An Olympic journey (Peninsula, that is)

Traveling from the North Country to Seattle in February is to visit a foreign land. When I looked out the window in the Syracuse airport I saw massive piles of snow in between the runways. A few hours later, as we left the Seattle airport, a soft rain fell on green lawns and tangled green shrubs. The air smelled of earth and growing things. My dry skin gave a sigh of relief and I hoped that the shell of my jacket was indeed waterproof.

After a night in a cozy Seattle house where I slept with the window open to hear the sound of rain, we headed west to the Olympic Penninsula.

This involved a ferry to cross Puget Sound while I admired the view of snowy mountains in the Olympic National Park.

My friends marveled that we were having a sunny moment in February. I guess Seattle in the winter isn’t completely perfect.

Peninsula might be too small a word for the part of Washington State that juts up as the final northwestern land of the Lower 48. It took us hours to drive across it, past clearcut forests returning to lush green and inland lakes and sinuous rivers. The roads circle around the vast lands of the interior, the mountains and rainforests of enormous cedar and spruce trees.

It was certainly worth the drive to get out of a car and walk less than a mile to stand on a wild beach at the western edge of the New World. After crawling over huge driftwood logs we stood on a pebbly beach and looked out onto an ocean that goes on endlessly until it finally meets the islands of Japan. Sea stacks in jagged shapes filled in the close view and the eternal sound of waves must be medicine for the soul.

Two days passed in a haze of beauty as we walked along beaches and sat on big logs to picnic. At low tide we looked in pools of water, showing each other orange and purple starfish and sea anemones with bright green fringes. Tiny crabs moved around in re-purposed snail shells.

The Quileute people live in a small community at the mouth of the Sol Duc River and we followed a hand-made sign –FISH– to a small house with nets in the yard. A young man rushed inside to get a basket filled with pieces of alder-smoked steelhead salmon. He told us his family fishes for it in the river and smoke it themselves. I was happy to hand over some cash in exchange for the packages of richly flavored fish.

I failed as a bibliophile when I puzzled over a sign at a little general store. It read: Antiques, Collectibles, Twilight Gifts. “What are Twilight Gifts?” I asked my friends. Those books, they said. Of course! Twilight fans have generated a whole new way to get money from tourists in the little town of Forks, the place where the fictional vampire family lives.

On our way back to Seattle we stopped at Lake Crescent to eat lunch on the porch of an old ranger station. It wasn’t quite warm enough for a long, leisurely picnic so we packed up the food and walked briskly up the trail to Marymere Falls. We passed huge moss-covered trees and crossed wooden bridges to a lookout point where we could admire the long, graceful fall of water over a dark cliff.

I’m now enjoying more urban adventures—dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant where the air was loud with the laughter of a group of Ethiopian taxi drivers, followed by breakfast at an Hawaiian café where eggs are served with white rice instead of toast and Spam is featured prominently on the menu, even in the form of sushi. Soon I’ll leave this library aerie—the tenth and top floor with a roof of steel and glass—and go exploring. Bookstores and a giant Asian food market are on my list.