Arriving in Seattle at 7:00 pm local time, after about eight hours of flying, Nancy and I collected our rental car and navigated ourselves south onto I-5 heading for Tacoma and wilderness beyond.
Combining skills -- my Workaholism, mutual Marital Negotiating, and Nancy's Careful Shopping -- I had bargained with NAHMA to do a two-hour presentation to their annual conference if they would pay an honorarium and cover two Saturday-stay airfares. So we were stretching the cross-country trip around a long-weekend mini-vacation to Washington's Olympic peninsula, close as the volcano blows but an eternity in Internet space from Gatesland.
Think of the Olympic peninsula as a clock dial with the mountains in its center. Seattle is at three o'clock, due east. SeaTac is at four o'clock, a bit south, Tacoma at five o'clock, Olympia at six (where U. S. 101, up from San Francisco, turns sharply west, snaking around the peninsula and eventually coming to rest near Seattle), and Aberdeen -- our destination for the night -- at eight.
But when we swung west on 101, the dashboard clock showed 8:15 pm local time, which was 11:15 pm stomach time, so we mixed Nancy's AAA guide and my cell phone prowess and found ourselves a reservation at and driving directions to La Petite Maison on Black Lake Boulevard in Olympia. This proved to be a converted homestead house with wraparound porch (now enclosed) framing a turn-of-the-century dwelling with gaslight torchere fixtures and colored stained glass windows. It reminded us both of Australian wine country dining (places like Byron Bay and Nuriootpa), an impression furthered by the conversation we overhead from the only other occupied table, where three elderly folks (two women and a man, one woman American, the other two Aussies) reminisced about the good times back home. The waiter joined in with a story about hitchhiking in the outback, getting a ride that involved hanging on the back of a sheep truck, having the incurious sheep placidly pee on him. "Had to give up my favorite wool mittens," he concluded, "the smell never came out."
Through sunset into night to Aberdeen, a grim tough town that logs timber -- twenty miles of distance, back fifty years in time, and down three economic ladders. Got lost, asked directions, found our way through the downtown grid streets of blinking yellow lights to the courtyard of the Olympic Inn, "Aberdeen's Finest Motel," lit by the beacon of a Greek torch formed from a grid of yellow incandescent bulbs fenced by three licking tongues of red neon flame.
Built when the Flintstones and Jetsons were popular and decorated as such, it was a two-storey square C. Our ground-floor room with king-size bed was large, with original but clean deep-pile sculpted burnt orange and harvest gold carpeting, a bathroom floored in linoleum spackle that came in three-foot-wide rolls, and a television whose remote worked only broadcast channels. On the dresser was a laminated placard with a dapper top-hatted architecture-figure butler offering toothbrushes, shaving cream, and razors, just dial the front desk; next to it was the loudest compact refrigerator imaginable, which we unplugged.
In the sudden silence we heard another sound, a fast-paced rhythmic squeeka-squeeka coming from directly above. Nancy and I cocked our heads listening, then she asked, "Do you think it's a lone gunman?" "If you were on the receiving end of that pace," I replied, "would you be having a good time?" "At least it'll stop soon," she predicted correctly, and after some footsteps and brief sounds of running water, silence reigned and we snoozed.
Safely awakening to find the trucks had vacated the parking lot, still slick with overnight rain, we checked the 'free continental breakfast' (unmentionable pastry and caustic coffee), then headed down the street two blocks, past the stucco bungalow that housed the broadcast studio of Christian Cable Channel 20, to Carey's Sports Bar, which had been recommended for breakfast. In the back, it was a classic sports lounge -- bar with stools, pool table, foosball, wide-screen TV, large posters of Bogart, Marilyn Monroe with her dress flying up, and Rita Hayworth -- but in front was a traditional American breakfast-lunch diner.
Seated in a 'non-smoking' booth on the far side of the autographed Seahawks helmet, Mariner's shirts and signed programs, we ordered vacation breakfasts -- King crab eggs Benedict for me, heaping flapjacks for Nancy -- played cards, and watched the streetscape, a trundling procession of Asplundh chippers on hitches, log flatbeds stacked with thick logs of Sitka spruce and Douglas fir, and pairs of Eskimo Marine buddies with olive-drab tee-shirts, thick necks, and crewcuts. Our food arrived and we tucked in.
From the counter just out of sight behind Nancy came the sounds of an argument, two men's voices rising. "I'm going to rip his heart out and shove it up his ass!" said a baritone, with the raw raggedness that unmistakably signals a male verging on violence. Sounds of a drawer being slammed. A pause, then a begging tenor, "I worked my ass off for you, man!" as if the words were torn from him. "Why are you doing this?" Seconds later a man stalked by, open red lumberjack over gray tee-shirt, thick two-day black beard and receding hairline. A moment later our waitress came to our booth and said sadly, "I'm sorry about that noise. He's worked here as a cook. He's been paid several times but always forgets. We just paid him again." She shook her head, watching him storm out. "And he has a young child at home."
Outside, a pickup truck was drawn up to the curb, a plywood chute leading down from the second floor, into which workmen were throwing old chairs, plaster, lath, and molding. "Don't mean to chase you off," one of them said over the clatter, "but we've gotta get this junk out of here."
Drove through Aberdeen, a town of grid streets with small bungalows, shingled and then brightly painted over with garish colors, past a front-yard totem pole carved in yellow wood: a bearded, pipe-smoking fisherman in a sou'wester wielding a chain saw. A poor town, a town of poor hard workers, depressing but stoic, a sense that time had stopped and would never restart.
Up to Lake Quinault, where we hiked through a long trail to the river, then up a side creek until the trail became so muddy and wet we were risking my clothing and Nancy's tender back to go farther. We were now at the edges of Olympic National Park, an area uneasily divided among the Park Service, several Indian tribes, and the loggers, who by now have embraced timber farming and management because they have discovered that thoughtful ecology is also good business. (A good example of government mandating that business do something which it would otherwise not have done, only to discover that, yea verily, one can accommodate a second objective and still make a sound profit -- score one for the interventionists.) Stopped in Amanda Park for gas and a Grotesque Gulp, where Nancy fell into conversation with a red-checked wool-shirted grandfather. "Can't log in the park any more," he told her. "Hell, can't hardly log outside the park any more."
Then west along the coast to the long gray flat beach at Kalaloch (clay-lock) Lodge for lunch of burgers with crispy fries and big ice teas. Sat watching the driftwood-strewn inlet among the tall fir and spruce as rain squalls spattered the windows. Ventured out into the steady strong wind for a mile and a half south, past the Girl Scouts making a fanciful offering of sand castle, seagull feathers and clam shells, past the cookout family throwing sticks their twin beagles could chase, past the outflow pipes, past the clear half-gallon bottle whose cap, with a logo in Japanese, when unscrewed revealed potent gin. All along we were flanked by the line of low yellow sand cliffs, the forest approaching to the edge and over, individual trees splaying out before they crumbled and fell like skewed teeth in a broken comb.
Turned back to the north as the wind kicked up, thin moist needles of spray. "That's not spray," Nancy said. "That's rain. It's raining." But she pulled up the plastic hood of her windbreaker, knotted the cord under her chin, pushed her sunglasses down and lowered her nose, following me along the beach back to the twisting path and back to the Kalaloch Lodge. There we sat in the diner area (away from the view), ordered big decaf coffees served to us by a weatherbeaten bifocaled waitress named MILDRED, and playing cards. Time wore on and we warmed up. Nancy asked Mildred if we were in the way. "Oh, you just take your time." The diner area being almost empty, she settled onto a red counter stool and launched into a reminiscence of two ladies who had arrived early one morning, parked themselves in the prime front table with the best view, had breakfast, then nursed coffees straight through lunch. Finally it was rolling on toward supper time and the place was beginning to fill up. "Oh, look," Mildred said as for the hundredth time she filled their coffee cups, "there's a beached whale giving birth." And voom, the ladies were out of there.
After coffee (no beached whales), we walked Ruby Beach, a more rugged stretch a couple of miles farther north: huge craggy rocks strewn away from the coast surrounded by sea-sculpted smooth sand, like God's Japanese garden. My kind of beach, creation unfinished. North to Forks, a town of about 2,000, the metropolis of the western Olympic peninsula (nine o'clock on the dial). The U-shaped Forks Motel had an enormous totemic ax-wielding Paul Bunyan in the courtyard and few visitors. Our room, one of only a few with a king-size bed, was adjacent to the main road (four lanes and a center left-turn lane). "The kids say we have no nightlife here in Forks, and by about ten they're done cruising up and down," the motel keeper assured us. He proved right.
Dinner at the Smoke House, the only AAA-rated restaurant in Forks, whose orange laminated menu featured six variations of excellent fresh salmon and three trivia quizzes, to help you pass the time, featuring puzzlers like How many eyes on a dollar bill? and out-of-date trivia questions such as, Who lived in Grimy Gulch? and What movie featured Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau and was about insurance fraud?
Even in Forks, we are nevertheless near Seattle -- drive-through espresso bars were everywhere. Backtracked to Hoh Rain Forest, where we took the Hall of Mosses loop and the Spruce River Trail.
The most remote section of Olympic National Park, it is one of the best. Lying halfway up the southwest slope where mile-high mountains squeegee water from the low clouds, it is the wettest place in the Olympics with an average of 142 inches of rain a year, making it the greenest place imaginable. Big leaf maple trees form the far overhead canopy, their limbs draped with blankets of epiphytes -- small ferns that live on the branches, which they use solely for anchor, living purely by drawing nutrients from the moist air. Almost every maple branch is gauzily sheathed, as if the trees were large lumbering ogres dressed by a fey god. Mosses cover rocks like deep-pile carpet, ground ferns rise two feet from the floor.
This temperate rain forest is always dying and always growing. Saprophytic plants grow on dead plants, such as the sconce mushrooms that infest low tree trunks. Tall trees, some of them two hundred feet in length, crash to the forest floor, where their three-foot trunks form a wall. Then seedlings fall, a lucky few on the nurse log (as it is known) where their height advantage (a couple of feet above the forest mulch) makes them much more likely to survive. Eventually, as they grow, the nurse log rots underneath them, so they extend roots down. Finally the nurselog itself is gone, its only mark a line of trees like marching columns.
The Sitka spruces in Hoh are 500 years old and 300 feet high, bigger, older, and more durable than the many cathedrals whose columnar lines they echo. America has no man-made history older than about 400 years, but Europe has no natural places as old or magnificent as ours. Are our canyons, deserts, arches, and forests -- America's pre-Columbian achievements -- a match for Europe's history? If so, we today can take no credit, for we did not create these places (though we did recognize and preserve them; thank you, Teddy Roosevelt). They attract visitors worldwide, as we could tell from the murmured German and Japanese we overheard in the visitors' center.
Throughout, we felt as if were we in a vacated city or ruined Roman town, huge timbers or sliced segments like fallen temple blocks, vast unreachable spaces overhead, all filtered with soft indirect light through the leaves and branches. Leaves rustle, perhaps wind, perhaps birds. Water trickles above and below, and the quaking aspens shiver. A pair of woodpeckers hammered a low trunk, the larger one showing the smaller how it was done until, fed or spooked, they flew off in a bullet of red and black. And round a further bend on a side trail, Nancy and I found ourselves walking quietly up on eight elk cows and calves -- we think eight, they were hard to count among the trees and leaves -- big, placid, healthy but not fat, moving as a band, eating. They saw us and, while never precisely becoming bothered, drifted gradually further into the forest, and we let them go.
Back through Forks (nine on the dial), where we bought deli sandwiches for lunch, then through Beaver and Sappho (no smirking, you can check the map, wise guy) and a brief heavy rain, up to Lake Crescent (eleven on the dial). The rain having stopped and the sun peeking through the clouds, we halted, then hiked a mile and a half up to Marymere Falls. Here a small chute of water fell about ninety feet, splashing into a creek. We sat, ate our sandwiches, played cards (102-77; 1-1) (53-108; 1-2) then hiked back to the car and drove east into Port Angeles (twelve on the dial).
Angeles is built in two levels, a retail/ commercial sea front and then a residential area rising on a fifty-foot bluff directly behind. Mainly a jumping-off place for the ferry to Victoria, BC on Vancouver Island, Angeles is a place people go through rather than stay. Five million bucks worth of urban development grant has produced a small waterfront urban pavilion featuring a hands-on aquatic museum (Hey, kids, touch a crab!), a few restaurants where you can get crab salad, and a small pier-end gazebo which Nancy and I climbed for a gull's eye view of the harbor full of ferries, small container boats, and fishing boats, as well as a long breakwater spit of land out which one could walk after driving through several miles of warehouses and piers. We declined.
Dinner at C'est Si Bon (It's So Good) in the trendy section of town, the five-lane U. S. 101 east (toward Port Angeles and Seattle) among the Mercedes dealerships. Genuinely French and evidently smug about it in boondock country, it was presided over by a talkative Alsatian host who seated us and with a flourish asked if he could do anything. We pointed out that our wrought-iron table (we were in the atrium festooned with plastic flowers) was very rocky, so he promised to fix it, hurried off, and immediately forgot all about it. We flagged a passing busboy, who performed the usual miracles with a matchbook. The food -- more fresh salmon -- was quite tasty, the Penfolds Kalimna Bin 28 rich and jammy, but Nancy was put off by the host's transparent false bonhomie.
Breakfast at the Main Street Café, where Nancy again had flapjacks with honey and I again had crab Eggs Benedict, both tasty cholesterol-filled calorie-heavy feasts. Most of the other patrons were enormous -- of course, if you are the kind of person who eats that breakfast every morning, you too will become vast -- men with beat-up and oily Stihl or John Deere baseball caps, blue-gray tee-shirts bulging over taut belt-slung bellies, and tough dungarees worn to a black shine by sweat and engine grease.
Drove east, skimming Port Townsend, then south, up Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park's most-visited spot both for the breathtaking view (it is named for the hurricane-force winds that commonly sweep through) and its proximity (closest to Seattle). The drive is fifteen miles long and over a mile up, passing through low clouds masquerading as dense fog.
Crawling through the whiteness, I found myself thinking about Bill Gates' wealth, since the entire Olympic peninsula probably has an aggregate value less than his net worth. This whole concept, whether or not meaningful, is certainly strange. I went to school with Gates; we shared a few classes before he dropped out. He spent one summer writing a version of BASIC for the PDP-8, an exercise several of us thought silly until he told us they paid him $20,000 for the work, which caused me quickly to revise my thinking, but not enough to deflect me from what was then my greatest interest, sportswriting. Ah, poverty and obscurity ...
Arriving at the summit, we discovered most of it was closed because the snow had not melted. Each winter, Hurricade Ridge normally gets thirty feet of snow, but last year was snowy -- 65 feet -- and it had not yet melted. So we had only a few places we could tiptoe around and, with Nancy's tender back, we elected not to do much on the slippery slopes. But even where we stood was spectacular. From the ground up, brilliant white snow reflecting the sunshine, some of it pink with algae (you know about yellow, well don't eat pink snow either), then a thick line of dark emerald-green forest, sawing jaggedly up and down the mountainside, then the sudden white crowns where the tree-line exposed the snow-covered peaks, and the blue sky above. A place to return when the snow is gone and the hordes are elsewhere.
Descended into Port Townsend, another one-main-street town with a commercial waterfront and a residential neighborhood above a crumbling dirt bluff. The peninsula's funk center since the late Sixties, Port Townsend has now gone chi-chi. Lunch in the Silverwater Café (100-91, 2-2) with excellent salads, then with a lightly scheduled afternoon, over to Fort Worden State Park. A cluster of white wood-frame buildings around a long slightly undulating marching green that fronted on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, it harkened back to the halcyon days of the turn of (this) century. Teddy Roosevelt was building the White Fleet, the ultimate strategic weapon was the oil-powered battleship, and a nation needed a coastal defense. The commandant's house featured period furniture (and a young period-dressed airheaded docent), sepia photographs of all the base commanders, and a long panoramic photograph of the base's entire complement. Then walked out to the old concrete bunkers, mostly WW1 vintage, each of them named for base commanders -- Wilson, McKenzie, and more -- now occasional overnight havens for the young homeless.
Back in Port Townsend, we window-shopped, I in the used bookstore (Melville & Company, bedecked with unreconstructed liberal placards), thence to our room at the Harborside Inn (three-story wood-frame motel) so Nancy could have a back-relieving soak in their outdoor jacuzzi, and a very nice dinner at Lonny's, a surprisingly tony restaurant hidden among the bait-and-tackle stores and engine-rebuilding shops.
Woke to a gray drizzle, had the Harborside's unexpectedly decent muffins and croissants, then got in car-ferry line for the fifteen-minute jaunt across to Whidbey Island. Played cards (84-101; 2-3) as an overweight woman and her swarthy husky husband chased their two little daughters around ("Aurora! Zoe! Get back here!"). Landed in Whidbey Island and drove to Coupeville, a little strip of Marblehead or Rockport made even less impressive because, early on a Monday morning, everything was closed.
So drove north through Whidbey's national conservation area and even further back in psychic time. A band of about 25 square miles that have been deed-restricted to the National Park Service, the area is a swatch of small farms and houses much as it would have been 75 years ago, unpolluted by the car dealerships, Taco Bells, strip malls, and Fotomats that materialized immediately once we left the area still driving north. Curiously calming despite the grim gray drizzle.
Rejoined the mainland driving over Deception Pass, where Captain Vancouver, who first explored the area, let his sailing master Whidbey take their full-rigged ship through the cut, proving it an island and earning the right to name it. A nice moment standing mid-bridge, looking straight down the deep chasm and then off into the mist, as tugs shepherded big lassoed flotillas of logs south toward the lumber mills of Olympia and Tacoma.
Returned to the present with a rush as we drove south at 75 on I-5, back to Concrete Gomorrah on Lake Washington. Found the NAHMA convention hotel, checked in, and I rematerialized as a Business Man. Finished the afternoon reporting the unpleasant facts of HUD life to a roomful of national affordable housing managers on a dead-dog panel (the last one of a conference before everyone runs for the planes). Then Nancy and I were treated to a wonderful dinner at Anthony's Pier 66 where she had stone crabs and I had succulent Dungeness crab.
Finalized 9/5/99