Hoh, Rialto, and the 6:10 Ferry

The 6:10 from Anacortes pushes off into mist with the deck still wet. The cars on it can be counted on one hand. You stand at the rail in a jacket that is the wrong thickness for the temperature and watch the first island appear, then the second, then nothing for ten minutes as the boat sweeps wide of a kelp bed. The islands come back. A gull tilts past at eye level. The pilot does not announce the crossing. This is the part of the Pacific Northwest the city does not show you.

What the country here asks of you is patience for the ferry, the tide, and the rain. Drive far when you must. Wait when you have to. The Hoh Rainforest is two hours west of Port Angeles and gets one hundred and forty inches of rain a year, twenty miles from a peninsula that gets seventeen. The rain is the post. To pretend otherwise is to plan the wrong trip.

The Hoh's Hall of Mosses is short, less than a mile, and a misleading sample of what the forest is. The trees stand in a green light the eyes need a minute to read. After ten thousand mornings of rain a Sitka spruce learns to wear its own forest on its shoulders, and the trail's first hundred yards are heavier with the smell of cedar wood and wet stone than any room you have stood in. The ranger at the visitor center, when asked which trail is best, may hand you a tide chart for Rialto Beach instead and say go there first, then come back.

So you go to Rialto first. The drive is an hour through Forks and the trees close in halfway through it. Rialto's parking lot is gravel, the path to the beach is short, and the beach itself is sea stacks and driftwood the size of houses. At low tide you can walk north to Hole-in-the-Wall, an arch the surf has cut through a basalt headland. South of Rialto, off Highway 101 with no sign, a Sitka spruce called the Tree of Life clings to a hollowed bank at Kalaloch with its roots completely in the air. You can stand inside the cathedral of its roots. People who know, know.

The four-day trip catches the 6:10 back across the strait to the islands. Friday Harbor opens before the day-trippers arrive on the ten-thirty boat. The bakery is open at seven. You walk down to the marina with a coffee and watch a cormorant fish, and afterward you drive twelve miles west to Lime Kiln Point and wait for an orca to pass between Vancouver Island and where you stand. Sometimes one does. Often one does not. The waiting is not wasted. On the five-day trip you take a Makah Recreation Pass and walk the muddy two miles to Shi Shi Beach, where the Point of the Arches sits in the surf in a row of basalt teeth.

What you remember after this trip is not the orca. It is the rain on the deck of the 6:10, the moss-light an hour after the rain stops in the Hoh, and the smell of low tide on a beach with no one on it for a half mile. The Pacific Northwest is a country slow enough to be missed by anyone in a hurry. Three days is enough to begin. Five days is enough to know which ferry you want to be on next time.