A Washington state ferry skims through glimmering Harney Channel in Puget Sound. The Wasp Islands are in the distance.

LONG BEFORE there was a city pressed around the inland sea, a 34-year-old English explorer on board a ship named Discovery took a right turn at the Strait of Juan de Fuca and sailed into a place he would name for one of his officers — Peter Puget. Typical of how the English viewed the far side of the New World, George Vancouver saw the Pacific Northwest in 1792 as raw land, untamed, needing the armies of the new Industrial Age to make it livable. He had already bestowed names on harbors that

I remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage — a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. John Steinbeck, "Travels with Charley"

conveyed despair — Cape Disappointment, for example — and on peaks, such as Rainier, that ingratiated him with his British benefactors. But after floating on the sound a few days, Vancouver softened and put the cultural chauvinism aside.

Vancouver had little contact with the people then living prosperous lives around Puget Sound. But had he asked, he would have found that the Natives had a saying of their own, since passed on to the modern inhabitants: When the tide is out, the table is set. The Northwest Indians had such a horn of plenty that they competed to give away food in elaborate potlatches. Vancouver's passage and the Indian words-to-live-by both made roughly the same point. For once, the worlds agreed on something — the land here needs no help. The city that would take shape on Elliott Bay, its art and its obsessions, would always look to this wild land to find its personality.

The riot of green, the way things grew from every rock and crag, the fusion of marine life with high alpine beauty, the sweeping carpet of the native forest, the snow-white heads of the volcanoes in midsummer — it all moved Vancouver. He praised the "serenity of the climate," he was rhapsodic about the "innumerable pleasing landscapes," and he was stunned by "the abundant fertility that unassisted nature put forth." The key word there is "unassisted," a somewhat novel thought at the time.

On a clear day, Mount Rainier looms over the city as though it were right at its edge. This view is from Lake Union.

In an eye blink, Seattle has gone from a mudflat village to a metropolis of more than 2 million people that may be physically unable to contain all its dreams. But it remains a city cradled by the wild edge: volcanoes on one side, the sound at the other, and a moody sky overhead. The urban attachments, as new and showy as they are, will always compete with the setting.

So it is probably true, as British expatriate writer Jonathan Raban says, that Seattle is the only city in the world that people move to in order to get closer to nature. Raban should know. After roaming the globe, he settled in Seattle 14 years ago. It is not just bald eagles nesting in city parks, orcas swimming by a shoreline shadowed by skyscrapers, or great blue herons watching for prey in the shallows of Lake Washington. You look up or down any steep street, and there is water from the sky or in a settled basin. On clear days, you look east to the Cascade Range or west to the Olympic Mountains, and there is water again, in the form of glaciers and snow. Of all the things Seattle chauvinists such as myself like to tell visitors about our home, this one is my favorite: Ours may be the only American city where a person can look out from the urban center and see three national parks at one time — Rainier, North Cascades and Olympic.

Text and photographs excerpted from "Wild Seattle: A Celebration of the Natural Areas In and Around the City," published by Sierra Club Books and distributed by The University of California Press. Text copyright 2004 by Timothy Egan. Photographs copyright Terry Donnelly and Mary Liz Austin.

Of course, these gifts from nature were in place long before a group of exiles from the Midwest decided to lay an irregular plat on the hills rising from Elliott Bay in 1851. Water is the master architect of the Pacific Northwest, aided by ever-restless volcanism. The salt water that laps at the city's shores and slides around countless islands is what brought people here to begin with. Natives had been living the maritime good life for centuries. Winters were temperate, if gray. Summers dry, never humid. If the natural world were kept in decent enough shape, a year's supply of protein showed up at your doorstep in the form of salmon runs. To their doom, the Indians shared secrets of the good, wet earth with the transplants from the flatlands, at one point telling a perplexed mother from Cleveland that she could supplement her baby's milk with clam broth. In return, an Indian name was bequeathed on the new settlement, and Seattle became the biggest city in the United States named for a Native American. By some accounts, Chief Seattle despised the honor.

In summer, the forest gleams green along the Boulder River in the Boulder River Wilderness Area, part of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest northeast of the city.

What Seattle still has is the promise it offered to those early transplants: an urban milieu, with all the clank and contradictions of compact city life, but snuggled up very close to the wild. Puget Sound, after all, sits at the far edge of what Wallace Stegner called the "geography of hope." It is this dual nature that gives the city its dominant personality, the fleece-vested free spirit beneath the dutiful civic exterior. In New York, Cleveland, Chicago or Houston, there are fine parks, but no pure wilderness areas close enough to provide quick relief from the city's raw side, or simply to define life. And with salmon coursing through waterways in the city — some of the fish have genetic links to the last Ice Age — the nature inside Seattle's urban core is not just ornamental. These fish runs, more than anything else, assure that the city's pulse is authentic, and that people are coexisting with something that predates them.

In Seattle, you learn early on that a reliable weather forecast is the presence of lenticular clouds hovering over the summit of Mount Rainier, a halo that is a harbinger of storms from the west. You learn to love winter gales for the pure brawniness of a hit from the Pacific, and the way snow geese feast on flooded fields after the harvest. You learn there is a different ecosystem in every direction: the rain forest in the west, the shrub-steppe east of the Cascades, the glacial high country of the North Cascades, and the crowd of life in the Puget Sound basin.

Dungeness Spit is bathed in dune grasses, white yarrow and coastal fog.

Most of these little spheres of wild life, to the credit of people who were thinking beyond their time, are relatively intact and open. For Seattle is surrounded not just by water and mountains, but by public land — a birthright of every American. Go south, for example: Follow the Cedar River just out of town to Maple Valley and then continue up the White River outside Enumclaw. Barely an hour's drive from the city, you find yourself in a sylvan haunt, the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, covering an enormous expanse of the Cascades. Clear-cuts scar the foothills, a legacy of mid-19th-century land grants that gave away vast swaths of the public domain to railroad companies, which then sold them to timber companies. But higher, deeper, much of the Cascades, on either side of the mountain spine, is wilderness. On the ground flows the frothy, milk-white runoff from Mount Rainier's glaciers. I threw my grandfather's ashes onto a glacier that melted into one of these torrid little streams, as he wanted. The mountain does the same thing for me that it did for him: It makes me feel significant and insignificant at the same time.

In the city, Rainier is one of those take-for-granted acquaintances that can surprise you after a long absence. For days on end in deep winter, the mountain is a rumor, at best. Then it pops out at the edge of town, its vertical ice walls holding the color of the day. On a hot summer afternoon, it is cooling simply to look up and see the 14,411-foot protrusion holding 34 square miles of snow and ice, some of the glaciers more than a hundred feet thick, just 60 miles from the city as the crow flies. The mountain, John Muir concluded after a visit, "was so fine and so beautiful it might well fire the dullest observer to desperate enthusiasm."

In Olympic National Park to the west of Seattle, the Olympic Range and trail to Hurricane Hill offer glorious vistas in many directions.

Among the big volcanoes, Mount Baker, Glacier Peak and Rainier are the ones that frame the city, the ones that can been seen from inside a car while stuck in traffic, or while swimming in Lake Washington. They beckon. But over the years, I have developed a fondness for the smaller, more anonymous peaks closer to the city. In Seattle's back yard — again, thanks to people who were thinking ahead to a time when the metro area would be bulging at the seams — is the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, sandwiched between Stevens and Snoqualmie passes along the Cascade Crest. You can be at the trailhead for, say, Granite Peak, in 45 minutes' driving time from downtown Seattle. A few hours' worth of uphill marching will leave you at the edge of the wilderness, staring into emerald pools of pure snowmelt in salt-and-pepper granite. The forest at that level is high alpine, stunted, shaped by snowpack and wind and a brief growing season. Flower meadows, of lupine and paintbrush, of heather and beargrass, show the range of pure color in a Cascade summer garden. Of course, it can also snow anytime in the high Cascades, and the notorious Fourth of July frontal system is a reliable weather companion to the holiday.

Defined and shaped by water all around, Seattle manages by going over and sometimes through it. The Lake Washington Ship Canal in the North End is a man-made creation designed to connect the lake to the sound beyond. The Burke-Gilman Trail, at right, hosts joggers, bikers and more, while the Fremont Bridge gives commuters another option for north-south travel.

But as pretty as the Alpine Lakes are — and Switzerland, in my view, is the only thing that comes close — this wilderness is not just background for aesthetics or playground for hikers. Like the volcanoes, the land is alive. A lot of water rushes down the west slope of the Cascades, and as it thunders downhill it provides the animating beat for most everything in the Puget Sound lowlands. Every city on the East Coast gets more rain than Seattle. But what matters here is the variety of rain, from daily mist to coastal deluge, and how it shapes the region's wild character. Precipitation varies widely because of the mountains. Ninety miles due west of Seattle, on the storm-lacerated front of the Olympics, the rain is prodigious, nearly 200 inches a year in some valleys, more than any other place in the contiguous United States. The bulky interior of the Olympics protects Seattle, which gets just under 40 inches annually. Then, ascending the Cascade Range, the predominant westerly storms gain strength again, and moisture increases. East of the Cascade Crest, down into the Yakima Basin, the land turns suddenly arid and brown-skinned, a haunt for sage grouse and rattlesnakes.

It seems unlikely now, but in 1890, when Seattle was a city of about 40,000 people, much of the Olympic Mountains was unknown to people settling in across the way. It was a mere 45 miles from the city to the Olympic Peninsula and its warren of glaciers, fjords, deep forests, and abundant wildlife. But in 1890, so much of the region was uncharted that an exploratory expedition sent by a Seattle newspaper took six months to travel 49 miles, from one end of the Olympics to the other. What slowed them was the precipitation, "rain falling in sheets," as one member reported, and snow that was 25 feet deep in the lower mountains.

In the city's Washington Park Arboretum, Asiatic maples abound, adding color and elegant structure to the grounds.

Once, I spent three days on a perch just above Marmot Pass in the Olympics. To get there, I hiked along a valley of old-growth trees, up an old burn at higher elevation, past the dwarfed firs and flower meadows at the mile-high level, and topped out on a Sound of Music summit. I never wanted to come down. Mountain goats, puffy-cloud-white and nimble-footed, browsed on forage. A black bear and her cubs appeared on a far slope. The huckleberries made for fine breakfast fruit. And the views, of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Vancouver Island to the north, and the serrated tops of the Cascade Range to the east, changed with every new angle of the sun. At night, not-so-distant city lights glowed. Days later, in a downtown office building, I looked back at the Olympics, the other way, the very peaks I had visited. The urban-wild bond was sealed yet again.

There are roughly 2,500 miles of shoreline along Puget Sound and its inlets. That's a beach that would stretch from Seattle to Pennsylvania. The sound is relatively new, created by the retreating glaciers from the last Ice Age, beginning about 15,000 years ago. An ice sheet covered an area from Vashon Island to the Canadian border and was nearly a mile thick in places. In its rumbling and epic retreat, the ice carved the land that became Seattle, Puget Sound, and all the urban appendages.

Western hemlock is ubiquitous in the Greater Seattle area and beyond in the Soleduck River Valley inside Olympic National Park.

The sound is as deep as the Space Needle is high — about 600 feet in Elliott Bay — and rich in marine life, not just the charismatic mega-marine fauna, like whales and harbor seals, but the less-glamorous workhorses — more than 2,000 kinds of invertebrates and an octopus that can stretch to 24 feet in length. Its tidal pull is ferocious in places. At Deception Pass, between Whidbey and Fidalgo islands, the peak flow is nearly 9 knots, with 2 million cubic feet of water passing through every second. This is eight times the average flow of the Columbia River, the biggest in the West. This tug of gravity and salt water is another way of reminding people that humility is better than hubris in approaching our native land. In the two places where sizable bridges have spanned Puget Sound's major inlets, over the Tacoma Narrows and the misnamed Hood Canal, storms and earthquakes have brought them down. They were rebuilt, with caveats that nature bats last.

But for all the strength of its tidal flush, for all the nearly 10,000 streams and creeks that drain into it, Puget Sound is only intermittently healthy. Three Puget Sound salmon runs are in danger of becoming extinct. The intertidal salt-marsh habitat — the bounteous set table that the Indians spoke of — has declined by 75 percent since people decided to build a city alongside Elliott Bay.

Most city-dwellers connect to the marine world simply by hopping on a ferry. Washington has the nation's biggest fleet. As a boat slips out of downtown Seattle, the city falls away quickly. In short order, the world is all water and mountains in this great bowl of Puget Sound. This region is sometimes called Ecotopia, which I think is a reach. Seattle has an active environmental conscience, as do Portland, Vancouver, and San Francisco, but it is not because the people are any more virtuous in regard to the environment. It is because the natural world is so close, so ingrained in daily life. The outdoors — mountain, sea, and forest — are shared living rooms, not abstractions. Even in a thick fog, crossing Puget Sound by ferry, you feel it: the call of the wild so close to the urban center. At times, I hold my breath.