The Pacific Northwest is demanding. Rain and wind hammer the coast and gnaw at our little home on wheels. Washington looms like a masthead over its gusty, water-bound corner of the country, and the wet drama is captured in names that all make sense: Deception Pass, Dismal Nitch, Cape Disappointment. It’s easy to feel the haunt of ships and souls lost in the deep dark drink. This place is wild. Unpredictable. It has a pirate heart. While we sleep the Pacific swallows massive trees, plays with them its mouth, then spits them onto the shore. I can hear the boom and crunch, the beaches a pick-up-stick display of dried grey bones.
In a state that isn’t shy about its natural gifts, Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is especially talented. The Pacific Ocean pummels its western edge, muscles its way through the Strait of Juan de Fuca (nudging Canada above), eases into the Salish Sea, and finally sinks into the Puget Sound. In Port Townsend, a lovely town in the peninsula’s top right corner, we watch river otters, sea lions, and orcas just a stone’s throw from the trailer. The views here make you feel like you’re plopped inside a giant caldera, distant snowy mountains puckered around the watery town on all sides: the Cascades and Mount Baker, the Olympics, and Mount Rainier shining like a silver yolk in the faraway sky. And then there are the rainforests: fuzzy, lush, dripping in hot forest breath, steeped in fog.
After two months in the Northwest we are pretty much addicted. Washington and Oregon are iconic, like eagles perched high up on their wild edge of the country, and we are easy prey, happy to be hunted and ripped all to love-pieces. We flit between parks on both state coasts and it never gets old. And we can see Lulu. She comes to us; we go to her. It’s an odd but beautiful bonding in the time of Covid: campfires and rooftops and virtual hugs. Love always lurks in all the things we cannot see or do.
So we’re shooting and living. The Wonder Wheeler leaks, her furnace broke, and sand has found a forever home in the cracks, but she keeps on rolling. And, thankfully, so do we.
P.S…. there’s a rich indigenous life on the Olympic Peninsula. I covered some of the Makah’s cool seafaring history in my previous 2010 blog:
We were rooted in the Olympics of WA like its native Sitka Spruce. Not ready to leave yet, we visited the Makah Museum, which taught us that the coastal Makah and Orvette tribes were tough whale and seal hunters. They would sail out in groups of eight on boats carved out of entire tree trunks, and each man had a job, one of which was to dive in and sew the whale’s mouth shut so it wouldn’t sink. (When sharks arrived, the hunters would toss rocks off the boat– a tactic that seemed to distract the sharks and send them chasing the rocks down.) Everything they caught they’d eat or use: seal bladders for bags, intestines for bow strings, sewed up seals for floats to tow whales back to land…. Fascinating stuff!
