My Trip To Seattle, Washington
My sisters, Julie and Valinda, and I woke up at a nice 5 star hotel. It was 6:45 AM, we were tired and cranky, so we headed out to Starbucks for some coffee, hoping it would wake us up, so we can hit the road.
The day’s agenda was to drive west to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, which is the northwestern-most point of the continental United States. That whole area is part of the Makah reservation. We’d been warned by other guests at the
B&B that you need to get a pass at the mini-mart to spend any time on the reservation. If they hadn’t warned us, well, we might have been in trouble. This wouldn’t be the Makah’s fault though. They have a sign on the highway before you get into town. Two actually. One says, "Visitors, stop and read sign ahead," and the other is the sign to read, which is very large with lots of small print on it. We said, “screw that,” and kept on going.
The pass in question was called a Recreation Pass. I told the gentleman behind the counter that we weren’t planning on having any fun while we were there, so did we really need a recreation pass? That got some laughs. It was suggested that we get in our car and turn around and leave if we didn’t
want to have fun.
Cape Flattery itself was quite wonderful. It made me think of
a fairy land. There were wooden pathways, and multiple species of moss on the trees, and ferns and ferns and ferns everywhere. Out at the water’s edge, we were high enough to see a seagull and her chicks from above. We also saw cormorants and wild starfish. No orcas though.
Polly, a nature guide, waited at the end of the trail to answer
any questions. There was an island a little ways out, with a lighthouse somewhere on it. Flocks of hundreds of gulls floated on the water by its shore, then lifted into the air, circling and squawking. Polly looked through her binoculars and said an eagle was frightening the gulls. As we stood there, fog engulfed the island, and it gradually disappeared
from sight. Polly told us that the US had recently given the island back to the tribe, who were surprised because they hadn’t know it wasn’t theirs to begin with. Of course, said Polly, the structures on the island were covered in lead-based paint and had asbestos insulation. Valinda figured the government’s next gift to the Makah would be to make them pay to clean it all up. For their own protection, of course.
After the Cape, we headed down toward Shi Shi Beach. This was a modest hike through an entirely different-looking forest. We had hiked maybe halfway to the beach when Valinda and I realized we were getting pretty tired (not Julie, though. She's a machine). I had this radical idea! There was
no law that said we had to walk all the way to the beach! We could turn around if we wanted to, and that is what we did.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I know my words cannot convey what we saw, but neither can my
pictures. That’s because I didn’t take very many of them. First, these forests were dark and the lens I’d brought just couldn’t go to a wide enough aperture to get good, clean shots. Second, since my main interest in photography is taking pictures of wildlife, I’d neglected to bring a wide angle lens, which would have done a much better job at conveying
the feel of the place than what I had. Perhaps it is just my lack of skill, but I could never find a way to capture the grandeur of a 200-foot Douglas fir with my 55-mm lens.
I’d had this idea I would see all kinds of new birds and squirrels and stuff when I came to Washington, like when I went to Mesa, Arizona and saw a new kind of bird every ten minutes. But that wasn’t turning out to be the case. I never saw any of the various birds chirping and singing in the trees around us, which made it pretty difficult to take pictures of
them. And most of the ones I did see were robins and crows, which we I can see at home, though I’d never seen wild robins before, forced to live their lives on beaches and rainforests, with no tidy lawns to hop about on.
Anyway, my camera was just a useless weight around my neck. I was getting photographer’s elbow from cradling it in my arm to give my neck a break. I stopped halfway back and put my camera into my pack. “Now, you know we’ll see some new bird we’ve never seen before,” I told Valinda, and when I looked up there was a woodpecker, of a species I’d never seen before, skittering around on a tree not fifteen feet away. I struggled to get the camera out of the bag, but needless to say, the bird flew off just as I got the camera up to my eye.
I kept the camera around my neck after that. Not that it did me a lot of good.
Our next stop was to be Lake Ozette, and then on to Forks.
But we got trapped in a traffic jam. Hard to believe, given how little traffic there was on this road, but construction crews were busily tearing up all the erosion-preventing plant life on the cliff next to the road and had stopped traffic while one of their digger-daggers (as Valinda terms them)
struggled with a particularly large tree. By the time we got past that, we decided to skip Ozette and head straight to Forks.
What awaited us in Forks was…. Vampires.
Forks suffers from Twilight mania. The Twilight books, and recent film, are all set in Forks and nearby La Push. We were informed that the author of the books, which feature teenaged vampires and werewolves, had been looking for a spot to set her stories that was foggy and mysterious, and
close to Native American land. Her Google search turned up Forks, Washington. There are four books out now, and the three films with the last, to be realeased next year. Twilight fans have flocked on pilgrimage to Forks, reviving its flagging
economy (temporarily, at least). Just about every business in town has gotten onto the Twilight bandwagon. The Visitor’s Center has a big sign that says “We [heart] Edward and Bella,” (the teen vampires) and an information desk devoted solely to Twilight. Hotels advertise “Twilight Rooms” (though one has a prominent sign stating, “Edward Cullen didn’t sleep here”). The local Subway is the home of the Twilight Sandwich. There are several stores on the main street devoted to selling Twilight memorabilia, and even the supermarket has a Twilight section.
It was rather nauseating, actually.
We stayed at Brightwater House, a B&B a little northwest of Forks. Part of the reason I chose it was that it had a river running through the property (the Sol Duc river), and because their website said they sometimes saw elk in the fields in front of the house (and no, I never saw any there). We had a large suite in the converted barn. The room was very nice, but our proprietor, Richard, got on my nerves. He’s a smart guy and all, but all he does is talk. Listening is a concept he has not learned to grasp, and he’s in his sixties. I’m thinking he’ll never get it. Maybe it comes from being a professor of archaeology for many years. Regardless, after the first few interesting stories, I got bored with the monologue, and then actively annoyed. I started avoiding him (not that we had all that many interactions with him). I don’t think he is a very happy man. How could you be, when you don't think anyone else has anything interesting to say?
His dog, Lucy was happy, though, and his cat, Tik Tik, was the most catlike cat I’ve ever met. He had about zero interest in human beings. He was nice enough as long as you let him run the show, but apparently had a habit of biting people who made the mistake of touching him without his permission.
For dinner, we drove down to La Push, on the Ozette Indian reservation. The town’s name has degenerated from the original moniker applied by the French settlers (or invaders): La Bouche, meaning The Mouth as this is where the Sol Duc river flows into the Pacific Ocean.
There is one restaurant in La Push, called the River’s Edge. After we were seated, we waited and waited and waited for our waitress (she shouldn’t have taken her title so seriously). After we ordered, we waited and waited for our food. Then we waited and waited and waited for our check. This kind of slow service was something we were to experience quite often on our journey down the western part of the Olympic Peninsula.
Julie and Valinda ordered exactly the same meal, a seafood medley sautéed in white wine and butter sauce. Valinda originally wanted to order sautéed scallops, but was told they were only serving them fried because the scallops were too small to be sautéed. There were scallops in the sautéed seafood medley, though. Go figure.
When their meals arrived, you’d never know they were the same dish. Julie’s bowl had a collection of different seafood items and some vegetables. Valinda’s looked like soup. We figured the cook had scooped out Julie’s meal, and then dumped what was left in the pan into Valinda’s bowl. You’ve got to wonder about a cook who would serve the exact same meal to two people at the same table, yet not make the presentations the same.
Later, we had more reason to believe the guy was a little off. Just as we were getting our check, he started yelling at the other waitress, “Close the restaurant! I’m out of salad!” The waitress rolled her eyes in disbelief, as did just about everyone else in the restaurant. It’s not like you go out to eat there for their iceberg lettuce salad bar. But the cook was adamant. “I’ve got no salad! I’ve got nothing to feed people!”
“But, I just seated two parties of six,” the waitress replied.
“I’ll find something to feed them!” he yelled back. “Just close.” So she flipped the door sign, but you could tell she thought he was a jerk. I was glad to get out of there and would absolutely never go back.