Change of itinerary: We have to return to Astoria later in the week to have the sliding door of the van repaired, so after several modifications we’ve settled on a circumnavigation of the Olympic
Peninsula, north up its west side, a ferry trip from the north end to Victoria, B.C., and then down the east side.I wanted to see the Olympic rainforest, and we did. It was another of those deals where we drove into a campsite after dark and woke up in an utterly foreign landscape. This time we were not surrounded by whalefish-sized RVs; this time we were dwarfed by moss-covered spruce and fir trees as tall as 30-story office buildings. We were agog at the size of the ferns, in a hundred shades of green. Lace lichen-type moss (that’s probably not the technical term) grew on everything, and – of course – it was raining. Not a steady rain, just on and off pattering of raindrops on the tin roof of our minivan. Enough to convince us that yes, we were in the rainforest. We were by Quinault Lake in a Forest Service campground. It was raining when we woke up, so we just drove up the road a ways and had breakfast in a little diner instead of trying to fix breakfast at our sopping wet, moss-covered picnic table.
Not that we had much of a choice, anyway. Raccoons had pretty much demolished the kitchen our last night at Fort Stevens. We had gotten lazy about packing up the food. We had had no critters at McKenzie Bridge. Our first night at Fort Stevens, the raccoons left us alone. They must have been laying the groundwork for a big kill. We had left the cooler and our food box out, with the cooler weighing down the top of the food box. I woke up in the night, hearing a commotion. My flashlight showed the beady eyes and bandit masks of two raccoons who had retreated to the edge of our clearing after trashing our campsite. I gathered our stuff as well as I could in the dark, and brought it into the van.
In the morning, we assessed the damage. They had tipped over the cooler, which allowed them access to those groceries as well as our food box. They took most of a roasted Safeway chicken,
bones and all. The one-pound margarine tub, which we had just opened, was licked completely clean. They ate two boxes of cereal, a box of crackers, and another of graham crackers. They drank or poured out most of a quart of milk. Our only consolation was that the raccoons will be sick to their stomachs. Anyway: Raccoons 1, Victory Lappers 0.So we had breakfast in a diner while the precipitation alternated between downpour and soft mist. We took a short nature walk during a break in the weather, through a Jurassic landscape of 300-foot trees and green stuff growing on everything, even the concrete bases of picnic tables (at right).
We decided in Quinault to try to make the last ferry to Victoria out of Port Angeles, a 2 p.m. sailing. So we drove most of the west and part of the north sides of the peninsula, through forests that have been harvested several times over. When we had a long view over many hillsides, we could see a dozen areas in different stages of
regrowth: some recently logged and replanted with tiny little trees, some having been logged many years ago and nearly reaching maturity again. Every so often there was a recent clear-cut, looking post-apocalyptic with enormous charred stumps and the leftover slash in crazy angles.We saw signs saying: “Third growth Douglas fir,” and one listing the years that the surrounding forest had been logged, and ending with “Next harvest, 2036.” The landscape is surprisingly beautiful, even though you get more of a feel of a tree plantation than of a forest primeval. It must be the overwhelming greenery of it all. It still looks natural. And it is. It’s just not untouched nature.
Anyway, we got to Port Angeles in good time to make the ferry, found a lot where we parked the minivan, which we’ve tentatively dubbed “The Guppy,” in honor of its stature vis-à-vis the RVs on the road. We had a windy 90-minute ferry ride and were welcomed into Canada at customs. Now we are the only guests at The Cozy Cottage B&B in Victoria, which Lynn had found by surfing the Web in San Francisco, before The Guppy embarked.
Notes from Lynn:
Is it OK to recycle a word already put to use in this journey of the unexpected? “Dumbstruck”? I’ll reverse it. I was struck dumb when Jamie and Joe Brand opened the massive doors of the 7th Street Theatre.
We stopped in Hoquiam, Washington, to say hello to Jamie, daughter of Sherry, Margo’s stepmother. With her husband, Joe, and their three young children, Jamie had moved about a year ago to this blue-collar port (population 10,000) on the forested coast of the Evergreen State. While Joe and Jamie study carpentry, they volunteered to help with operations of what was once the small city’s big movie theater. Now both are actively involved, and Joe is the board. We followed them in the dusk into one of the thousands of downtowns now ignored by residents who shop on the outskirts and go to movies at the multiplex.
The 7th Street Theatre, like the 3,000-seat El Capitan on San Francisco’s Mission Street, was built in 1928 as a combined venue for vaudeville and movies. Like the El Capitan and so many others of the 1920s, it was designed and built by admirers of Spanish Moorish architecture. Like
the El Capitan, it was closed after a downturn of patronage in the 1950s. The El Capitan marquee still hovers over Mission Street, but the auditorium was demolished. It’s now a parking lot. You drive your car through what was once the elegant lobby. The 7th Street Theatre was to suffer a similar fate, Joe said, when an angel appeared in 1978. Robert Serredell and his wife, Cheryl, bought the old movie house and spent 15 years in restoration work. They lived in the old dressing rooms. It foiled those who hoped to demolish it for parking. The miracle continued when businessman Ed Bowers donated a fund to allow a group of concerned citizens to form a nonprofit corporation and continued restoration. Joe said downtown businesses are forming symbiotic relationships with the reborn theater where once Will Rogers spun ropes and stories.How many seats? About 930, Joe said. The lobby was basically unchanged from the days of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton – with Avalon-style decorated tiles framing a water fountain. The website says, “It was the first theatre in the Northwest, and the last example, of an atmospheric theatre, that gives patrons the feeling they are sitting in an outdoor Spanish garden. The curved ceiling is painted to simulate the evening sky, complete with twinkling lights. The auditorium, designed to be acoustically perfect, shimmers with balconies, iron grilled windows, spiral columns, arched doorways, plaster urns, red tiles atop courtyard walls, with ivy and cypress trees.” Jamie said old movies are interspersed with live performances. (Glenn Yarborough played the house last month.)
We walked into the auditorium. Joe said it was designed to look like a Spanish fortress at dusk. It was time travel. We were struck dumb in Hoquiam.
Mileage the past two days: Astoria to Port Angeles, 220
Total mileage: 1060
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