Goodbye, Forks. Hello, PDX

The view out my hotel window.

We had a hard night on Friday. At 3 p.m. we had six people signed up, and then one called and canceled. Five people. The first participant was one of my spleens, and to put it simply, was difficult. Then the next two didn't show up. The first of them I had spoken to only a few hours earlier, and the second was his friend. I had called the friend and left messages twice, and he hadn't called back, so I was not really expecting him to show up. But it was possible they were going to come together, or maybe the first would take the second's place. So 5 minutes after the second missed appointment, I called and pulled forward the remaining two people, who were great.

But that meant we had that first difficult session, followed by 3 hours of blank waiting, before our last two guys arrived. The rain, which we were most desperate for, was drying up and the temperature dropping, turning ultimately into pea soup fog. Poor Glenn, out there fending off the cougar, was cold and shivering, and Nate had reached the end of his patience. They discussed an idea they'd been dancing around for a day, and informed me that after Friday night, they were done.

Soooo, this morning, I packed quickly; called all the Saturday people and cancelled them; had a debrief and clean up session with the guys out at the airport; and left. It feels rather abrupt, even though it's only one day early, and until Monday of this week we hadn't been intending to run Saturday anyway. (It was when it looked like the only rain we'd get this week was Friday and Saturday nights that we decided to schedule them. We had an unexpected night of rain on Thursday, so Saturday wasn't technically needed.)

I took advantage of the early and lengthened day, going first to Second Beach, and then stopping at the Quinault Rain Forest on my way home to Portland. I'll blog about those tomorrow, I expect. Nate and Glenn were planning to hole up in the hotel and have a cigar and a couple of beers (not a fancy I share). They drive to Seattle tomorrow for a little sight-seeing, because they have to be there Monday morning to return a rental camera (not open weekends). Then they will drive without stopping to Minnesota, because they have Tuesday morning meetings.

Meantime, I'm home; the cats displayed intense feline-pleasure (which translates as: You will pet me constantly for 30 minutes, and then you will feed me, and then I will ignore you); and it's time for bed.

Follow up to Long Song

Thanks for all the kind words (through comments and emails) on the Long Song, as one person called it.

Yes, it is based on things people told me while we were waiting. Something about my expression? Or the situation (sitting elbow to elbow in a little, warm car surrounded by the night)? Or maybe the town just needs a little therapy. I wouldn't have to say much beyond, "Well, it looks like we have about 10 minutes --" and their mouths would open and I'd hear so much, often so much more than I wanted to hear.

I don't think I can publish it, actually, without opening myself to a libel suit. It's a little too honest, don't you think? And too specific -- referring to people who everybody in town could figure out -- and some pretty horrible things they said or recounted doing to me. Some wonderful things, too, of course. I suppose I could change the "names", make up new names for the towns and try it. But I don't know how much would hang together out of context of what I was doing (sitting on an airport in my car doing research). And I don't know how well it would work with the names changed.

On the other hand, I've already revised it from what I posted last night -- I left out one rather crucial couple (some of the Others), and I think there are some who can be removed to make it shorter, without losing anything.

And I'm stuck on what body part would be the Others -- I have them as the sinews, because they are sort of forgotten in the body, yet critical, and most of those people in my story are "new" immigrants to the area, so not necessarily in the main part of the community, but they are the new blood and the future. But they aren't as critical as sinews. Blood doesn't seem right, either.

I also don't like the dead being memories -- because memories aren't a body part. The spleen? I had a couple definite spleens, but they got kneaded into other parts. I hate to lengthen it, but I can think of two spleens that aren't even mentioned. Maybe the mothers are the arms, and the dead are the heart. Hmmm, I might go with that. Any suggestions?

I Sing of the People of Forks

I sing of the body, the people of Forks.

I sing of the backbone: the men, who work, or who can’t find work, who range from desperation to cynicism, with little satisfaction in between.

I sing of the white man, caught in the middle;
who started out logging;
who moved on to commercial fishing when the logging slacked off;
who moved on to conservation when the fishing slacked off;
who now works for the Hoh Indian Reservation, managing conservation;
who mourns the loss of the streambeds and the hillsides, to logging;
who mourns the loss of logging jobs;
who blames technology by reducing crews from 8 men to 2, for the loss of jobs;
who trusts private logging industry and the DNR less far than he can spit.

I sing of the white man who is out of work
who 15 years ago started college in fisheries, but then moved to criminal justice;
who found he could not both attend college full-time in a city an hour away, and work
full-time here, even though he was 15 years younger then;
who has eaten a luau of octopus in Tennessee with a family of Samoans;
who sometimes guides the handicapped on hunting tours in the Olympic Mountains;
who sometimes works road crew;
who sometimes works for the DNR, counting fish;
who wants to do criminal justice, but the career path here is to work at the prison;
who doesn’t want to babysit big scary angry men all day;
who doesn’t want feces and pinecones thrown at him;
who is caring for his young nephews while his twin brother lies dying of cancer in a hospital ward in Seattle.

I sing of the white man who works for the DNR and the prison;
who takes work crews of prisoners out to the mountains;
who plants and thins three acres of forest a day with a 10-man crew;
who may do the planting too, or just supervises;
who takes his prison crew to forest fires in that season;
who earns $50K, not counting fire bonuses, for babysitting big scary angry men.

I sing of the wussy-assed wimp at the weather station;
who could not be from around here, because he drives a Prius;
who stood in his white socks and Birkenstock sandals;
who scolded me for leaving open the gate (never locked), thus encouraging vandals to come
to drive on the grounds;
who watched me from darkened windows for an hour afterwards.

I sing of the over-confident former commercial fisherman, who would not let me finish a
sentence.

I sing of the nervous system: the children, poised and ready for the starting gun, still close by
their mothers’ sides.

I sing of the boy, “taking a break” after high school;
who lives only to kill – moose, deer, elk, cougar, salmon, halibut;
who brings photos of the cougar he shot, and the moose in Alaska;
who wants to learn taxidermy, but thinks linesman’s school might be more secure.

I sing of the high-school senior who hopes for a baseball scholarship and wants to play in the
big leagues.

I sing of the midwife’s blank-eyed daughter, who sparkles when talking about boys.

I sing of the articulate boy reading a book in the back seat while his mother talks to me;
who was the only person to take any candy from the bowl;
who asks to sit in the Mini Cooper;
who is most delighted by the automatically dimming overhead light;
who is too young to mask his enthusiasm with the polish of high school.

I sing of the heart: the mothers.

I sing of the business owner who reminds herself repeatedly, aloud, that her boy must make his
own mistakes.

I sing of the midwife, awaiting two babies, who knows everybody in town and around it.

I sing of the young woman, starting late after nursing her three-week old son.

I sing of the elbows, or maybe the feet, bruised and sore: the men who are disabled,
who live with their families, on the cheap out here in the wilds.

I sing of the transplant from Detroit;
who was pistol-whipped by police 30 years ago in the city, crushing his skull;
who’s suspicious and sharp-edged;
who sees light more brilliantly than the rest of us and turns away in pain.

I sing of the gentle, funny, smart man, on disability, but not obviously disabled;
who is wider than he is tall;
who says All I have left is my appetite and my sight. But I’ve got diabetes, so even that’s
going soon.

I sing of the Vietnam Vet (two tours);
who took two bullets, and an AKA-47 rifle butt to the forehead just above his eye;
who is proud he can still count to 10 and signs his name in a childish scrawl;
who smells of ancient cigarette smoke, wood smoke, cheap alcohol, and mold.

I sing of his half-blind, glass-eyed younger stepson, monosyllabic.

I sing of his hardscrabble, handsome wife, goliath Chihuahua tucked under her coat;
who growls and barks against all strangers;
who keeps them all together by sheer force of will.

I sing of her elder son, as beautiful as twilight on a stormy day and smart as lightning;
who works at “The Park” (the National Park) on a maintenance crew;
who lives in a plumbless cabin on the shores of a glacier-fed lake;
who joys in the glory of the forest and the water and the rain.

I sing of their friend, the organizer, the arranger;
who is tiny and round and dark like a dew-painted stone in the forest;
who is lively and laughing like a salmon swimming upstream;
whose smoke-graveled voice is the nexus for seven disparate spirits, watching them,
nurturing them, rescuing them.

I sing of the outsiders, rubbing shoulders: the people of LaPush,
who confirmed with me (three of them, two nights) and then didn’t show, a few hours later;
who hung up on me when I called to see if there was a misunderstanding.

I sing of the retired deputy sheriff, expensively blonde,
who has the skin of a woman ten years younger (all the locals have young skin in this
rainy region);
who lives across the street from her grandchildren;
who cares for her great-grandchildren one day every week of their lives;
who has recently remarried and laughs at every mention of her new husband;
who plans to build a home for her children to stay in when they visit, on the five acres
she bought with her new husband;
who says, pursing her red soft lips, Oh, LaPush – they’re Indians. They are so lazy!
You can’t count on them for anything. And drunk-! Always drunk!

I sing of the tongue: the friends, with ties other than blood;
who greet each other in surprise in the glow of the car lights;
who say I didn’t know you’d be here! How’s your father?;
who say See you Friday! Or See you at church! Or Say hi to your mother!
who sometimes say, as we drive back through the dark across the runway, Oh yeah,
I remember her now. My mom used to work with her at the bank.

I sing of the girlfriends in their 40’s, who both come together, twice;
who each sits in the dark car for two hours while her friend is with me,
who each is a silhouette with a cigarette for an evening, window half-open even in the rain;
who each is relaxed, but prepared to run to the rescue.

I sing of the gut and intestines: the retirees, who came here for the climate.

I sing of the early-retired nuclear chemist who came to hike the rain forest, because he had
hiked every other climate already;
who had lived five years in Las Vegas, hiking in the sear dry heat and learning to gamble;
who fell in love with the former deputy sheriff, a widow with young skin, and
who stayed;
who misses sunlight and travel and speaks often of god, and oftener of death;
who has a wife who will not sell her home as he sold his;
who plans, despite her, to build a house for them both on the five acres they bought together.

I sing of the retired gumshoe from around dere near Chicahgo;
who has an accent you could cut deep dish pizza with, and piercing blue eyes;
who at six foot five and three hundred pounds had nothing to fear while investigating;
who moved here with his wife because he’s thrifty, and you can live thrifty here;
who moved here because it was the only place in America you don’t need air-conditioning;
who knows all the honest car mechanics in Portland and gave me their names and addresses from memory;
who would have been happy to have talked for hours:
who did talk for hours: on the phone…during his wife’s session… and he came early;
who remembered I liked Ikea and brought me a catalog to read, and a book catalog, and the local paper.

I sing of his wife; almost as big as he;
who pleaded with him to find her a bathroom;
who lets him do all the phoning;
who waited for him to open her car door;
who laughed through our session and called her husband a babbler, just like his name;
who could have held her own against a cougar.

I sing of the Mrs. Cravitz, with three police scanners and four CC cameras on her backyard;
who caught those punks smoking down by the trees, and they couldn’t sell that car for
months -- that’s what limburger cheese will do;
who patrols the downtown blocks at the wee hours, laden with mace and pepper-spray;
who raised three kids alone, and raised them military, we’ve always been military;
who has two sons in the Marines in Iraq right now;
whose new husband has no military connections, and his eldest is a doper. When he comes
to the house, I follow him around with bleach, because dopers are full of germs.

I sing of the Mr. Cravitz, large and hearty and educated, friendly and warm.

I sing of the memories: the dead.

I sing of two teenaged girls in an especially gruesome car accident last weekend, their
sudden absence a reverberating, tingling shock for everyone we meet.

I sing of the husband, 55, chopping wood one minute, flat dead the next, while she was
making a phone call.

I sing of the baby boy, mentioned by his mother 25 years later, then carefully laid aside.

I sing of the baby brother, not a teenager yet, death unexplained.

I sing of the sinews and the muscles: the others.

I sing of the bank teller, come here from Detroit 30 years ago, only a local for 10 years;
who wants to talk about Lost and Buffy;
who knows all about how our money is filtering through town;
who explains about counterfeit traveler’s checks.

I sing of the nurse, intense and quick;
who came here from Michigan six months ago;
who shed her first name with her husband I was determined to lose something of
the old me;
who doesn’t recognize her old signature anymore as being her.

I sing of the bus-driver, the 3 a.m. to noon shift, between the pockets of humanity,
Forks to Clallam Bay and Clallam Prison, then Neah Bay, and back;
who traveled the world for 19 years with Disney on Ice;
who came here because his folks retired here;
who says Rain is better because once you’re wet, you can’t get any wetter.

I sing of the people of Forks.

The Turning Point

Something about today, maybe the overcast skies returning, and the rain in the evening, making the study wet and cold and unpleasant (even though we've been waiting for rain). . . All three of us suddenly are longing to be done with the study, and going home. There are still sights to be seen, but we're tuckered out. What's the expression? "Check the oven, honey. I'm done."

But we had good subjects tonight, all of them. And only two more nights, which, once they get moving, will go pretty fast. I miss the cats. (I don't miss the interrupted sleep.)

The Point

Today dawned stunningly clear and sunny. You would never believe we are within 30 miles of Rain Forest from the line up of sunny days we've had. The three of us decided to go a little further afield, and started out for Cape Alava, which is, at low tide, the westernmost point of the contiguous 48 states. There is a 9 mile walk along the beach there (unusually, all on wood planking) which takes you by an archaeological dig of an ancient Makah Indian village (which was taken by the sea for centuries and then appeared again in the 1970s); and by Wedding Rocks where there are 300 year old petroglyphs; and further on there is Sand Point. I can't remember what is distinctive about Sand Point, but there is something gorgeous there, too.

However, low tide is now late in the afternoon, about the time we have to be at the airport to start setting up. We were driving towards it about at high tide, planning to walk only part of the trail and to stay on the high ground. We realized then that about 3/4ths of the drive to Cape Alava coincides with 1/2 the drive to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery. And the spirit took us and we changed direction.

So instead, we went to Cape Flattery, which is the NorthWesternmost point in the lower 48, and ties with Cape Alava for Westernmost point at high tide.

The drive there runs for about 20 miles parallel to, and along the shores of the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Across them, about 25 miles to the north, is Vancouver, Canada, breath-takingly close. We definitely got the better deal when trading for views -- I hadn't realized the line of snow-capped mountains right on the coast of Canada.

At the end of the drive you enter the Makah Indian Reservation and the small, rural, but seemingly thriving community in Neah Bay. And then further on narrow roads curving around steep landslide-prone hills, with sheer sliced rock straight up two yards from one side of the road and rocky shores two yards on the other side.

After that is the Park itself at Cape Flattery. A nice little parking lot, and then a 0.7 mile walk down through thick wet forest, on a trail that is often made up of thick slices of tree trunks floating in mud, and occasionally the clean wood planking that awaits me some day at Cape Alava. As you walk down, you hear only distant waves, muted by the forest, and often obscured by the louder sounds of streams bubbling down the hillside under and around the path.




At the end, you are still many feet above the ocean, and a viewing platform has been built above that. You stand at a point that really feels like a right angle at the northwest corner -- cliffs stretch directly south on the left, and straight back to the east on the right (or behind you).

Across a little channel (through which whales swim, but not today) is Tatoosh Island, home of a lighthouse built in 1857. And to the north of course, still the not-so-distant mountains of Canada.

It was an exhilarating view, and just exactly the right length walk.



The Eagles
During the drive along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and at Cape Flattery itself, we counted over a dozen bald eagles! One of those was in shadow, and might have been a turkey vulture (its head was a little pinkish), and another appeared to be sitting on a rock in the water, which I've never seen before -- so maybe that wasn't a bald eagle, but another huge, white-headed, black-bodied bird. But others flew close enough to see their yellow feet tucked in close to their bodies.

And out at the point, we saw another huge bird, just for an instant -- We are pretty sure it was a golden eagle, because they do live out here. And no other birds of that size in this area have that allover brown coloring.

The Critters

A brief summary of the wild animals I've seen here. So far.

A seal (pup?) on Rialto Beach. They pull themselves up to sun on the warm rocks. Signs say not to bother them. No one approached this one too closely, but he didn't seem too worried.



(Those are not people you know in the background.)





Bald Eagles (also at Rialto). Glenn, Nate and I saw them flying overhead, and then land atop one of the standing rocks and watch the ocean like a light house. When Cattus Dommus familia were there, we actually almost got dive-bombed by one wielding a freshly caught (huge) fish. That eagle swooped to the end of the beach (it is actually, theoretically, photographed in the long-sweep beach scene in my previous post, but you can't see it against the white and black trees) and its mate soared overhead for 10 minutes. A few minutes later, a juvenile coasted along above the trees, too.





The white-rumped Roosevelt Elk, of which there are about 5,000 in existence, and they all live in the Olympic National Park. They were named for the President (I assume Teddy, and I'm shocked that I didn't take note of which Roosevelt) who declared the area a National Park. We say this in the Hoh National Rain Forest, about which I'll write more later.

Nate and Glenn have seen a herd of about 80 elk across the street from the airport a couple of days ago. I didn't see them, but I was late that day and not looking left nor right, but racing my little Mini down the lovely winding roads.

I have also seen a deer, as I drove home in the wee hours of this morning.

Tonight, Glenn, the man who stands for hours in the dark as our airport runway pedestrian, stopped his car and watched a cougar, waist-high, cross the road in front of him, about half a mile from the airport. They follow the elk, all the locals tell us. Well, the elk are here.