Olympic National Park lies with her head in the mountains and her feet in the sea.  But I wasn’t up for the highlands (mountain driving wears out my grip on the steering wheel), while the rugged coast, with a tide that tore like ripping fabric, seemed hard and uninviting.

So I spent most of my time in Olympic’s mossy middle regions: Her beautiful woods.

Forests draw me outward and upward in ways that the more obviously picturesque mountains and coasts do not. If I sometimes fantasize that there is an ancestral memory in me, then it may be that my people came from the woods. And despite the threat of bear, cougar and elk – there were warning posters throughout the park – I can imagine living there, surrounded by trees and feeding off of that green, filtered light.

Olympic’s massive woods are phenomenal. Even in sunlight the forest is dark, stretching unbroken up toward the mountains. A temperate rain forest, it is watered by fog in a soupy atmosphere so rich that mosses and ferns grow on the sides of towering trees without damaging the host. They can do that because they get all the nutrition they need from the air around them.

And the air is spicy. It was only after walking through the forest that I understood what all those men’s colognes are aiming for when they describe themselves as “woodsy.” It’s Olympic’s mix of pine and earth – at times lightly fragrant, then sharply astringent, often deeply mellow. Several times the forest’s comforting and constantly shifting aroma stopped me in my tracks; I breathed it in, looked for a source that was, of course, all around me; wanted to bottle it, then was happy I could not. I settled for the occasional resin that clung to my fingers when I touched a branch.

As I often do, I wasted too much time trying to get a photo, but finding a balance between the gaps of bright sunlight and the deep shadows above the forest floor was futile, so I took the easy way out and lay back on the open path. Above me the trees rose some 200 feet into a bright blue sky and offered me a picture that was easy (and expected) enough to satisfy the undemanding folks at home.

That evening, as the fog swept ashore fast and thick, I stopped at the park’s Kalaloch Lodge, had an expensive but tasty salmon, and on the following day ventured into the woods before dawn. The path took me by the biggest cedar in the park, a gnarled and knotted Tolkienesque monstrosity, and then deeper into the forest. The trek in darkness was bracing, and if I was ever going to get eaten, I figured, this was it.
At the lodge the night before, I had met several young ladies who had come to the park because of popular vampire romances set in the area, and as I walked along – gingerly inched along is more correct – I realized that it was fangs I was concerned about, as well. Cougar fangs, actually. Unconsciously I had shifted my alpenstock from my left hand to my right – my defensive weapon hand – and even after I realized the change, I kept it there. I don’t think I walked 500 yards from my car, but I felt like I’d spent a day in dangerous Mirkwood.

I said above that I can imagine living in the forest, absorbing energy from the light. But now I know I can see myself dying there, too. It’s a lonely thing to envision my bones bleaching on a mountain slab or on an open beach, but leaching back into the soil of this good, green earth? Under a canopy of moss and leaves? Yes. I can make that seem like going home.

If I have to.

These are things we tell ourselves to make peace with our precarious positions here on earth, but I’d rather just drive away. Which is what I did as soon as I made it back to my car. I dropped down to the open beach I had eschewed before and wandered confidently amongst the broken, gull-pecked shells of crabs and other less-fortunates.