14 May 2002 ~ The Pacific Ocean, or, how to talk to a lumberjack without getting scared...

Please excuse the marked lack of timely entries lately... I don't have much excuse for skipping so many days in a row, though I do have some fascinating Road Trip stories from this weekend to offer you....

Jürgen informed me that living within spitting distance of the Puget Sound, and having once been to a beach near L.A. is NOT the same as having been to the Pacific Ocean. And since, of course, we're so close to the Pacific Ocean (okay, we're REALLY not very close), we took off Sunday afternoon for the coast.

Some of the highlights of the trip would have to be staying overnight with a ghost (the desk clerk informed us that her name is Beverly; we informed him that she's fond of making the lights flicker; he appeared not to be very surprised...), wandering around in the woods in the dark trying to find the ocean (which was, of course, right in front of us), and having lunch with a couple of lumberjacks in a town that didn't appear to have a name.

(Admittedly, the lumberjacks scared me a little bit too; I don't blame Louise for being a little nervous of lumberjacks the night we almost went to Aberdeen. It didn't help that Jürgen told the lumberjacks that we were 'Greeners and that I was from "back East." Norman told me ages ago that lumberjacks and 'Greeners aren't reputed to get along very well. Jürgen says that the catch-all phrase for liberals, environmentalists, 'Greeners, and folks so unAmerican that they don't eat onion rings, is "spotted owl." Took me a few minutes to convince the one fellow that I wasn't a "spotted owl." He'd ordered this huge steak and mashed potatoes, and I picked on him for not having any onion rings, and didn't he want to order some quick before anybody accused HIM of being unAmerican... Heh. I would have sworn, a few days ago, that such a lame comeback would only work in a stupid movie, but I guess I was wrong. He hastily ordered onion rings and let me play with the little wooden biplane he'd carved. Go, Helena!)

(Spotted owls rock... Don't tell anybody with an axe that I said that....)

...And of course, there were the eight million times that either Jürgen or I would call out the name of a tiny little Washington town and giggle about it for awhile. Unfortunately, neither the town of Beaver, WA, or its next-door neighbor, Sappho, WA, had places at which to buy commemorative postcards, though I did give an extra-special wave to Aberdeen (where Kurt Cobain lived, yes, but no, he did not live under a bridge there; that's crap), and stretch my legs in Sequim (pronounced "Skwim," which is my new mantra)....

Some interesting facts I learned this past weekend:

In the Olympic Peninsula Rainforest, it rains. And it's cloudy. Go figure. It didn't occur to me before. Duh.

The Pacific Ocean is so named because, at least in the Pacific Northwest region of the coast, you are not very likely to step on a hypodermic needle, as you might in say, New Jersey. Thus, one feels more peaceful with life in general. This feeling is short-lived when one's companion leads one to the shore in the middle of the night and says, "you know, if a tsunami came in, we wouldn't have any forewarning; we wouldn't see it or hear it or anything. And it would slam us into all that driftwood and up through the woods, and if we lived, which we probably wouldn't, we'd be cold and wet." I was not feeling very pacified after that. But it WAS a whole lot cleaner and more beautiful than most beaches I've been to, tsunamis or no.

You can't see tide pools when the tide is in. Hell.

There are either five rivers called the Sol Duc River, or it bends a WHOLE lot.

The so-called "Big Cedar Tree," (which is, as the name on the map insinuates, a big cedar tree in the middle of the woods) is pretty damned big. And yes, they put it on the map. If I had my scanner with me, I'd show you, but for now you'll have to take my word for it. There is, on the map of the Olympic Peninsula, a spot marked "Big Cedar Tree." I swear it. And it is a hell of a big tree.

I have been informed, speaking of facts I've learned, that a "pine tree" is not the same as an "evergreen tree." And that a cedar tree, which does not have needles, IS an evergreen, but the big spruce "pine trees" in my front yard as a kid were not, in fact, pine trees. Dammit. I don't know which upsets me more: that I've grown up with all these false notions of the world around me, or the fact that these damned Environmental Studies kids have to keep inflicting their social constructs on me. Heh!

I'm starving. Helena needs to eat.

Love,
~Helena*