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Frank Herbert’s hometown inspired it all
You can walk a loop trail in Tacoma, Washington, where bronze sandworms burrow out of the earth and quotes from a famous sci-fi novel line the path beneath your feet.
Dune Peninsula at Point Defiance Park covers 11 acres on Commencement Bay, and it takes its name from Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel “Dune.” Herbert was born in Tacoma in 1920 and grew up near this very site.
The pollution he saw here reportedly shaped the environmental themes running through the book. What the land looked like before, though, tells a completely different story.
Image Credit: Washington State Localities Photographs – Public Domain/Wiki Commons
A copper smelter poisoned this ground for a century
For close to 100 years, the ASARCO copper smelter dumped toxic slag into Puget Sound from this spot. That slag piled up over the decades and actually formed the peninsula you walk on today…