Other states, other lives, other souls

In the last week of September 2013 my husband Phil and I took a road/hike trip to the Olympic Peninsula. Olympic National Park is a one-of-a-kind wilderness in the US because it includes a temperate rainforest, averaging 150 annual inches of rainfall, along with two other major ecological zones, old growth forest and endemic animal species. It was unmapped until the turn of the 20^th century. 

The timing of the trip was momentous for several reasons, both personal and political. I retired in April 2013, after taking the family on a farewell trip in January to Argentina and Uruguay. By May our first grandchild was born. By December 2013 I had been diagnosed with two forms of cancer. (I’m fine now)

During his first term, Obama passed the historic ACA, the first government-subsidized health insurance plan since Medicare in 1965.  The ACA was hotly disparaged by Republican majorities after the Tea Party swept into Congress in response to Obama’s election. After Obama’s reelection in 2012, “Obamacare” was targeted for removal.  That plan ultimately failed, but during 2013, the battle for a 2014 budget agreement raged around attempts to defund the ACA.  We were fairly oblivious to the budget battle, as we crossed from Seattle to the Olympic Peninsula by ferry. Washington, D.C. seemed a long distance away.

Our first adventure was to take kayaks out into Port Angeles harbor.  The major sights were lots of white harbor seals sunning themselves on the rocks abutting the harbor, and tide pools filled with starfish and crabs. 

The second adventure was mountain biking, for the first time, through the giant Sitka spruces along narrow winding paths near Port Angeles.

Finally, it was into the park. By then we were hearing that Congress was threatening a shutdown of all federal government services. That included national parks!  We entered the park at Crescent Lake and stopped midday for our first hike through the temperate rainforest.  It was magnificent—teeming with plants layered on plants, layered on dead tree trunks, surrounded by mosses and fungi. Trees were so high that we needed to take two vertical pictures and then connect them when we got back home.  After the hike we got back into the rental car and drove to a cabin at Sol Duc Hot Springs. The staff was already on the phone asking the powers-that-be if they had to shut the facilities immediately or could they stay open 48 more hours? I guess the answer was the second choice, as we were allowed to spend the night and enjoy the hot springs. The next morning, we drove south along the main road encircling the park boundaries and ended the day in the little town of La Push. The town was in the tiny Quileute reservation at the mouth of the Quileute River on the Pacific Ocean.  Maybe we had eluded the shut down!  Tribal reservations were sovereign nations and not bound by most federal laws.  We spent the night in the local hotel.  If any of you readers watched the Twilight vampire series (I did not—see my last post on not watching horror movies), the “cool ones” vampire legend was attributed to the Quileute. The author has since admitted that she made the legend and attribution up. 

If you want to learn some actual Quileute legends, follow this link. In Quileute Bayak, the Raven is a character seemingly like Anansi the spider in African lore—a trickster full of positive and negative qualities who sometimes aids the Quileute and sometimes not.  This Halloween my husband created a natural portal on a dirt path at the bottom of the bluff on the south end of our townhouse complex. It featured two lifelike stuffed ravens that were brought back into our house in somewhat worse shape after the holiday. They are currently residing in a drawer in our living room.   Hmm! This past week we have had a series of minor problems—furnace on the fritz, setback furnace program with a mind of its own, outdoor lights changing their programming at will, first-time Covid exposures. How do you placate a raven god? 

After the night in La Push, we were excited to drive to the famous Hoh rainforest trails in the park. Damn! There was now a metal chain crossing the entrance to the Hoh, proof there really was a government shutdown.  We parked our car in the small lot just as a woman was leaving the Hoh in her car.  We exchanged a few pleasantries and she then opined that the Hoh was a masculine trail and the Quinault was a feminine trail.  Since I am extremely skeptical of statements such as this, I asked her how she knew and what characterized the difference. That question ticked her off and she made some dismissive remarks about how useless the federal government was.  I suggested that it was the Roosevelts and the federal government who had created the park she had just enjoyed. She was sure that was not true.  Fake news, and it was only 2013. We walked under the barrier and spent a little time on the path in a very masculine drizzle. We got back in the car and onto the main road, headed to another larger reservation, the Quinault, with beautiful Lake Quinault and an historic lodge.  Haha, we were eluding our government again!  Yes and no.  We were able to stay in a cabin attached to the lodge and enjoy a magnificent sunset over the lake,  but ours wasn’t the only government making rules.  We found out that the Quinault tribal government had shuttered the lake for one whole year in order to restore the fish that were being threatened by overfishing. 

The next day we admitted partial defeat and drove back east and north to Port Townsend to catch the ferry back to Seattle.  Not be discouraged, my husband returned in 2017 with friends to hike over one hundred miles of shoreline and rainforest.  I met up with them to resupply on the last day, having broken my arm in August. Truthfully, that is an excuse. I would never hike 100 miles. That trip was part of a post I wrote called The Way We Live: Friendship Tour.