Room for STUFF

Most people, when they visit the Pacific Northwest, will see the obvious.  They see the conifers and the windswept coast, the snow capped mountains and the lighthouses.  What they don’t see is the room for “stuff.  When you live here in the PNW, you need “stuff.”  As such, the casual visitor fails to see that the residents’ garages exceed the size of their homes.

You might ask, “What kind of “stuff” does the PNWesterner have, that the average homeowner does not?  Well. . . . , everyone owns a truck; some even have two.  And a dog or two to go with them.  If they don’t have a second truck, they have a full size SUV.  No one has a paved driveway, so owning a European sedan is laughable.  Then, you need a Quadrunner.  Not for off-road racing, but for hauling the deer that you tagged 4 miles off the beaten path.  Or, to go down the road to get your mail.  Then you need a “jump” trailer.  I have no idea why the locals call it a jump trailer.  It’s a utility trailer to go pick up your firewood with and to haul your downed limbs and brush to the dump with.  You need a generator for the power outages.  And a chainsaw to cut up the tree that fell across your driveway.  You need a lawn mower and a leaf blower and gas cans to go with all of them.  And you need rakes, post hole diggers, pick axes, shovels, wheel barrels and a minimum of 150 feet of extension cords.

You also need two boats.  One drift boat for trout fishing on the river, and one ocean vessel so you can get your cod.  You have to have freshwater fishing equipment and ocean fishing equipment.  You need crab traps and crap pots, and a second freezer.  You need lots of pantry space so you store your fresh canned tuna.  There’s no such thing as a water department up here, so if you have a broken water line, you borrow your neighbor’s backhoe and dig down to the pipe.  Every other neighbor has some sort of big equipment, and more than happy to let you borrow it in exchange for your pressure washer so he can clean his decks.