I was traveling with a friend who lives in nearby Tacoma, and we started Wednesday. First stop: Lake Crescent in the north of the park, very pretty, though the moody dark forest was more exciting. We decided to take the brief hike to Marymere Falls, very nice, too. But falls are falls, not that different from falls you might see in many places. But just beyond them came our first amazement, a pair of huge fused trees growing on a giant stone, with roots like tentacles. Wow! Trees' usually invisible tethers visible!! Actually it wasn't the first first amazement, which was a vast bigleaf maple bulging with fuzzy moss at the start of the trail.
It was more striking even on our return from the falls, as the forest had been full of dark, straight conifers but this deciduous tree with bright green leaves beyond the yellow moss grew in all directions. It couldn't have done that, we concluded, without help: did native peoples clear a space for it? We weren't alone with this special tree. Here the once visible had become invisible - but we could see it.
We considered going to Hoh Rain Forest after this but I'd heard that the parking lot is full by morning, so we instead checked out something I'd seen on the internet, the "Tree of Life" at Kalaloch Beach. This sitka spruce, which is tenaciously holding on even as a stream has eroded all the cliff beneath it, was more impressive than I expected (don't we assume everyting we see online is photoshopped?). And it turned out to be a portal, too. The cave the waves have carved beneath it has become a kind of shrine, in which people place flat stones - often inscribed - among the skeins of exposed roots. My friend and I are both scholars of religion: this is a sacred space, we whispered to each other!
But the Kalaloch "tree of life" was the portal for us also for another discovery. The beach was full of "drift logs," the ocean-scoured remains of big trees which fall from cliffs or river beds. Or stumps, snarly sculptures as big as we were tall, which it was almost impossible not to see as deliberate works of art. Each whorl seemed to merit extended attention, or at least a sheaf of photos. There were many more drift logs to come the next day, but these first ones were few and transfixed us, as root systems, the nerve centers of trees but usually invisible, were now exposed to the sky and the sea, and us.
The next day we tried to get to Hoh before the parking lot filled up but failed. Instead of waiting two hours in the car queue we decided to return even earlier the next day, and ventured into some of the primeval-looking forest on the approach. There was a trail (perhaps worn by deer) but we soon found ourselves stepping away from it onto the spongy soft duff of the forest floor, as we found ourselves circumambulating in wonder what turned out to be the stumps of ancient trees.
Younger trees grew around and sometimes within them, as they did in the "nurse logs" we noticed nearby. The forest floor was indeed bumpy with all the old trees in various stages of decomposition. But then, just as we were starting to see the ancient forest of massive giants whose remains towered over us, we realized that every tree in this forest going all the way back must have got its start in the ruin of an earlier tree. A 500 year old tree rooted in a tree which had been 800 when it fell, in turn raised from the nursery of another tree of great age, and... Trees in trees in trees, said my friend; turtles all the way down! The ground beneath our feet shifted at this revelation.
In this forest, probably the closest to "original growth" I've encountered, we found ourselves playing a detective game. At each stump we asked "where is it?" - meaning the rest of the tree. We looked in all directions. Sometimes the fallen trunk was visible as a long ridge, covered with ferns and saplings. Sometimes it was underfoot, a blaze of ochre showing between plants. But in many cases we could find no trace. Could it be that this forest we were, along the Hoh River, in had been logged? Mouldering stumps aside, no really big old trees were growing here. As we imagined European settlers despoiling the forest, we also fancied we saw the wood from its original giants gracing buildings and ships, church ceilings and school houses, not just in the US but in all the places these ships could carry them.
Going next to another beach (Ruby), we realized that not a few of the missing trunks might have ended up on the coastline like this: everywhere we looked there was a tall layer of drift logs, mostly bone-white but some still with color, pushed up against the shore by what must have been ferocious waves. Their edges rounded like rocks, these trunks and roots must have spent time at sea. How long? And all the stuff in them that wasn't going back to nourish the forest, or being used by humans: had it been leached out by the sea, feeding marine populations? Was this another ecological cycle, another system of symbiosis? (Yes!) I have scores of pictures, but am posting just this one, which suggested to me not - as most others did - bones and faces of various kinds of animals, but an ancient marble corinthian column.
We spent the balance of the day in the Quinault Rain Forest, near where we were staying, marveling at great tall douglas firs and red cedars - which we learned could be as much as a thousand years old! - as well as fallen logs and spectacular upended rootplates. Here the "where is it?" question could usually be answered quickly in situ. On the ground we found fallen trees upon trees. The trail we walked had literally been cut through this landscape of
horizontal trees, which fungi and ferns and hemlocks will take another century to digest. (Apparently Quinault lost many trees in a fierce wind storm about 18 years ago.)
A new insight offered itself, familiar words in a new context: whatever goes up must come down. All that substance that trees conjure in the air from the air, all of it, will one day no longer be aloft. The windblown rootplate-revealers were half the story. The rest of the trees die, standing, becoming "snags," first losing all their branches, then towering above the forest as ghostly spikes, many as white as the drift logs, before eventually crumbling. Some of the huge stumps we saw near Hoh had presumably been through this process. (And of course, I originally forgot to mention, there's fire.)
I guess I won't get to Hoh in this post! Rest assured we made it there on our last morning. I'll wrap up with this image of the World's Largest Sitka Spruce, a short walk from where we stayed. My friend, whom you might have spotted in the second picture above and the second here, looks even smaller seated in a yoga pose at the base of this behemoth, which is doing splendidly well for its thousand years (!). But, while I am awed by its massiveness and vigor, I'm so grateful we also had a chance to learn to see more than champions like this - to see beyond what's visible now to the profound cycles of which these are just the surface. It's always right to ask of the rest: "where is it?" Hint: It's trees all the way down.
