Road Trip: Olympic National Park
September 15, 2016
“Our national parks are blood. They are more than scenery, they are portals and thresholds of wonder. . . Whenever I go to a national park, I meet the miraculous.”
— Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land
We ascended the road to Hurricane Ridge in a cloud.
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
— G. M. Hopkins, from “Inversnaid”
Sign at the Hurricane Ridge Visitors’ Center
We began our tour of the national parks with a 3-day loop drive around Olympic National Park in Washington State. This is a most amazing park because of the diversity of its landscapes — from snow-capped mountains to temperate rain forests to Pacific ocean beaches.
Our first destination was Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic Mountains. Clouds had settled at the higher elevations. There was little opportunity for sightseeing, as we looked out on nothing but white!
Our view of the Olympic peaks was a bust!
This wet and gloomy weather is one of the hallmarks of our Pacific Northwest. When you vacation here, you have to surrender to the elements. We soldiered on to our next destination, the Hoh Rain Forest, thinking that rain in a rain forest might make a more authentic experience. But, of course, it was not raining when we got there!
Still, the effects of rain were evident everywhere — moss-drapped trees, green green streams, nurse logs nourishing new growth, filtered light. We walked the Hall of Mosses Trail and the Spruce Loop Trail. The tall trees were awesome.
Driving into the Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park
Tall, tall trees
Along the Hall of Mosses Trail
Nurse log, a fallen tree that nourishes new, young trees
Green stream bed
Spruce Loop Trail
Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way
by Mary Oliver, from Felicity
If you’re John Muir you want trees to
live among. If you’re Emily, a garden
will do.
Try to find the right place for yourself.
If you can’t find it, at least dream of it.
When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow.
Anything that touches.
God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable. But holiness is visible,
entirely.
Some words will never leave God’s mouth,
no matter how hard you listen.
In all the works of Beethoven, you will
not find a single lie.
All important ideas must include the trees,
the mountains, and the rivers.
To understand many things you must reach out
of your own condition.
For how many years did I wander slowly
through the forest. What wonder and
glory I would have missed had I ever been
in a hurry!
Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still
it explains nothing.
The point is, you’re you, and that’s for keeps.
“the leaping greenly spirits of trees . . .”
— e e cummings
Tall trees of the Hoh Rain Forest
Our second Olympic National Park destination was the Hoh Rain Forest. This temperate rain forest gets 12 to 14 feet of rain each year, but we were lucky to be visiting on a sunny day. We began seeing moss-draped trees on the road leading into the heart of the rain forest. Instead of fifty shades of gray, we were seeing fifty shades of green.
Fisherman in the Hoh River
The road into the Hoh valley
Green, green stream
Hall of Mosses trail
Tall trees on a rare blue-sky day
Living giants
New growth on fallen log
Light through a lacey green curtain
Nurse log (fallen tree nourishing new trees)
Rings of a fallen giant
Ground cover
Noah peeking around the trunk of a giant
These ferns reminded me of sea horses
Ferns with Holga-ish effect
190-foot fallen Sitka spruce
Moss-Hung Trees
by Gertrude Gilmore, 1936
Moss-hung trees
Like the mantilla of a beautiful lady’s ghost
Bearing elusive fragrance of a faint perfume
Soft, caressing;
Shaped
Like the wings of huge, inert gray moths, —
Weird and uncertain branches veining them
Gossamer, intangible;
And reshaped
Like fairy cobwebs interlacing mesh upon mesh
With lights of foolish insects caught within them
Restive, darting
With shadows —
Like half reluctant thoughts lately modified
In a world of fantastical shapes and causes,
Mystical, fleeting.
Mossy branches of a maple tree
Moss-laden maple
Thoreau Thursdays (24): Time is But the Stream I Go A-Fishing In
September 29, 2011
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Watery reflections
The finite and the infinite — our lives are but a shallow dip in the endless streaming of Eternity. We wish we could anchor ourselves for a longer stay, but the tides of time will ultimately triumph. We will all die.
I’ve pretty much reconciled myself to my death and the fact that there will likely be no lasting memory of my time on Earth even a generation after I am gone. Not even a light footprint. And that’s okay. I will be subsumed back into Nature, which is eternal. My atoms will survive in a new form.
“As for man, his days are like grass:
He flourishes like a flower in the field;
The wind blows over it and is gone,
And its place remembers it no more.”
— Psalm 103: 15 – 16
“Surely human insignificance is at least as much of a mystery as human existence.”
— David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death
“I bequeath myself to the dirt
to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look
for me under your boot-soles.”
— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
“To end with nothing is something.”
— Suvan Geer
“. . . from generation to generation, the earth abides. We are the earth, we come from the earth, and to the earth we return. The earth abides.”
— Richard Quinney, Once Again the Wonder
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