Seattle, Mount Rainier & the First Time I Touched the Pacific

This was the big one, the first real trip I ever took with my boyfriend, Nicholas. A whole week in Washington State, and it packed in a mountain, an ocean, an old friend I’d only ever known through a screen, and a quiet promise I made to myself about where I was going next.

A rental car and a windshield we don’t talk about

We flew in near Mount Rainier and our very first order of business was renting a car from Enterprise. This is mildly confessional: on the drive out toward the coast, the windshield took a rock chip, and for a stressful little while we were quietly dreading the return, would they notice? They did not. Sorry, Enterprise. With that small drama behind us, the trip really began.

A mountain, a meadow, and the Skyline Trail

The centerpiece was Mount Rainier, and we eased into it. The drive in was its own event, the trees out there are enormous, old-growth giants, and our first day we did some lower-altitude hiking, just wandering through different stretches of forest to get our legs and our bearings. We based ourselves in the quiet, quaint little town of Eatonville near the mountain (with Ashford as the tiny gateway hamlet right at the park’s southwest gate), stayed at the small, homey Mill Village Motel, and did a proper grocery run for essentials before the big day, the kind of thing you do when you’re taking a real hike seriously.

Then we tackled the main event: the Skyline Trail up at Paradise, the park’s most famous hike, a roughly five-and-a-half-mile loop that climbs through subalpine wildflower meadows to enormous glacier and mountain views. Late August is right at the tail of wildflower season, so the meadows were still going, and the whole thing tops out around Panorama Point with Rainier filling the sky. We did the full loop, all the way up to where the trail starts turning snowy and icy. And here’s what I was proudest of: we didn’t get exhausted. We drank lots of water, ate lots of snacks, paced ourselves, and took an absurd number of photos, my shots from those Rainier days run into the hundreds. It was our first real bonding experience as a couple, the two of us against a mountain, and we crushed it together. There’s a short spur near the start to Myrtle Falls, the classic shot with the mountain framed right behind the water.

We also drove out to Snoqualmie Falls, a 268-foot waterfall east of the city, taller than Niagara, the one from the opening of Twin Peaks, and based ourselves around Kirkland on the lake.

Mary and Lucy, finally in person

One of the best parts had nothing to do with scenery. This is the trip where I finally got to meet Mary, my pandemic friend, in person, along with her dog Lucy. Our friendship was born on a wonderfully specific corner of the internet: FreeSO, the fan-revived version of The Sims Online (someone reverse-engineered the server logic, reopened the servers, and in some ways made the game better than the original). We met in that little resurrected world and bonded over the Japanese reality show Terrace House.

Terrace House is a Japanese reality series (it ran on Fuji TV and Netflix) where six strangers, three men, three women, share a house and a couple of cars while going about their real lives. It’s famously low-drama and gentle compared to Western reality TV: no manufactured fights, just people slowly getting to know each other. It’s also a soft, lovely window into everyday Japanese life, which, given where my head already was, was catnip.

Since we were in Seattle, we finally met up in person, and I got to meet Lucy, her dog, sweet thing, always covered in little bumps (the kind you can never quite tell are bugs or leftover from the cancer she’d had at some point). There’s a specific magic to all of it: hugging someone who’d been a rectangle on a screen for so long, scratching a dog you’d only ever seen in photos. The pandemic took a lot, but it handed me Mary, and Seattle is where the friendship finally got to be real.

There’s one more thing about Mary I have to get down, because it’s most of what we are: we’re the two biggest foodies alive. While we were there she cooked Mexican food for me and Nicholas, and it was the kind of meal you remember. To this day, basically every time we check in, one of us asks the other what’s for dinner? or what’s for lunch?, and if there’s any event at all on the calendar, the very first question is always what food are you having? (A favorite detail: Mary grew up right around where Toshi’s Teriyaki is now and had somehow never once had it, until recently. Now she gets it all the time with her grandkids, Jackson and Veronica.)

We also have a running bit that probably explains us better than anything. When too many days slip by, one of us just sends a single word: “Alive?” (or, just as often, the grimmer “Dead?”). It’s a joke and a nudge at the same time, and the answer is always some version of yep, still dead, plus whatever’s been keeping us busy. One day, of course, one of us actually will be, and that will be genuinely sad, and also, knowing us, a tiny bit funny. That’s the kind of humor we have.

Mary and I tell each other everything. I keep trying to describe what she is to me and failing, because she’s a little like a second mom, a little like a grandma, a little like a sister, but really she’s just a profoundly good friend, the kind that goes past the word friend. When I’m sick, she asks how I’m doing. When I’m sad, she knows the exact right thing to say. And it runs both ways: if she has a problem, I’m in, ready to do anything I can, advice, listening, whatever it takes. Age isn’t a division between us. Nothing splits us apart. We’re completely genuine with each other, and we’ve talked nearly every single day for years and years. Sometimes a few days slip past without a hello, but almost always, we’re talking.

The day I met the Pacific

We did the city, too, the waterfront and the wharf, Pike Place Market, all of it. But then we drove out to the coast, to Ocean Shores, a lovely little town of tiny homes that were built to be getaways, a planned resort community where someone had put one up as an Airbnb, and we took it. The land out there just runs out into miles of wide, flat, hard-packed gray beach (you can literally drive on the sand).

And there I finally did the thing I’d been wanting to do for years: I told Nicholas it had always been my dream to touch the Pacific Ocean. I’d been this close once before, at WWDC in San Francisco back in 2014, but I never managed to find the beach, and I left without ever reaching the water. This time I found it. I walked down and touched the Pacific with my feet for the very first time.

Here’s the thing that makes that moment matter: by this point I already had my trip to Japan booked. So somewhere out on that beach there’s a photo of me pointing west, out across the Pacific, toward Japan, half thinking it, half saying it out loud to the universe: I’m going there next. The ocean I was standing in was the same one I’d be flying over in a little over a year. It felt like aiming.

The teriyaki revelation

And then there’s the food discovery that genuinely reordered my life a little: Seattle teriyaki. I grew up loving teriyaki, sure, but in Seattle I discovered Toshi’s Teriyaki, and learned that Seattle basically invented its own style of it. A man named Toshi Kasahara opened the city’s first teriyaki place in 1976 and is credited as the godfather of the whole Seattle-teriyaki phenomenon, skewered grilled chicken over rice with a simple sweet sauce, cheap and perfect. Eating it where it started flipped a switch in me. My love of “all things teriyaki” has a clear before-and-after, and the after starts here.

Champagne and “raid the pantry”

Our Seattle hotel deserves a mention. We explored downtown Seattle, the wharf, the waterfront, and came back to a pretty nice place that handed us champagne on arrival (a little to Nick’s bemusement). Best of all was a perk they called “raid the pantry”: after 10 PM, you could head downstairs and grab a couple of free items, ice cream, snacks, whatever looked good, and bring them back to your room. It was awesome. The only catch was that by the end of each day we were so wiped from hiking and walking that poor Nick kept having to wait until late afternoon to muster the energy, a running little grievance of his. Worth it, though.

The takeaway

Our first big trip together could have been anywhere; that it was this, a glacier meadow, an internet friend made flesh, my feet in a new ocean while I pointed at my own future, makes it feel like a beginning in about four different ways at once. Nicholas and I were just getting started. So, it turned out, was everything else.