Such experiences fill the eye and heart with expansiveness
and perhaps even joy, but they also tend to empty the brain of words. “Wow,”
you may say. Or you say nothing.
Hilary and I drove and hiked through such environments for
ten days in early September. I had spent a good deal of time prior to the trip
burning CDs to listen to in the car, but for the most part they proved to be a
distraction. Though the Syrian chemical-warfare crisis was in full swing, I
have to admit that the only news reports elemental enough to catch my eye were
devoted to the progress of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.
It was only by coincidence, but in the course of our travels
we stayed in a tree house, a historic national park lodge, a retrofitted ranger
cabin on the side of a hill, several campgrounds, a budget chain motel, a mom-and-pop
motel, and a rustic, Native-American-operated seaside resort.
We took four ferries and a four-hour whale-watching
expedition. We hiked out Dungeness Spit, which was shrouded in fog, but
could find no local crabs for sale. We bought and cooked fresh clams, chatted
with people who were gathering oysters on the banks of the Hood Canal, and also
heard some great Alaskan fishing stories from a Portuguese sailor, now long retired,
who was sitting across from us in a tiny restaurant in Hoodsport. When we told
him we’d been out to see the whales, he replied, with a laugh followed by a slightly
disgusted grin, “I don’t need to see whales. I’ve seen enough whales.”
We hiked out to Gray’s Bay wildlife refuge, one of the
premier bird-watching hotspots on the West Coast, but the only birds we saw
were flitting through the shrubs amid the blackberries as we made our way out to the
mudflats. (I know—it was the wrong time of the year.)
Yet one more extraordinary sight met
our eyes one gray morning on the beach. I looked out to sea beyond the rugged
island stacks just off-shore and noticed a ragged line of lanky black birds
with pale white underwing patches heading north in a steady stream. The wildly flapping birds stretched
as far as the eye could see in both directions, and the parade continued without
cease throughout the forty-five minutes we stood there admiring the scene,
breathing the sea air, and examining stones and broken shells on the beach. I’m
sure that several hundred thousand birds flew by during the time we were there.
When I turned in our key at the office later I asked the
proprietress if she knew what the birds were.
“We call them “black sea birds,’” she replied.
“Yes, but do you know the name, specifically?”
“That is their name: black sea bird.”
I suppose it might be a translation of a Quileute term,
but I wasn’t satisfied. Examining out field guide later, it occurred to me that most of them were sooty shearwaters,
which the guide describes as forming “flocks of hundreds of thousands.”
Less staggering to contemplate but more fun to see were the
sanderlings, small white birds about the size of a cell-phone that race around
on the beach on stiff legs in medium-sized flocks, running out when the waves recede and
dashing back to higher ground when the surf rolls up again. Their movements are
mesmerizing and also cute, and it’s fun to pick out the western sandpipers and
semipalmated plovers here and there amid the pack. But when the flock takes
flight, moving like a coordinated wave across the beach, turning and diving
like a magic carpet made up of dazzling sparkles as they catch the evening sun,
the word “awesome” once again creeps into view.
My favorite sighting, however, was of a chestnut-backed
chickadee. I didn’t know such a bird existed until I saw one in a tree on the edge of
our campsite at a state park on Whidbey Island. It looked just like a thousand
other chickadees I’ve seen, but something was different. You guessed it: the
back was a rich chestnut color. I’m not saying it was the most stunning bird
I’ve ever seen, but it’s always great fun to see an old friend in a dramatically
new outfit.
But back to the awesome sights—next to the enormous mass of
Mount Rainier, I would set the remarkable expanse of the Olympic Range as it
appears from Hurricane Ridge. The morning we were up there the valleys were
shrouded in fog and the row of distant peaks, covered in snow and seemingly
almost uniform in elevation, looked cold and forbidding. By way of contrast,
the clumps of pearly everlasting along the trail looked especially cheerful in
the gray morning light, and the black-tailed deer standing out in the meadow looked
regal, like an advertisement for an insurance company. During much of our three-mile
hike an unseen marmot was making a high-pitched shriek at regular intervals,
which I rather enjoyed, though it made me wonder how effective a warning could be when it’s being repeated
endlessly.
The fog had lifted by the time we got to the crest of the
ridge, and we could easily see Vancouver Island in the distance to the north
across the Straights of Juan de Fuca; the spit that forms the harbor of Port
Angeles lay nearer at hand just below.
Back in town, we decided to go out on the spit, but the
highway heading out that way seemed to run smack-dab into the entry gate of a sprawling
paper mill. We turned around and pulled over onto the shoulder, but as we sat
by the side of the road pondering our options we noticed that several of the vehicles
entering the plant weren’t being driven by mill-worker types. So we turned
around again and forged ahead down a narrow road bumpy with railroad tracks and
lined on either side with chain-link fence, parking lots, yawning delivery
doors, semaphores, tin sheds, orange plastic cones, and men in hard hats
wandering around like ants.
Sixty seconds later we emerged on the other side, unharmed,
on a long, largely undeveloped split of land. We could see the coast guard
station off in the distance, like the bead on a rifle. A good-sized raft of
gigantic logs floated in the harbor to our right, contained within an invisible
corral. We pulled off the road to watch four or five harbor seals at play, then
walked to the other side to look out toward Vancouver Island.
We stopped at another small gravel lot further out along the
spit only to be greeted by an amateur rowing club whose members were using it
to launch their sleek, narrow vessels.
It was a calm, beautiful, light-filled evening, the kind
that makes even the smallest events
interesting, and doing nothing also seems just fine. You say to
yourself, “I’m getting to know Port Angeles.” There’s an oil tanker anchored a
mile or so down the way—painted an immaculate and heavenly shade of dark blue.
And two elderly gentlemen have puttered across the bay in their 40-foot yacht
from the recreational marina to get a view of the sunset unobstructed by the wooded
mountains that rise up to the south at the edge of town.
Between the marina and
the mill there’s a lumber yard covering many acres. As we drove by it on our
way to the spit we could see gargantuan stacks of trees of roughly uniform dimensions,
any one of which would have been a prize specimen in Minnesota. But here the
piles seemed endless, and Hilary noticed that at various points there were
signs, presumably to help the truckers bringing in the logs: Douglas Fir,
Western Cedar, Western Hemlock. That struck me a comical for some reason, like
a rudimentary taxonomy class on a very grand scale. These were the trees (along
with Sitka spruce and red alder) we’d been seeing (and trying to identify) throughout the trip
.
I love trees, and I don’t even mind seeing them prostrate on
the bed of a fast-moving truck. We met many such trucks west of Port Angeles as
we headed out toward Neah Bay and the Makah Reservation at the extreme northwestern
tip of the contiguous United States. In fact, one of them went off the road at
milepost 42 and backed up traffic for hours. Lucky for us, we’d taken an inland
route around Crescent Lake and inadvertently bypassed the delay. We
learned about the accident on the travel advisory radio station but had no idea
where milepost 42 was, and were informed of its location, and our good fortune, by the woman at a
drive-through espresso shack in Clallum Bay.
Neah Bay is a quiet reservation town, as far as I can tell,
with a genuine fishing fleet as well as a recreational marina. The hike out to
the tip of Cape Flattery is the chief draw for many tourists, and it’s
certainly haunting and beautiful out there. But for me the most interesting
sight to be seen was a canoe—two canoes, in fact, that are on display in the
tribal museum. The larger of the two, which holds eight men, is a replica of
one used by the Makah perhaps five hundred years ago to hunt whales. It’s based
on a vessel that was buried in a mud-slide and only unearthed in recent
times.
The idea of taking an open canoe out onto the ocean seems a
bit insane to me; the thought of using it to bring down a whale even more so.
But that’s how the Makah used to make their living, and they’ve been whaling
again since 1995, when the courts granted them the right to harvest five whales
a year for tribal use.
The rest of the museum is hardly less interesting. Most of the
artifacts on display were unearthed from the same mudslide that buried the entire
village of Ozette back in 1560. All told, more than 55,000 artifacts were excavated
during the eleven-year dig that got going in 1970; anthropologists estimate
they span a period of roughly 2,000 years of occupation.
By early afternoon we were headed up into the rainforest.
Here it’s typically so wet that trees sprout from the branches of other trees,
moss clings to everything, and you can see complex ecosystems developing along
a few feet of bark on a fallen giant.
Along one of the short trails near the visitor’s center we
met up with two middle-aged men just returning from a backpacking trip.
“How long were you out?” I asked.
“Five days.”
“Did you do a loop?”
“We made a base-camp five miles in and did day trips from
there.”
“Much rain?”
“Not really. Though I’ve hiked here in December in full rain
gear. The forest glistens!”
“How was it out there this time?”
“Absolutely stunning,” was the uninhibited reply.
I asked if I might take a photo.
“Don’t get too close. We’re pretty ripe.”
To me the most interesting thing in the rainforest was the
herbarium-like grown that develops on the bark of trees, both upright and
fallen, and the maple groves, where the leaves were starting to turn, adding a
few golden speckles to the otherwise green and brown ensemble.
If I had to chose between forest types, I’d
pick the slightly drier and more open woods farther inland, on the other side
of the mountains. In fact, the most awesome “woods” we visited was the famous
Grove of the Patriarchs in the southeast corner of Mount Rainier National Park.
It’s an easy walk in along the lovely Ohanapecosh River, with the morning
sunlight streaking through the shadows of the towering evergreens. You cross a
suspension foot bridge to an island where the Douglas firs, western hemlocks, and
western red cedars, scattered here and there amid less distinguished species, are
a thousand years old. A few of them approach fifty feet in girth. Even the bark
can be an object of wonder.
The water in the river is a pale, glacial blue. On the way
in we spotted two dippers frolicking in a narrow lagoon at the far side of a
rocky sandbar. The air was cool and the trees were tall, and the atmosphere
was, well, awesome.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment