Coming Back Home
Port Angeles, Washington. Combed green by the winds of the Straights of Juan de Fuca and sheltered by the towering Olympic mountain range, it can arguably be considered one of the most beautiful places in the Pacific Northwest. People travel from around the world to experience the vast views of Hurricane Ridge in bloom or snow, to dive deep into the quiet hanging moss of one of the last temperate rainforests still in existence, to meander farther west down the winding highway and to Lake Crescent, a glacial carved crevice where the water is so blue even the fish find it remarkable.
None of those reasons are why I moved back. Not for seafood food served fresh with brine, not for the coffee shops on every corner, not for the cute bricked pathways installed in the downtown shopping areas, and not for the uncanny number of birds to be heard in every season.
Recently, in May of 2023, the Hurricane Ridge Lodge burned down in a roiling fire still able to consume everything despite the damp spring atmosphere. The cause of the fire is still unknown. The only information released detailed that during renovations to update the building built in the 1950s, a ranger crested the hill one morning and saw the structure choked out in flames and smoke. Little could be done to stop the fire once it had taken hold. I imagine the ravens chortling as they avoided the smoke, swirling upwards as the heat billowed under their wings.
On one of my visits to see my mother, a long-time townie of the area, she gave me the disappointing news. It felt like the end of an era, a setback from the plans always built on the idea that the foundation of the visitor’s center would be there. Ideas of lodging to stay immersed in the views of a unique mountaintop ecosystem, a funicular railway or cable car system to take passengers up and down the mountain to bypass the need for more parking at the top. Multimillion-dollar expenditures that seem now ridiculous that there wasn't even a flush toilet for miles.
I moved back to Port Angeles because my partner died. I had no way to pay the bills of the life we had built with just me, so I quit my job and spent most of the money we had saved up to go back to where I was born, go back and live in the same room I had lived in as a teenager. I replaced all the band posters with pictures of us smiling at restaurants for our birthdays, hung up the trinkets he bought me when we attended food festivals, and set up the memorabilia I had acquired to represent each anniversary of marriage. My favorite was the little cast iron pan I had engraved with our names and the date of our wedding. The iron anniversary.
The foundation of my life had been burned up. I crested a hill when I answered the phone call that said he was in the hospital and it wasn’t looking good. I could smell the flames in the words, see a foundation taken for granted in its infallibility crackling and melting into a quagmire of things that once were. The plans we had to get goats and chickens, the plans for him to start singing and performing again in the local theater, to buy a house, to start a family, were now superfluous without the structure of our life together. All were now pieces of ash taken by the wind and broken into smaller bits as I watched them float away.
Some weeks after the move, I hiked out to Marymere Falls. I went early on a November morning and had to keep moving or the cold would creep down the neck of my jacket and start freezing up my core. The last part of the trail was a switchback up to view the waterfall. Roots laced the pathway and the steps were uneven. Each breath puffed out in front of me in frozen grips of air. And suddenly I was at the top, my legs only slightly jellied from the frigid work to carry my body up the hill.
The water flowed in front of me, marking the passage of time. It splashed and cascaded down the slick moss hillside and collected into the widening river I followed on my path there. I snapped a picture of myself and made my way back down. I stopped on the bridge at the bottom crossing the river and tried to peer up the side to see if I could see the waterfall from the bottom, from that crossing point. The waterfall was completely obscured even though I could hear the evidence of the the crashing flow up ahead. I waved at a cute older couple clad in warm hats and jackets coming up the path to see the view. I paused for a minute and breathed the air, tasted the familiar cold in my throat, and made my way back to my new and old home.
