By Kim Mayer, Journal contributor

Having grown up on the East Coast, I get a still kick out of towns, hills, creeks, rivers and roads with Western names. I don’t think a born Westerner would derive the same pleasure in the signs flying by on road trips: Sweet Briar, Tom Cat Hill, Lost Man Creek, Rogue River, Coyote Pass, Red Bluff, Crater Lake and Whiskeytown Cavern.

Like everyone back then, I was raised on enough Westerns for it to be part of my television DNA, but it was on train trips as a child that I really fell in love with the West — lock, stock and barrel. Stretched out in a Pullman berth alongside a window running the length of my bed, the landscape rolled by like bygone days — before everyone came to California. In my head, “Rin Tin Tin” ran full speed alongside the track, and “Bonanza” was around every bend. The light, the stars, the far horizon. I know this land, I thought, and the land knows me. That’s where the deal was sealed, I believe, with the West. It’s the story I tell myself to this day.

The West of my childhood is still out there. Like the young girl on the train, I am all eyes and note the signs that give me a sense of place: Antelope Valley, Crazy Horse Canyon, Black Butte Summit and Jumpoff Joe Creek. Take creeks, a Western word if there ever was one. Wolf Creek, Canyon Creek, Elk Horn Creek, Medicine Creek, Bean Creek and Little Muddy Creek, to name a few. In the East it’s called a brook or a stream. Slough is another Western word: Blue Slough Road, Preachers Slough Road. In the East we’d call it a marsh or tideland. The word river, of course, runs all over the map.

The summer travels of my childhood went as far west as the Pacific Ocean and as far north as the Redwoods, as I recall. But nothing prepared me for the Pacific Northwest, the place I now call home. I have found the Pacific Northwest to be like nowhere else, but perhaps Stephen King’s Maine. Notwithstanding geographical similarities (rugged coastlines and countless islands, forested and mountainous regions), it’s the names of places in the Pacific Northwest that ring not of happy-go-lucky cowboy jargon as in California, but rather, the eeriness of Stephen King’s horror novels. Desolation Sound, Deception Pass, Obstruction Island, Phantom Lake, Dismal Nitch — I could go on – and Deadman Bay on San Juan Island.