About the show

What you’ve just heard is the opening strokes of a letter written back to a shop in Seattle. The shop opened in 1897, on the morning of the Klondike Gold Rush, outfitting people heading toward the difficult road north. That shop is Filson. Passages is the correspondence it receives today, 128 years later. Eight letters, from eight slices of American life, one sent back each week.

Each of the eight episodes is a letter from a different piece of contemporary American life. A Vietnamese-American oyster family on Willapa Bay. A hotshot firefighter working the wildland-urban interface outside Los Angeles. A letterpress still running on 100-year-old machines. The captain of the mail boat that still calls at Aleutian villages nothing else can reach. The subjects are absolutely of now. The voice around them, narration, register, sound textures of a 19th-century outfitter’s shop, is the voice of the country that made them possible. The show is contemporary journalism dressed in the register of 19th-century Americana.

The title carries a double meaning. Passages names the journeys the show follows: crossings, setting-out, and going-toward. It also names the editorial artefact itself: a collection of excerpts cut from the larger fabric of America, preserved in the shop’s ledger. Each episode is a passage in both senses. The country turned 250 this year. The years that follow are the years that will define its second quarter-millennium. Passages is the correspondence addressed to the shop about the country those years will shape.