1. Into the Hoh

Up Hoh valley this morning

Perfect U made for raincatching 

remember how old TVs had a dial for Hue? 

Out here it’s all green, full hue.

Laying on dewy clover in 

Louis Meadows the canopy is a Jackson Pollack 

splatter in Verdant Major, silly even 

what an easy paean this place is to 

photosynthetic necessity and 

layers of loam, life rooting deep

into the mineral aggregate earth.

2. Rhizomatic

Taking an early break for lunch, polenta with nuts, munching and reflecting on the morning.

On the drive over the Olympic Peninsula there were clearcuts and thinned strands and regrowth and logger propaganda. In the Park it’s just forest though, hundred year old Douglas Firs and Sitka Spruces covered with parasitic relationships – mosses, fungi, ferns, insects, squirrels, woodpeckers. The trees are spaces of their own. Monstrous microsites.

It is May. Some of the old trees are down, winter victims. They fall from their bases, undermined by rot, and to see them laying across open loam you want to rewind time so you can hear the boom when they fell, all that baseboard roar over the forest floor, and how would that compare to when thunder hits your chest? 

This North coastal bioregion extends from Vancouver island down to mid-Oregon, but of course many species range into multiple regions. Can you believe that you can see Sitka Spruce in Alaska as well as on the Northern California coast? The same species.

Geologically speaking this is glacier land, granite land, raw land as opposed to those oceaned-over sedimentary regions or the igneous zones like the Columbia River Basin in Eastern Washington. Water cleaves the granite on an inhuman scale, forcing steep cuts, simply tumbling toward the lowest point as in its purest nature – “water always seeks the lowest point” is what Dad would say as we laid concrete for a patio or parking space at the home I grew up in.

Do you know the lowest point on your property? 

Do you know your home?

Do you know what the walls are made of, who laid the framework, where the wood came from, whether it was from a clear cut or thinned stand?

Do you know the land that your home sits on, who else has lived on it, what animals and plants live on it now?

Do you know the plants in your immediate area, the animals, and do you know the boundaries of your home’s biome and what causes those boundaries?

Does your imagination inhabit the spaces in your neighborhood?

Do you know your neighbors?

Have you had mad sex with the windows open and then laid down in its pool, gorging your afterglow on local fruits?

Do you go to the closest café for your morning jolt or do you drive somewhere else for it?

Do you go to the local restaurants, often enough for the waiters to know you?

Do you feel a moral obligation towards your space?

Do you know the place you’re in right now?

Do you know your own body, every inch?

Just leaves of grass in the rain forest meadow. Time to walk on.

3. Compression

In the rainforest, actions are limited. So much IS – monster trees and little maples, licorice ferns, mosses and lichens, blackberry bushes, black slugs like charred cigars, centipedes with fat pincers, fungi of all variety bulbous and blooming out of the loam - but most of it isn’t up to much. Out here being trumps doing absolutely. In this compression of verbs those which are present have a significance – for example just now a bird announces my presence to the rest of the bottomland. The announcement continues after I’ve passed and when I can’t hear it any longer a second bird begins to announce me. These little birds are the sentinels out here, and beside their being is the doing of keeping watch and then trumpeting loud and clear.

Meanwhile my being is in the process of being reduced, and it’s a pleasant reduction. I’m reminded of watching my niece the other day, 22 months old, and she names her world with an authority. “You’ve got nouns down, now do you know any verbs?” I asked her.

Her mom answered “Yeah, she knows a few… like give me, come to me, eat.”.

“Ah!” I said. “The important ones! It’s all downhill from there.”

In the rainforest they stick to the important verbs, the ones that have gotten them through the millennia.

4. Palette

12 miles up Hoh River Trail 

full pack on my back (42 pounds) 

seeing in splotches of interest -

baby green floor of clover and blackberry bushlings 

mediums of mosses and ferns 

twinges of yellow mingled into most moss -

old green of leviathan Dougs, Spruce mooses 

the loam floor occasionally giving to maroon flames 

newly shredded bark 

or the stark pale tan of fresh down giants

cut by NPS trail crew saws -

on my right the drainer of this perfect rain valley 

full with spring, turquoise with glacier water,

a grey undercurrent of glacial powder

or white rapids and blue eddies

on the roof, white snow, white bank of clouds. May.

5. Transcendence of Definition

1. On an ordinary San Diego morning the Five is my river, palette made of greys with green rectangles and Juan Gris blurs of motion trapped.

2. Those ordinary mornings impatience is the worst thing, fired with an idea or a want/need yet being jammed by immovable others is the epitome of intellectual impotence. 

3. Untrue though: the worst-worst aspect of being stuck on a freeway is the sense of following, being forced to do – in this case To move – in an unpreferred mode.

4. Out here it’s whatever mode you prefer. Sit in the grass all day? Walk 20 miles under full pack? Do what you choose how you choose so long as you do no harm.

5. Only it isn’t, is it? Or at least not quite because the matter of survival pushes you down the channel of necessity just like debris and glacial powder is carried down the Hoh.

6. By survival I mean comfort, because much of what we consider necessity is merely necessary to be comfortable.

7. Talking food (in short term), talking hot food, talking flavorful hot food, talking hot food prepared with spices and oil in a skillet over a nice fire. 

8. As conditions improve, so too do the standards of what we tell ourselves we need.

9. How many days would I have to spend in the Hoh Valley before I’d be happy sitting on a bugladen log with hard tack to gnaw like a John Muir of the Olympics?

10. John Muir driving on a California Freeway, Walt Whitman in a supermarket, Allen Ginsburg in the rain forest, Gary Snyder happy dug in on the South Yuba waking to his daily palette. Living deliberately, being wild and simple in the river called 2006.

6. Survival

More than anything, surviving is hard work. When you setup camp late and on empty, when the wood is wet because it’s a rain forest, when you didn’t bring a filter or iodine tabs or a stove and so have to either boil water on a fire or risk bacteria, when it’s so cold you’re shivering but the lighter burns you while you’re trying to get some paper to flame, the last of your paper, without which you have zero chance of getting a fire going. When your cookset is junk and you can’t get half a cup of water the hundred yards from the creek to your fire without spilling the other half. When the fire nearly goes out in the five minutes that getting water takes and then you have to spend fifteen minutes stoking it back up. When it’s midnight amid the cedars and pines and you fall into your bag, exhausted, only to wake up at first light which is probably four AM in the late May Pacific Northwest, you realize that you haven’t had an idea in days maybe, and you understand intimately why the Hoh tribe - living simply on the land - didn’t develop complex systems of art, literature, science, philosophy, self-actualization. Though you don’t have time to ponder your realization further because those coals are salvageable, if you hurry, and in a few hours if you’re very lucky and can get those coals stoked up, maybe you’ll have some water heated up to make some coffee and maybe then you can take a moment for another idea.  

7. Awake

You’ve been waiting all night for the tent to show signs of light, and when it does and really does you’re up.

Snorting, shaking your head, pissing long and yellow. Walking around a bit, slowly reinjecting me into the automaton.

I take a deep breath and then another and then have a spin around. There’s the creek with its sweet trickle, there’s the bear wire with my pack up high and my stuff sack full of rocks down by the ground. There’s a few warm coals in the pit but there’s nothing for it for sure. There’s the monster, the leviathan – the network of ideas. It’s back there, barely awake but churning around, firing off snippets and fragments – lines of prose, first little poem of Riprap – Three days sun after six days rain. Garcia Lorca, is that you over in those leaves of grass? The banana slug song from fifth grade, friend Jesse taking me camping first time on King’s Mountain, 16 years old. Survivorman Les Stroud saying “Wow that was a rough night, I was really really cold. I didn’t get much sleep.”.

And the monster is here to stay for the day. Sure, I love him, I mean love comes naturally because I formed him with my bare hands, but still. To keep him quiet for a bit I walk up to Elk Lake. It’s a quick half mile and the lake is perfect, alpine, duck filled in the predawn. In the campsite there’s a tent – just over the ridge from where I slept last night, these two girls were camped. They’re surprised to see a hiker this early without even a daypack and I don’t give any explanation. Up on the meadows winter is breaking, spring is firing the snow and cracking the ice, day after Memorial Day and summer is here.  

Back at camp I stuff everything into my pack amid a steady trickle of linky ideas and then get on to the serious work of hiking out of here. Fifteen miles, 42 pounds, a quart of ashy, powdery water. Work to do.

8. Painfoot

Painfoot creek

Not very deep

But for the meek

Pain will seep.

When I get to Falls Bridge at the confluence of Martin Creek and the Hoh River I stop, take a few pictures, slug some of that ashy water, and start worrying about crossing the Mighty Painfoot. 

The Mighty Paintfoot isn’t even the deepest creek I’ll cross today, nor is it the widest or the fastest. The problem with the Painfoot though is that there’s no reliable log crossing, and it’s a bit too deep to do in shoes. Which yesterday meant a barefoot ford.

About halfway across, maybe thirty seconds in, the pain began to seep into my toes.

Suddenly I was very aware with it. Every idea was gone, so was appreciation of the creek, so was my careful plotted checkers hop to the other shore. The pain stopper kicked in, the subterranean part of the brain that says “HEY! We don’t like this one bit. Give me the wheel I’m gonna drive us out of here pronto.”

The road to panic is paved with good painstopping intentions.

The thing about panicking while crossing a mountain creek is – don’t. If you slip and fall in a foot of mad water you’ll lose your pack at least. You may lose more than that. You may lose the whole thing.

The thing about pain is – it’s a foreigner to the white collar worker. The post-modern boy or girl is used to anxiety, fret, worry, impatience as his or her demons. This pain thing, it’s a waking shock like if you asked a mountain man, a Gary Snyder of the Sierra, to fill out a ten page TPS report in thirty minutes.

And so the Mighty Painfoot is a deep, wide, and fast monster to be anxious, fretting, worried and impatient over. As I hike I listen for her, think I’m coming to her, then remember this creek or that creek that I crossed after her – “Oh yeah.”

Then it’s her. And there’s nothing else but ford her or sit by her all day, all week, all year, so I take off shoes and socks, grab a pair of branches for poles and get in.

The pain begins again, beginning in the arches of the feet and moving up the balls and into the ankles. 

No matter how ready I am, I can’t stop it from taking the wheel. We don’t get to panic or even in the vicinity, it’s more like a rushing like when you’re walking on a beam and you’re starting to lose your balance so you figure Hell, I’ll just walk really fast and get over it.

On the other side, with socks on and shoes on, all this Painfoot stuff seems a bit silly. Pain leaves no remnants, no traces. It’s either imminent or here, but in the past it’s not even a whimper. I walk on. Eleven miles to go.

9. Thoughts that keep you going on the trail

Next break.

The deliciousness of impending food.

The deliciousness of pack off shoulders.

Just a swig of water.

A song from the jukebox of your mind.

The repeated chorus of this song:

A few stray notes,

Humming playful riffs like a jazzman,

The beat of feet,

The rhythm of your jostling pack,

Two steps, three steps, big leap over mudflat,

Four steps, ten steps,

steps.

Mindful of the trail

Forgetting to think

Just walk

Step

.

-

,

“ “

“………………”

-

Walking

Is not much different than working

Both simply doing, going on

No boundary between this and playing

Even eating or fucking

Now there’s an idea

-

Mmmmm

-

Flipping the index cards

Forgetting the pain

Forgetting to forget

An idea – the cycle of things

Any idea besides the idea of painful motion

The world of perception and the world of ideas

Perception – the rain forest

Moss on every tree

Size of trees

Ages of trees 

Persistence of trees

The branch of life that plants took

Traded cerebral possibility for rooted security

Rooted to a place

It’s been a while since thinking about place

So now you must be getting close to

And it’s time to think again about

That next break.

10. City Boy

Fourth guy that hikes by me as I lay resting, I want to chat. “Where you guys headed?”

“In. OGS. We’re trail workers.”

“Right on. In, you mean you're headed out, right? Camp and work for a few days on the trail?”

“In. There's lots to be done after this winter.”

Lots to be done. I've become a City Boy at heart. Only a City Boy would interpret In as coming in from the wild and Out as heading out into it. Only a city boy would be out here thinking about a cappuccino and a glass of wine at his favorite Parisian café in downtown Seattle - which he’ll have day after tomorrow - and how over that one and then a second cappuccino, he will write about his Hoh trip in the comfortable detachment of abstract ideas rather than the fool reality of foot blisters, calf cramps, knives in shoulders and hammers to the small of the back.

City boy is headed in.

11. Looking Later

After back in my car and after stopping for pop and a Snickers (“This is going to taste so good!” I said to the guy in the market) and after being served delicious Pad Thai in the Sequim restaurant and after ten hours sleep in my bed at my mom’s house in Port Orchard Washington, I fired up Google Earth and looked. 

From space I zoomed into 638 Medallion Place East Port Orchard Washington 98366 and then angled the view until I was looking directly at Mount Constance. I zoomed right at Mt. Constance until I was there and then crossed a few ridges and looked directly into the Hoh valley.

Just like I’d imagined it while down there, the Hoh Valley is a long funnel with a finger in the end. Formed for trapping Aleutian Low-spun Berring Sea moisture, forcing the banks of moisture abruptly up, then pushing them back on themselves. With nowhere to go but further up, sudden cooling occurs, and then rain is a meteorological inevitability. 

I can even see Martin Creek from Google Earth and almost make out the falls bridge if I really squint. The trail that followed the ridge to the top and then up to Elk Lake looks easy from here, looks like fun. Getting to Glacier Meadows looks Whatever dude!. And Olympus looks easily summitable.

I shut the lid of my laptop and walk outside. Through the clouds of yet another stormfront, Mount Constance pokes with all her snow. The Brothers are hidden, and Mt. Anderson is behind a wall of grey. Behind them is Olympus, and behind Olympus is the Hoh Valley. In the daily drama everything is being, and it’s all been being for so many days and so many days and so many days, like a relay race around a track with all of planet earth participating and the baton just being passed, passed, passed, the same worn baton and no tape ever stretched over the line. Men running, women running, children running, bears running, elk running, rabbits running, birds flying, frogs hopping, centipedes crawling, beetles stepping, slugs slithering. When it is the fishs’ turn they will wheel out a pool and let them swim it. The algae, the krill, the eukaryotes and the prokaryotes will drift their laps. The trees will grow and wait for the seeds to blow around the track where other trees will grow and spread their seeds until even the trees and all the plants have done their laps.

Seeing those mountains up there, I just hope I’m there, here, anywhere again. Running with the monster, letting him blast away to his linky heart’s content. Crossing painfoots and laughing about them later. Running in the sun or the rain or even the densest snow, just a silly man charging hard, a baton flaring wildly in his firm handhold.