Cycles and Seasons
A Northwest holiday road trip prompts some thoughts
Never a huge Halloween fan, I find the holidays begin with Thanksgiving. Seasonal celebrations punctuate the years nicely. We took a slow road trip to the spot where our kids will converge with us. Seeing places that I do not know well in long stretches of Washington and Oregon activated fresh eyes and a curious mind. I kept circling around cycles.
For The Road Trip this week, I muse. Read on!
Olympic Peninsula
We spent the first two nights on the Olympic Peninsula, staying the first night at the northeastern corner and the second night toward the southwestern corner.
The heart of the peninsula is Olympic National Park, a mostly wild mountainous landscape with few easy entries, by design. At a key point in the park’s history, wilderness advocates held enough sway to quash the idea of a cross-park parkway so common in the 1930s. Despite having to skirt the edges, we found some corners of breathtaking beauty.
National forest lands and private timberlands surround the park. Much of this land has been hammered hard by the timber industry for more than a century. It once dominated the Pacific Northwest but has declined significantly since I’ve been an adult through a combination of technology, economics, and policy.
Despite the industry’s decline, we witnessed clearcut after clearcut. Interspersed with them were second- or third-growth forests that look crowded and uniform in size. In some of the clearcuts, we saw enormous stumps, few and far between, showing that forests of a century and more ago were less uniform, more spacious—bigger. In other words, a forest, not something resembling a crop.
Occasionally, we saw timber company signs announcing when the forest was harvested and replanted—the cycles inscribed on plywood, promising an endless, regular cycle. It’s a promise that rings shallow if the communities— human and natural—are any indication. Hard times have taken up residence on this hard-edge of the continent.
Columbia Gorge
To avoid mountain passes, we moved inland through the Columbia Gorge. This is a special natural spot in the Northwest. In a short space, you move definitively from west to east. The two parts of Oregon and Washington are geographically distinct and not subtle about it. Politically, they are uncomfortable together, as the expression in Eastern Oregon to join Greater Idaho makes clear.
We stopped at Beacon Rock and stayed on property that once functioned as a ranch. Now, it’s a state park. Although the rock is the feature, we enjoyed the lowland where the animals once grazed. Large oak and other deciduous trees scrambled the vista with twisted branches, reminding us of the time it takes to witness history change, to stand guard over places to fish, to ranch, to recreate.
Just upstream from the park’s boat ramp, barely out of sight, Bonneville Dam obstructs the Columbia River. The first New Deal dam on the river, it was completed in 1938 and provided cheaper power for Northwesterners and helped fuel industrial growth. It also posed a significant barrier to salmon, something that worsened significantly when Grand Coulee Dam was finished a few years later. Still, the salmon try to continue their timeless cycle.
A paved pathway, covered in yellow leaves, offered a welcome circuit through the ranch-park. A spur headed off through the yellowing grass. Beckoning, we followed and ended up at the river, looking downstream at a tugboat. Above us, clouds shrouded the Oregon mountains. Along the shore, spawned out salmon scattered along the lapping water.
Salmon cycles have defined this spot for thousands of years. To me, those cycles seem more reliable as a marker of place than the interpretive signs that try to explain history.
Deschutes River
After making our way through the gorge, we turned south passing through some of the emptiest land anywhere—if we measure by human beings (which we shouldn’t always). On our way to Central Oregon for our holiday rendezvous, we traveled through open space for many miles before picking up drier forests.
Through part of this leg of our journey, we viewed large swathes of land that recently burned. Grasses have been burned deliberately for millennia, and it often promotes healthy new growth. The same is true, with different ecologies, for many forests. Fire cycles define landscapes and make many of them function. Ending burning disrupted age-old cycles.
I don’t know the story of this fire and whether it destroyed homes or livelihoods of those who have recently inhabited this sparsely populated land. I did wonder how frightening it would have been to see the fire coming for miles with nothing to stop it.
Later, we hiked along the Deschutes River, where the trees and rocks kept company with the moving water. Fire had been here, too. I’m not sure how often or how recently. But stumps and standing trees bore the unmistakable marks. Ponderosa pine forests like this one have evolved with fire. Such fire scars are familiar to anyone who hikes interior western woods.
Along the trail, we saw fresh burns and older burns. We saw big standing trees and ones toppled by fire or wind, or maybe just age. We saw crumbling ancient giants turning into a seedbed for the future.
I touched bark. My spouse counted tree rings, trying to estimate if a fallen log had germinated before the First Thanksgiving. (Yes, we decided.) My dog sniffed rocks, bushes, trees. We listened to the Deschutes. Timeless; someone walking here 400 years ago might have experienced much the same.
But the trail passed in and out of state and private property, a different type of cycle, one imposed by human legal regimes. They guide so much.
But I prefer to sync with nature’s cycles.
Postscript: A wish
On our first night, we stayed at Fort Worden State Park. In the morning, I ran around the park, seeing the concrete remnants where big guns once stood, aiming to protect Puget Sound from a maritime invasion. As a boy, I loved seeing similar structures across the Sound at Fort Casey, probably my favorite boyhood spot. Then, I played “war,” running around imagining I was a soldier.
As I ran through the morning rain, I thought about those soldiers once stationed here, and I wondered if they dreamed of peace, a brake on the cycle of violence that seems endless.
Closing Words
Relevant Reruns
In Olympic National Park is a beach I’ve written about before here. I wrote about an entirely different kind of road trip here.
New Writing
Local efforts to improve flood control have reached an agreement, something I wrote about here this week.
As always, you can find my books, and books where some of my work is included, at my Bookshop affiliate page (where, if you order, I get a small benefit).
Taking Bearings Next Week
Back to The Library next week. Stay tuned!