Ports Townsend & Angeles, with a stop in between

Many delights awaited my first day's journey into the Olympic Peninsula. A few surprises, too.

Not the least of which was the wall of stone that greeted me upon my venturing outside the motel-in-the-dark I had booked the evening before. It was easy to believe what a casual passerby had told me: "This place is built on landfill." (So, for the record, is the entire 200-plus acres on which Battery Park City is built at the tip of Manhattan Island in New York City. Some 50 years from now, some hapless New Yorker is going to find orange peels and a 1975 washing machine emerging into their parking garages, but that's another story.)

It was a glorious morning, and I have realized something about myself on this journey. I am unusually buoyed high by bright sunshine and large, puffy white clouds. I saw much of this kind of sky in Montana, Idaho, Washington and now on the Peninsula. And, although completely alone, I felt supremely happy to be ad-libbing along the road.

On the way from Port Townsend to Port Angeles, I saw a sign for "Sequim." Didn't know what it was, hadn't planned to visit it. But I'm glad I did. A pleasant little town, pristine  and scrubbed, full of shops selling paintings of local scenes and crafts. Right in the middle of town was a small sturdy building devoted to men's and ladies' restrooms. Nowhere on my trip thus far had I seen so thoughtful (and clean) a placement of public restrooms. May not seem like a big deal, but for many of us, the sight of a public restroom that's clean is worth a whoop. While home to many (and seemingly very well-off) residents with lovely large homes and yards, Sequim also appears to be a vacation town; lots of well-designed, newish homes on pleasant lanes and byways, with gardens and lovely shrubs and plantings.

I'd seen signs to a point indicating the northernmost point of the Peninsula, or perhaps the northernmost part of Sequim. A young girl on the street told me it was several miles out of town, to get on the road and just keep going. (Reliable instructions at last, it turned out.) while on my way, I saw a sign indicating that life may not always be idyllic on the Peninsula. It was a sign warning of a possible Tsunami, indicating an escape route. Startled me, I'll tell you. But this was the edge of the Pacific Ocean, Tsunami country. Nonetheless, another sign popped up, a much more  appealing sign. It indicated that my favorite kind of crab was to be found but a few short miles away. Mindless of the tsuname threat, I pressed on, only slightly salivating.

I found two things at the end of the road. One was a one-room schoolhouse plopped right at the bend in the road that led to the sea, a beautiful, striking building that made me wonder who attended (and taught) there, what they learned, how they prospered, where they went afterwards. The other was a fine restaurant called "The 3 Crabs" where I  had a superb (if somewhat overpriced) lunch of dungeness crab salad, dungeness crab cakes and if they had had a dungeness crab dessert, I'd have had that, too. All the while I was treated to a compelling view of the wide wetsand beach that lay between the restaurant the ever-encroaching, greedy Pacific. All over the wet sand were people out crabbing. Perhaps some were sold to the restaurant, but more likely, they were foraging for their own kitchens. Some were young people, but most were middle-aged and beyond. The seaside was chilly and breezy, and the bucket-pitchfork-and rake-equipped crabbers were bundled up against the wind.The wide expanse of sand was also a landing field to dozens of seagulls, which alternated between dive-bombing and scree-ing at the crabbers and alighting on the rails and roofs of "The 3 Crabs", seeking handouts (or foodouts) from the diners. I saw more than one seagull with an injured or missing leg, and hobbled as they were, they seemed to be just as scrappy as their two-legged competitors. In fact, I got close enough to one of the  fulls to take the picture to see, and he (or she; who can tell?) gave me a very loud 'get away' scree. Might be an injured bird, but he was determined to defend his turf. And his handouts.

And then, on the way back to Sequim and the main road to Port Angeles and the rest of the Peninsula, I saw something I'd missed on the way out to the point: a lovely home selling lavender. In fact, the more I looked, the more homes and small roadside stands selling the lovely, vibrant purple, fragrant blossoms. It almost seems to be a major trade among the residents. Some were elaborately set up, as shown here, others were simple tables set up along the road. Perhaps this part of the Peninsula is the lavender capital of Washington. Or perhaps the local citizenry has stumbled on something the rest of the world wants. They all seemed to be quite successful. I saw one buyer purchase several quite large bunches, and put them into the trunk of her car. Lord knows how long they last, but this woman was sure to have the most sweet-smelling auto on the Peninsula for some time to come.

The economy of different states, towns, communities has always intrigued me. Not from a bookish sense, but from a sense of curiosity. How do people make out? What do they do for a living? What supports a town and its people? Well, on the Olympic Peninsula, one answer is clear: Logging.

As I drove into Port Angeles, I was passed by dozens of fully-loaded logging trucks.  These are huge affairs, going well over the speed limit (55 mph on the open roads, 35 and 25 in towns. I had a dread of meeting one of these behemoths head-on. I'd have been a mere smear on their windshield; they were that big and that powerful and to me, scary.). There is a large paper industry, both in this country and abroad. You can smell a paper plant from miles away, and I encountered them in Washington, Oregon, Arkansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. I wonder why, with all our vaunted technology, there hasn't been something done by the paper mills to reduce the noxious and objectionable odors that spew from their stacks.

At any rate, when I got to Port Angeles, I saw where the logs were going. There was a large Japanese plant at the harbor, and there were hundreds of huge logs,  stacked and awaiting the machinery that would turn them into pulp, slurry and eventually, paper. For the first time, the phrase "recycle paper, save a tree" really meant something. While I parked outside the plant entrance, I counted nine trucks, all heavily log-laden, zooming into the gates, and offloading their cargo. I had the impression, perhaps mistaken, that this activity was going on 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Port Angeles turns out to be a huge shipping port, so I'm sure as soon as the logs are processed into paper, they're loaded on a ship bound for the Far East.

Not far down the road from the Nippon plant was a charming little town of Fork, where I stopped for a snack. A man who was heading north (I was heading south) told me outside the little restaurant to make sure "...you stop for a while by Crescent Lake. It's something you won't see the like of in a long time."

He was right. This beautiful glacial lake, nestled in amongst cliffs and hills, is sparkling. I read on one of the many informational signs that it's 800 feet deep (if you dropped the Empire State Building into it, you'd see only the top 20 floors and broadcasting spire of that 102 storey building), and colder than you want to imagine. One family had stopped by the lake about the same time as I did, and the little girls were playing by the lakeside. One turned to her mom and said, "Ooooh, mommy. It's soooo cold. We can't go swimming. It's much colder than our lake." I asked their father where "their lake" was. "In New Hampshire," he said. "She's talking about Lake Winnepasaukee. We came out here for a wedding of one of my wife's friends, and decided to take a drive down the coast. Spectacular, isn't it?"

While we stood and talked, more than a dozen giant logging trucks whizzed by, heading north for the Nippon plant. The road was narrow, and these trucks, as I noted earlier, were going well over the speed limit. It's a wonder to me that there aren't accidents on these small and twisty roads. I guess the truckers have been doing this so long, they know where the turns and the hills and the narrow outturns are. At least, I was hoping they did.

I was not only cheered to meet up with someone else from the East Coast who was an enchanted as I was by the stark natural beauty of this special place, but I was so pleased to find his enthusiasm was no less than mine. I'll post a few pictures here to give you an impression of what we saw that sunny, dancing day.

Comments

[Kay Dennison]

How wonderful these photos are! This is a magic place!

And I'm one of those people who gets near the ocean and pigs out on fresh seafood every chance I get!

I understand your qualms about trucks in hilly areas. One of my worst driving experience was taking my son on a recruiting visit to WVA and navigating a road where coal trucks traveled the roads at breakneck speeds. Needless to say, I found an alternate (flatter) route home!