The Fireweed Turns. The landscape of the Pacific Northwest was rooted in my memory and imagination at a young age. When I was nine years old, my family moved from the Sultanate of Oman to America. My father worked on a remote island in the Aleutian Chain and would come home with stories of the men and the landscape, both strange and incredible. At the same time, talk in the playground was of the local manhunt for the Green River killer. When I was later sent to school in Northern Ireland, the narrative of this extraordinary backdrop became fixed; it was a mythical place, somewhere that could excite and seduce, yet profoundly frighten.