Puget Sound stretches out from this shore, one of the great inland seas of North America, a glacially carved fjord running 100 miles from the Strait of Juan de Fuca south to Olympia. Captain George Vancouver mapped these waters in 1792, naming the Sound for his lieutenant Peter Puget. The Duwamish, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, and a dozen other Coast Salish nations had navigated these waters in cedar canoes for thousands of years before European contact, building civilizations organized around extraordinary salmon abundance.
The first commercial canneries in the 1860s and 70s depleted those runs within a generation — a pattern of extraction that has repeated across every natural resource Seattle was built on. Ferry service across the Sound began in 1888. Today the Washington State Ferry system is the largest in the United States, connecting the mainland to islands and peninsulas with no other road access.
Standing here watching the green-and-white ferries cut across the steel-grey water with the Olympics behind them, you understand the pull of this place: its scale, its wildness, the way it insists that the city is not the whole story. The water was here before Seattle, and it will outlast it.