And Puget Sound Is Named For?

The British arrival into the Pacific Northwest in 1792 was a very big deal, for many, many reasons. Chief amongst them? The names of many of the places that we take for granted today had their origins with the British Captain who led his ship into the region.

George Vancouver was the captain of the HMS Discovery, a 10-gun survey ship, who was tasked with wresting control of the Pacific Northwest from the Spanish, either by diplomacy or by force. The Discovery used this opportunity to explore the Pacific Northwest, in hopes of better establishing their claims to the region.

Vancouver used this as his impetus to start claiming and naming everything in sight, with hopes of insinuating the British and British influences into the region.  The Puget Sound was so named due to the existence of 3rd Lieutenant Peter Puget, who served beneath Captain Vancouver.  Puget explored the waters of the area in longboats from the Discovery, while Captain Vancouver busied himself with other duties.

The name "Puget Sound" was initially meant only to refer to the region of water south of Tacoma, with the waters north of present-day Tacoma to be called Admiralty Inlet. The latter name fell out of disuse, and Puget Sound soon represented all of the waters south the the Port Townsend and Fort Casey.

Seattle - How Now Puget Sound

 

The location of Seattle is unique insofar as it is one of the largest cities in America to be situated upon a sound. It’s not the largest city in America to have this distinction – that’d be New York City, who finds itself on the west end of the Long Island Sound. 

What defines a sound is dependent upon which geological definition you use; either the Scandinavian definition, which means a strait, or the narrowest part of a straight, or the 18th century English definition, which means a sea inlet that contains islands. This is the definition used for the Puget Sound.

This definition helps explain the fact that Seattle is a coastal city located upon the Pacific Ocean, even if it is around one hundred miles or so from open sea. This is a fact that is easy to ignore at times due to looking across the sound and seeing various aspects of the Olympic Peninsula.

Puget Sound is defined as all waters of the Hood Canal, the Admiralty Inlet, the Possession Sound, and the Saratoga Passage, among others. Essentially, if one were to draw a line from Mount Vernon, to Port Townsend, Puget Sound would include all waters of the inlet from that line, down to Budd Inlet in the south by Olympia.  That’s a body of water that stretches approximately one hundred miles.

Seattle is located on the Eastern Edge of the Puget Sound, and this aspect of the city is the primary, but certainly not only, defining geologic feature of the region.

All of the Puget Sound region was shaped in larger part due to the Fraser Glaciation. Evidence of glaciation is easily seen today all along the Puget Sound area. The Fraser glaciation lasted about 10,000 years and consisted of 3 periods of ice expansion (called “stades”) and 2 ice recessions (called “interstades”). The Puget Sound was shaped by the Puget Lobe portion of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet that was part of the Fraser Glaciation that shaped much of the Montana, Idaho, Washington, British Columbia, the Yukon Territory, and Alaska.  The Puget Lobe portion of this ice sheet made it as far south as modern-day Olympia.  As it retreated over the course of many thousands of years, it geologically shaped many of the water ways of the region, including Puget Sound, as well as Lake Union, Lake Washington, and Lake Sammamish to the east.

The retreat also helps explain the hilly nature of the region, though not so much the mountainous portions, whose shapes were created under different forces.

What a Cultural Explorer Explores

Yesterday, I wrote about how I define the cultural, and how it relates to when we travel. Obviously culture is a big topic, but we can use some of the more high-level aspects of culture to quantify what to consider when we visit a new place.  The idea here is to avoid going to new places uninformed, and waiting for the city or region come to us, when instead we travelers should be the ones doing the leg work in trying to understand the places that we go.

The starting point for me is the list of L. Robert Kohls' aspects of culture. His list here isn't in particularly in depth, but for our purposes, we don't need it to be. It just needs to be a starting point.  To revisit, Kohls says that culture consists of the following:

“- Manners
- Customs
- Beliefs
- Ceremonies
- Rituals
- Laws (written and unwritten)
- Ideas and thought patterns
- Language
- Arts and Artifacts
- Tools
- Social Institutions
- Religious Beliefs
- Myths and Legends
- Knowledge
- Values
- Concept of Self
- Morals
- Ideals
- Accepted Ways of Behaving”

In reviewing the above, I've arrived at a list of aspects of cities that either inform, or result from some, if not all, of the above. There's some overlap here. This is also my baseline position, one that will likely evolve as I explore this path in more depth and detail as we go forward.

Firstly, we have the environment, which is the foundation of culture.  They include aspects such as:

• Geology
  • Climate
  • Indigenous Wildlife
• Geography
• Time Zone

Then we have the people who inhabit this environment, and the various sub-tribes found within each area.

• Founding of the region/city by people
• Who arrived later
• How they categorized themselves
  • Communities
    • Majorities
    • Minorities

People tend to create or provide either goods or service to the community that has been created. This includes the following:

• Shelter/Architecture
• Food
• Craft/Goods
  • Guilds/Small businesses
• Entertainment/Art
  • Literature
  • Music
  • Dance
  • Theater
  • Visual Art
    • Paintings
    • Sculpture
  • Film/Television
  • Sport

People then use some type of institution to hold sway over them. They include:

• Governments (to provide guidance and leadership over known issues found within the geographic area that they claim)
  • Politics
  • Military
  • Police
    • Crime
• Religion (to provide guidance and leadership over the metaphysical)
  • Rituals
• Economics (to provide guidance surrounding the exchange of goods and services)
  • Businesses (large)
• Industries
  • Banks

Finally, after some course of time, all of these items above result in a history, in some form or another. Depending upon one's taste and knowledge,  this history can have varying degrees of importance. But the key thing to understand about history, is that it is theghostly remains of culture.

All of these items intermingle with one another to create a melange that results in a "place".  And of course, life isn't as simple as the list above might suggest. Each item listed very likely informs another. For example, a State Fair may have resulted from a group of guilds that agreed to meet once a year to celebrate the harvest as well as sell various wares. They invited many members of the community to attend, and the government may have provided a subsidy to support any cost overruns, or a centralized place where the fair could occur. As with anything surrounding humanity, there's always a complex intermingling of cultural ideas at play with one another, far to complex to quantify simply.

Let's take a quick rundown of a few touristy places and/or events, and see if we can place them into a category listed above.

Grand Canyon - Geologic

Crossing a border - Geographic/Governement

Eating a meal - small business/food/Indigenous Wildlife

Oktoberfest - Crafts/Goods/Government/Industry

Broadway show - Art/Theater/Music

Gettysburg - History/Military/Government

Soccer Match - Sports/Entertainment/Community

The point of this exercise here is to point out that using culture as the basis of travel, one can create an itinerary of sorts, based off of their interests as they relate to the lists above. 

In fact, that's what I entirely intend to do. Not just for myself, but for all of us.

Culture - The Language of Life

So here's a loaded question - What is culture? A person can spend their entire life trying to find an answer to that query. I'm not planning on going into that level of detail, but for those of us intent on exploration of new and possibly strange lands, it's an important part of the traveling experience.  As I have noted before, the moment one steps off of the airplane, one is immediately immersed in the culture of that land.

When some of us think of culture, we end up thinking of the arts - ballet, classical music, opera. Ifone has an appreciation of these, we tend to think of these people as 'cultured'. However, not only is this a misappropriation of the term, it leaves out aspects of our society that have far more impact upon the day-to-day lives of every day folks like you and I. We are all cultured.

Culture is the language of life. It is how we communicate our interpretation of the world to others.  Yes, art is the most obvious example of this, but so is our collective morality, which ends up informing where we put our faith. Sometime we put our faith in religion, other times with government, other times with our community or immediate environment, sometimes we even put our faith in individuals.  Our expression of these faiths results in the cultural.

"All right," you may be saying. "How does this affect the poor, lonely traveler?"

"How does it not?" I would respond. Your first decision on how to get to your destination is steeped in culture. Stepping into a car in order to get to the airport is an exercise in the cultural. The car is an invention created to a quick method of transportation between extended distances because the natural environment, as well as our natural bodies, are ill-equipped to get from point A to point B in a timely manner. The car you drive reflects either your values and class status. The roads your drive upon inform your interaction with that environment, and may even dictate where you can live.

"Okay," you say, a little exasperated.  "But this doesn't tell me about the place I was going to visit."

Fine, fine. If you head to Tucson, and try out Sonoran Hot Dogs? You'll be eating a food that found its way from Sonora University, where it fed the local students cheaply, to the streets of Tucson by those who had come from that region.  It is a dish created from the local resources that reflect the region.

Every time you cross a border, or go through customs, you are embarking on a bureaucratic process implemented by a local government designed to control the influx of visitors. Governments are but an legislative extensionof the culture of the local citizenry.

If you go to London, and visit St. Paul's Cathedral? You're visiting the manifestation of the local citizen's interpretation of the unknown communicated through architecture.

If you go to Tokyo, and take your beer along with you as you walk the streets, you're indulging in the city's (and by extension, its citizens) lack of concern over public consumption of alcohol. My examples here are admittedly high-level. I can go on, but hopefully these communicate how culture informs the traveling experience.

Don't take my word for it. L. Robert Kohls, in his primer Survival Kit For Overseas Living, defines culture in the following way:

“ ...we can see that a particular culture would consist of at least the following:

- Manners
- Customs
- Beliefs
- Ceremonies
- Rituals
- Laws (written and unwritten)
- Ideas and thought patterns
- Language
- Arts and Artifacts
- Tools
- Social Institutions
- Religious Beliefs
- Myths and Legends
- Knowledge
- Values
- Concept of Self
- Morals
- Ideals
- Accepted Ways of Behaving

In short, culture is the total way of life of any group of people.”

The food you eat while visiting New York City? That's an artifact of the culture. The bus you use to get from the airport to the hotel? That's a tool used for transportation. Have you visited Oktoberfest in Munich? That's both a ritual and a ceremony.

My point here is that everything we do when we travel is related to the cultural. And if you're someone who seeks out these things, the experience you have is exponentially greater if you understand the hows and whys of these things and how the end up impacting the place your visiting.

Culture and the Traveller

The other day I posted my take on the reasons people travel, conveniently distilling them down to four types of motivation.  I wish to explore the one category to which I feel applies to myself - Those who go towards something. In the post, I defined them as such:

“These are the people who travel in order to find things of value in the place they are visiting. These are the cultural explorers - those who seek experiences either new, or similar (but different in degrees) to those found in their back yard. These are the people who go to Paris to see art up close, or to Tokyo to explore the restaurant scene. These are the people who seek out the culture of the places to which they are heading.”

A point of fact is that we all wade into foreign culture the moment we step out of our preferred method of travel and arrive in the city or region other than our own. It's as unavoidable as dealing with the weather. To be cognizant of it, however, is a skill unto itself.

There are two possible reasons how this manifests itself -

a) The person traveling seeks to experience something completely new and novel to them, that they can't get at home. Think about the tropical locations that many people head towards in order to avoid the snow and wet found at home during the winter months, or the festivals that are particular to a specific city or region.  These are but the most obvious examples out of many.

b) The person traveling seeks out similar experiences to those available at home, and either consciously or subconsciously compares the two.  This can be as exotic as having breakfast in Hong Kong, to as subtle as seeing how the news is reported in Chicago as compared to ones home town.  The experiences may having one or two common denominators, but the local culture has added new variables that make the experience different to some degree.  As an example, visiting a coffeehouse in Genoa, Italy is a different experience than visiting a coffee house in Seattle, Washington, even though the core activity (getting a cuppa) is exactly the same.

Guide books are notoriously challenged when trying to deal with this aspect. They cannot talk about culture in the way that would benefit the reader, almost by design. If they tried to explain the hows and whys of every location they recommended, the resulting book would be too large to carry around.  The result of this design flaw is that they may recommend that one visit the Dom Cathedral in Cologne, but cannot provide little more than cursory insight into the location. The result? People visit the cathedral, and can appreciate the aesthetics of the place, but have little reference to how is was made, and why it is important to the local populace. 

This context is important, and this dissonance between what the traveler sees and intuits and the local citizenry knows to be, matters to some degree.  If all I do is appreciate a locations aesthetics, without seeking to understand any more than that, then my only take away from that city is that they have some interesting things to do or see.

From my perspective, this does the region or city visited a disservice. My goal with this site is to address that disservice, and help provide the context that connects a foreigner to the land being visited.

Culture is context, and it takes some measure of effort on the part of the traveler to understand that.

Sowing the Seeds of Fear

The title is borrowed from Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times in relation to the Paris attacks of November 13th, 2015. In it, the dear Professor offers a straight up assessment of the situation:

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.

The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire.

It's easy to look upon the images on the news, and sit, in real-time, on Twitter and Facebook as the events unfurl in front of us.  We end up aghast.  It is easy to let that initial response be our de facto position on this tragedy.  But it is not a sustainable position.

Or, we can tut-tut those who fail to feel equally bad about the tragedies that occur in other nations of the world, including those not often covered by our for-profit, grab-all-headlines-at-any-cost news networks. This approach is also not helpful in any manner other than to allow us to feel more worldly and more informed than others. It does nothing to address the responses others felt as they watched the violence erupt in a city that is culturally significant to many people who don't call France home.

What happened is first and foremost a tragedy, and sadness and disgust are understandable responses.  But we do get to choose how to move on from it.  "Fear" as a response, as Krugman reminds us, is exactly what the perpetrators want. This is evil, through and through.

However, just as evil, is the leveraging of these events for political gain, and to use the pain and sadness of others to justify a position that is at odds with our own. Fear allows this leveraging just as much as seeing the world through some fundamentalist lens.

So what is the proper response to these and other similar events? From my own perspective, I mourn the losses, and understand what is being attacked. Look at the places attacked - a football game, a full restaurant, a rock concert - and ask the following:

"Should I not go to sporting events, concerts, or a restaurant, in order to be perfectly safe?"

All of these places are culturally significant to a great many of us. Do we really want to alter our enjoyment of these places because some fundamentalist with a chip on their shoulder thinks we should feel less safe?

Now let's expand that question a bit - Do we really want to allow these people to alter our behaviors just because they reminded us that life is fragile?  This insight their act provided isn't new to anyone.

From where I am sitting, the only response to these atrocities is to be sad, be brave, and be a citizen of the world. At its core, we are all entitled to what the entirety of life has to offer, regardless of what an idiot with a gun and a dogma happen to believe.

Context of Travel

We tell ourselves that there could be many reasons for travel, but in actuality, there are only a few.

1) Those required to go:

These travelers are defined mostly by business travelers, although people who travel for weddings, funerals, and other obligations not dictated by the traveler.  In other words, had a certain obligation not existed, they would not have traveled at all.

2) Those who go in order to go:

Checklist travelers, or people who go whose motivations are to say that they went. These are the people who count how many states they've been too, but can't provide any insight of value to why they went beyond the act of travel itself.

3) Those who go towards something:

These are the people who travel in order to find things of value in the place they are visiting. These are the cultural explorers - those who seek experiences either new, or similar (but different in degrees) to those found in their back yard.  These are the people who go to Paris to see art up close, or to Tokyo to explore the restaurant scene.  These are the people who seek out the culture of the places to which they are heading.

4) Those who go away from something:

These are the people wholook to get away from their life, if only for a moment.  It is travel for the sake of breaking up the monotony of every day life.  These are the people who go to resorts, or travel on cruises with no ports of call. These are even the people who head out to the movies for two hours or so.

While it would be simple to put ourselves in one category or another, but life is not as simple as that.  While our preference may be for one or another, the fact is we carry all of these traits, to some degree or another. Rare is the person who fits into only one of these categories. Rare, but not unheard of.

For our purpose, we want to focus on the third group, and help them find the new experiences specific to the places where they are visiting.  We want to push beyond the question of "where?", and dig deeper, asking the questions of why and how as well.  The goal isn't to tell readers where they should sleep, eat, or visit. Rather, it's to point out the places that define the city or region, and give voice to the culture that helped shape those places.  It is the art of traveling with context.

To put it another way, in form of a metaphor - One can go to a museum, and look at the paintings, and come to some measure of appreciation of their aesthetics.  But that only provides a cursory overview of the blood, sweat, and tears that went in to effort of creation of the pieces exhibited. Now imagine visiting a museum that showcased Picasso's work, and provided details of Picasso's life,  supplemental work that showed the influences upon him, and work that had been influenced by Picasso. That is context. While one may leave the museum in the first example feeling pleased, those who went to the museum in the second example would have been enriched in ways that the first example could not have provided.

It is this second perspective that we wish to foster in travel - to provide context to travelers that enrich their experiences. Places do not evolve in a vacuum - there are continuous influences that shape each place into what it is today. 

Our goal at Tugoto is to explain such influences . This is as close to a mission statement that we have.

Mostly Meaningful

A few days ago, the sub-reddit called r/travel asked the following question: Who are your least favorite type of travel snobs?

A reader named Actuary_420 provided this response -

People who think that travel is anything but self-indulgence. I love traveling because it's a break from reality, not because it's some sort of meaningful journey.

I thought about their response quite often in the past few days, and then stepped back a bit. Why did this answer pique my curiosity? There's actually several points in this one answer, and I want to break them down, bit by bit.

Is travel a self-indulgence? Absolutely. But so is owning a television, or having a connection to the Internet in order to post on Reddit. Self indulgences aren't bad, per se. As with all indulgences, it depends on how one moderates them. Indulgence is about gratification, a sense of pleasure or satisfaction with a cost of some sort, usually a combination of time or money.

It is also a break from reality. The humdrum nature of many of our lives can be broken up by visiting someplace new, However, this conveniently sets aside the fact that some people's reality includes regular and routine travel. I need only to explain how many times I've been to Tucson, Arizona for business (twenty), and how quickly the bloom was washed off of that particular rose, in order to provide a contrary perspective to that point.  But that's not what niggled in the back of my mind.

It was the statement that travel isn't a meaningful journey that set my mind off. Really? One shouldn't ascribe meaning to travel? Granted, landing at Schipol probably shouldn't result with a blinding light from the heavens, with Handel's Messiah blaring in the background.  But neither is it a zero sum gain.

Travel has meaning due in large part because it's a break from reality. It has the ability to show us something different from what we take for granted. It doesn't need to be earth shattering, nor does it need to provide insight into some sort of metaphysical narrative. It could be something as simple as eating a Chicago deep dish pizza for the first time, when all you've had previous are hot slices from the ovens in New Haven, Connecticut.

At the very least, travel can provide the option for us to see something new and have it inform us in some way.  If one chooses to have a religious experience having a slice of deep-dish for the first time, then more power to them. Or, if one simply chooses to shrug their shoulders and go "meh" at the experience, that's just as valid.  But it's up to the individual doing the travel to make that call. 

But to claim that travel isn't meaningful? I'm curious as to why someone would throw hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on an experience that left no lasting impression upon them. Because if travel isn't meaningful, then why go at all?

The Why of The World

Above is a picture that I have taken of the Saône, a river in eastern France that connects to the Rhone in Lyon. In all of my dreams of my youth, I never once anticipated that I would end up here, taking in the beauty of the urban landscape in one of France's preeminent cities. 

I grew up firmly in the mid-to-lower middle class of western Pennsylvania. My high school didn't offer much in the way of options for life in the area, as the two largest social clubs in the school at the time were either the Future Farmers of America, and the Future Homemakers of America. If you weren't destined for the farming career, you were either put on the vocational track or, if your grades were good enough, the college one. The amount of resources spent on the kids in the college track were spotty at best. My high school wasn't the place where one discussed Plato, Socrates, or Aristotle. It was more pragmatic than that.

This isn't meant to lament my youth, but rather to point out that the system I was ensconced in wasn't designed to set one up for life beyond the region. One might be lucky enough to realize that they weren't meant for the life of a farmer (or homemaker) and seek greener pastures elsewhere, so to speak. For the most part, school was designed to keep the students feet firmly on the ground. If a student was curious as to the world beyond their immediate environment, they often had to rely upon themselves to satisfy that curiosity. 

I had such curiosity. I always have had it. But back in my youth, the country that stirred this feeling was England, specifically London. Watching episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Benny Hill, and Dave Allen at Large, showed a world familiar enough that it was recognizable, but exotic enough that I felt compelled to find out all I could about it. I read Dickens, I studied English history, and I became knowledgeable about some aspects of English culture, especially in regards to its humor.  As I graduated High School, I knew not what the future would bring to my life. But I did know that I wanted to visit London at some point. Because the meager steps I had taken to understand the English culture simply were not enough.

"Wanted to". Heh. "Had to" was more like it. Everyone has a different relationship with curiosity.  Mine is to bring it the forefront, and relieve the pressure of "Not Knowing".

It is here that is the genesis of my wanderlust.  This sense of "Not Knowing" is excruciating.  It has only one recourse - to know.  Twenty-two years after graduation, I finally made it to London. I had experienced the city first hand. I had knowledge of this city of city.  And it was not enough.

Because the truth of "knowing" is understanding that it will result in more questions. What influenced London?  Certainly geography played a part, and all of England's neighbors played a heavy role. The Netherlands played their part in England's development, so I found myself in Holland, trying to figure out their culture. France's impact on England is well-know, so thus I found myself in Paris, trying to understand how their culture influenced the world's history.

It is this path that eventually led me to a bridge in Lyon, taking a picture of a river on a chilly December morning. This insatiable need to understand the world in which I live has provided some answers. but not nearly enough.  Every time I get on an airplane, I am amazed that a person of my background has seen enough to know that the world is beyond all of of us. It's simply too big. But I've also been around enough to know that one of the better joys in life is found in making our world smaller, albeit in minuscule amounts. This is accomplished via understanding.

My impetus of travel is the realization that the world should be open to all of us, regardless of background. We all should have the right to understand other cultures, and press them up against our own in order to challenge our notions.  In other words, I desire context, in order to understand the "why" of the world.

This is why I travel.

Welecome to Tugoto!

There's several risks in writing about travel. The reason is both simple, yet complex - there are several philosophies and beliefs surrounding both the idea of travel, and the act thereof.

This is not a bad thing. In fact, it's one of the major reasons that makes travel so compelling. "Travel", as an idea, requires some thought, which inevitably leads to discussion, which leads to introspection.

This is my way of introducing you to this site. It's a travel site - blog at first, and maybe some other stuff later - where I will discuss things of interest to me. I'm going to try to avoid many of the major paths that others have trodden, and try to provide a more in depth approach. Conversations about a city will last months if not years.  The goal?  Create a context and provide some insight into why we go to places, and extract greater enjoyment from these all-to-rare moments in our lives.

So this is a test

Ready. Set. Go.