I have noticed, writing up these entries from random notes and at a remove of two weeks, that in an incident about my early August, I refer to journalers' entries about their mid-Augusts, since I had to catch up as soon as I got back. This strikes me as lying, which guilt-inducer is why the pacing of my storytelling leaves so much to be desired.

Speaking of guilt-inducers, today is Blake's hatchday. He's at camp at the vet's. HAO, bless her, is bringing him his favorite fresh foods today.

We drove up the coast and inland to find the Hoh rainforest, through which runs the Hoh River. Following the river up to the visitor center, we passed the Hard Rain Café. "When it rains hard, think of us." A likely message in a rainforest in Washington.

After a leisurely breakfast, the drive, and toodling on the duckboard through a mossy bit, it was nearly noon, and I asked a ranger if it was still safe to start a hike so late. The Hoh rainforest isn't Rocky Mountain National Park, we weren't going to hike above treeline, and noon was just fine. So off we went, striking off into the great unknown that is the national park system more than a half-mile from a parking lot.

I have never been in a rainforest before, and I couldn't get Amazonian expectations out of my head. There was no system of canopies and no constant drip-drip-drip. The day was blazingly sunny and humid, which seemed rainforesty, but I still expected the drip. One awe-inspiring fact about the Amazon is that it not only affects weather but actually creates self-sustaining weather. The Hoh is not that big. It exists because it's close enough to the ocean for the temperature to be mild, close enough to the ocean for greater humidity, and showered with rain trapped by the Olympic mountains. Nevertheless the rainforest can only exist within river valleys.

The staggering thing is that this river valley houses a glacial river. No broad sticky slow-moving brown Amazon here. A drop of water flowing past us melted off a glacier about four minutes ago. Well, I don't know. Not very long ago, anyway; not long enough to have warmed up. The Hoh is blue-grey with glacial silt (till?) and glacial temperatures. It's meltwater, and that's what it looks like. The water is so cold that as we emerged from the forest to the riverbank, the temperature dropped more from the water than it rose in the full sun.

Detouring to the river itself, I found a way across not-quite-stepping stones to a lounge-boulder midstream ("mid" here meaning "as far out as the rocks went, less than a quarter of the breadth of the beast"). We sat there and I reminded RDC of the first time we sat on a boulder in the middle of a freezing creek: on the Ausable near Lake Placid eating Fig Newtons: bliss.

RDC and I spent a lot of time gazing up at the moss, at the towering thick trees, at the sky, and a lot of other time peering down at butterflies, roots, fallen trunks, lichen, and flowers. We saw no critters and heard lots of birds I couldn't identify. We hiked only five or six miles, but we took a long time what with all the craning of necks.

We had applied sunscreen already, and not far into the humidor of a forest, we stopped to put on bug repellent. Back at the visitor center, picnicking under a tree and frustrating begging crows, I realized I was not perspiring water but sweating an ooze whose composition would horrify the most hardened biochemist. I wanted a bath, and RDC was about equally desperate. It had only been 36 hours, which shows what a wimpy camper I have reduced RDC to.

We had left an overcast campsite, but the sky had cleared as the morning progressed. A good hot sun would make the Pacific an idyll: an ocean of salt, a tube of biodegrable soap, and thou. Driving down the river, however, we realized that the sky had not cleared necessarily with the day but by going inland. The coast was entirely foggy, so cold and clammy that we'd never warm up after swimming. We were prepared to drive all the way south to Quinault Lodge and buy showers, but a kindly ranger told us the Chevron station a mere five miles away offered showers.

Going into the store, I was sparechanged by a Hoh boy. One of five boys, he wanted a quarter for the bus. He was the only one without a bike. I offered to place a call for him, to buy him a soda (before he said what he needed the quarter for), but he gave me the finger when it was obvious I wouldn't give him actual money. He didn't call me a paleface, anyway. An Indian woman came into the store as I was paying the (also Indian) cashier and told the cashier that those kids outside were harassing people. If the kids were just bothering the tourists, which we with our Colorado plates obviously were and which she with her features probably was not, I would have taken my lumps. At least I wasn't German and in Miami with rental plates on my car. After our blissful though separate showers, as we packed the cooler with freshly cooked ice, I saw the kids board the bus ("Queets Community Center"). Good, I'm glad they'll all get home, I thought. We followed the bus five miles north toward our campground, and by the time we started our supper, the kids were pedaling and peddling all over the campground. This time I felt intimidated, which was partly a function of my perception of their hoodlum appearance and behavior and partly, I am sure, deliberate action on their part. This is their territory, as Indians--the coastal stretch of Olympic National Park stretches between two reservations, Queets and Hoh--and their turf, as thirteen-year-olds.

When I was growing up and new houses were being built on my road, I trespassed throughout their construction. It was fun, the skeletal buildings being interesting and the activity being illegal, but also such intimacy with the structures proved my knowledge and possession of them, my right to land unfairly squatted upon by usurpers. I understood their attitude as adolescents; I acknowledged my implicit guilt as a Usan of European descent; and still I cringed.

The fog dampened the last sunset we would spend on the Pacific, and we retired to our tent.