974. We drove immediately to the North Beach-Chinatown area, had a bite to eat, and went to City Lights Books. I’ve been here ever since. San Francisco was that “place” in my brain even though I had never seen it. I’ve only been back to Jacksonville for short visits, and haven’t been back at all since 2005. And I have no interest in going back. But then Jacksonville is a sucky town while San Francisco is cool.
Also, the weather. Did I mention the weather? Like I said, San Francisco is cool. And virtually no mosquitoes…ever. What a great place!
I also grew up in Kent, the new one, which got it’s name from the fact that it was a major hop growing region. Despite that, I really dislike IPAs.
I lived in Illinois for my first 9 years, then Oklahoma until I was 30.
I now live near PZ’s old stomping grounds on the east side of Seattle.
I have absolutely no desire to move back to either of those other states.
In my opinion (no studies that I know of) the rain in the last 30 years has gotten more like what we would get in the Midwest. Still mostly gentle misting, but now we do occasionally have heavy pounding rains with some thunder and lighting that we never use to get. And instead of 3-5 days with the temperature over 90, we get 3 weeks of it every summer.
Wife and I are both Hogtown brats who’ve lived in Ottawa for the last 45 years. Over that period, we’ve visited Toronto frequently to visit family, though that’s likely to end now, since the last family member there passed away the other week. And every time we went, I’d think (usually while stuck in traffic on the 401) how glad I was not to live there any more, or indeed anywhere in the GTA. So somehow, my native town isn’t “home”.
Oddly, the place I do feel an attachment to is the North of England (particularly the Dales), where all my ancestors came from, despite not having spent more than a few weeks there, cumulative. So take that, @5.
The north of England is my ancestral homeland, on my father’s side, but the one foreign place I felt most at home was Galway, in Ireland.