Disclaimer: This post is one of those that ended up being written years after the experience was had. Sadly, there were no notes taken so whatever is shared here must be extracted from the images and what memories they may have lent us. Fortunately, there was an itinerary still in my directory of travel plans, so that will help with some details. As to why this wasn’t noted or blogged about, I was in the throes of writing/editing my book Stay In The Magic and felt that any other deep writing would derail that fragile effort.

The momentum of having completed some rudimentary narrative for the previous three days has me wanting to continue and get the last two days of this trip knocked out, but I’m sitting in a coffee shop this summer afternoon in 2021, and I’m falling flat. Sure, the photo of the low sun in the fog looks dramatic, but I’ve got nothing good in my head about this day. Maybe due to the tension that was about to boil over today, I purged this part of the trip as much as possible as it turned out in some ways not to be ours.

Our friend Kirk apparently had developed a crush on Rainy, and being as smitten as he was, he went overboard, making himself the center of attention to the point of being overbearing. By the time I had to let him know that Caroline and I needed some “us” time up in the mountains of Olympic National Park, I’d already been smoldering that he was hijacking our vacation instead of sharing it. The dumb thing about this situation is that we’d do the exact same thing later in the year when we’d invite someone else named Caroline to join us in Oregon, where we’d learn that we didn’t want to travel with her either. The trouble there was that she was scheduled to join us on the Alsek River up in Canada and Alaska the following summer. I’m yet to blog about the Oregon trip but I’m pretty sure it’ll be relatively easy to push her to the side as I did with the blog post about the Alsek.

Just give us some nature, wildlife, coast, some small restaurants, a coffee or two, and each other’s hand, and Caroline and I can be perfectly content to walk through our world. Our sympathy for those who don’t vacation as much as we do but voice envy about our privilege needs to be limited as the difficulty of meeting their ideas for lodging, food, waking, sleeping, walking, and quiet are not compatible with John and Caroline Wise. I should make one exception as we have always enjoyed traveling with my mother-in-law Jutta, well, except those times when I get cranky but seriously, our time spent with Caroline’s mother has been terrific over and over.

The forest doesn’t perform for us; it doesn’t try to make us laugh or demand that we look at it. It’s just a forest that does what it does and probably does it better when humans are not around. It’s our good fortune to be able to visit such places where serenity can be experienced.

What’s the difference between this image of the sun whispering to us through the fog while silhouettes of trees act as columns holding up the sky to a cathedral where the sun streams through stained glass and we stand before such a sight as us worshippers kneeling in the nave before the beauty surrounding us? To answer this, I’d have to suppose that humanity has forgotten how to be smitten by the natural world and has even grown numb to the artifice found all around them in their world of contrivances.

Nothing needs to be done to this piece of driftwood to make it more dramatic or give it greater utility; it is perfect and beautiful.

The layers! Caroline will know what I meant.

Some random spider spent the energy and time to construct and likely repair this beautiful web full of morning dew. The temporary nature of webs is like friendships: they are constructed in relative haste, serve a short-term purpose, and then fade unless constant attention is given to them. But even the spider finds it more effective to simply take the hour and spin a new one the next day. I wish I had the wisdom of spiders.

Here I am in 2021, assembling this blog post, and I could have made my life easier by leaving out the redundant images that are iterations of dozens of others that effectively show the same thing. But my desire to refresh my memories with distant fragments of things seen with these eyes is insatiable even though at this point where thousands of blog posts and possibly 10’s of thousands of images have been shared, it will be difficult to review them all in my remaining lifetime. But still, I enjoy knowing that I could stumble upon them in the future, and they’ll bring a smile to my face, or I’ll discover a detail I missed before.

This brave deer stood motionless looking at the human standing motionless staring at it. Maybe we were both incredulous that the other creature seemed safe enough for this moment that we could stop and dwell in consideration of what the other was thinking. Strangely enough, there were two other encounters with deer today, at least as far as photographic proof is concerned.

Even when alone with our thoughts in places such as this, while Caroline and I can be aware of our togetherness, we can still find those quiet moments of aloneness where we are here with the mushrooms, newts, moss, ferns, birds, and fog.

Instead of acting as prisms to see the details of the leaf or surrounding forest, it appears that the water droplets are acting as mirrors of the foggy sky overhead, and so they have taken on this silvery appearance. What the truth is doesn’t matter, as the only important thing is that the droplets are enchanting.

Oh yeah, I just posted that other trail photo with Caroline walking; oh well, I have a soft spot for these scenes.

Kirk and I met back in 1995 when I was opening an internet cafe, he worked as a cook in the kitchen, and you can rest assured that he’s a dick.

I would have never guessed that we’d see Mt. Rainier three days in a row, and this time from our ascent into Olympic National Park, over 100 miles away from that majestic mountain.

Mount Olympus as seen from Hurricane Ridge.

Flowers as seen by humans.

Humans as recorded by electronics after being illuminated by photons.

Ptarmigan a.k.a. grouse seen in Olympic National Park.

This was the only real reason for our trip to Washington this summer; Caroline wanted her Junior Ranger Badges from Mt. Rainier and Olympic National Parks.

On our way out to the northwestern edge of the continental United States.

Seriously, I don’t really know what I can say about driftwood covered in moss in front of the blue waters of this lake other than it’s kind of sexy.

The spots of sunlight were all I needed to find this magical.

Caroline and I first visited this tiny corner of the earth back in 2002, and so it was only nine years later when we returned, but as I write this, it’s now been ten years since that visit in 2011. No matter, really, as I never dreamt we’d go two times, so missing a third is not a disappointment.

I’d like to tell you that I photographed Caroline standing back there years ago, but as I studied the image of her on a similar bend in the boardwalk, I came to the conclusion that it is not the same spot.

Tatoosh Island and the Cape Flattery Lighthouse.

Can’t go any further down here at the cliffside where America falls into the ocean.

The last time we were in Neah Bay, we got an earful about the desperate economic situation of the indigenous Makah people. While we visited the small museum here in town before we ventured out to Cape Flattery today, it just didn’t feel like enough, so we took up a table at a bayside restaurant to try and offer just a little more support of the Makah Tribe. Thirty years after I really started becoming aware of the plight of America’s original population, I still can’t help but feel repulsion at how ineffective the dominant culture has been in supporting people outside the narrow definition of who is considered the real American.