The Shoalwater Peninsula is my gift to the state of Washington. In Larkspur, I inserted a fictional county on the northern California border. Nobody objected, so I have felt free, in this book, to edit Washington, too.
Residents of the Long Beach Peninsula will recognize some features of their own corner of the state. However, I made the long needle of land stubbier, with a little hook of expensive real estate at the northern end, where the peninsula terminates in the Leadbetter Point wildlife sanctuary. I subtracted all six towns and replaced them with two purely imaginary ones--Kayport and Shoalwater. The demography of my fictional peninsula, including ethnic composition, is deliberately different from that of the Long Beach area. The Nekana are an imaginary tribe. Shoalwater Bay is the old name of Willapa Bay.
None of the people or communities in this book is real, though the issues facing the Shoalwater towns bear a resemblance to problems common to all beach communities from the Canadian border to Brookings, Oregon, on the California border.