Saturday morning and sunny. Pablo and I pick up a wilderness camping permit and bear canister at the Olympic National Park visitors center in Port Angeles. What’s a permit? How much farther? From Lake Ozette, up in the far north corner of the Washington State, we hike the boardwalk toward the ocean. The Ozette River is a short one, and flows brown. Not muddy brown, but bourbon brown from the water’s tannins, and as we cross the bridge we see salmon that, as Pablo says, seem to float just under the surface. What’s a tannin, dad? I’ll get back to you. Canadian dogwood bloom on either side of the planking, amid deer fern and bracken, cedar and hemlock. We rescue banana slugs from getting stepped on, and inspect yellow-spotted millipedes. We stick close together, telling each other stories about Mountain Trolls. In one, a troll’s big toe swells to the size of a watermelon after he stabs it with his own stick; another troll gets his spear stuck in the spokes of a bike and faceplants into a truck; another laughs so hard he spews donuts out his nose. Nothing pairs like physical humor and six year-old boys. Or maybe boys of any age. As we near the beach, we listen to the low rumble of the surf, smell the salt and brine of the air—like salmon, Pablo says—and marvel at the salal which grows rhododendron-high out here in the Pacific Coast rainforest. Why is it called a bear canister, dad? What’s the word for the brown water? Are millipedes poisonous? Are trolls real? His curiosity is as thick and dense as the rainforest, as nimble as the paired feet of a millipede, beautiful as the four-petal dogwood. Trenched in beach sand we find a rusted tube, six feet long and two across, that resembles a tube of toothpaste. What’s that? I don’t know. Take a picture and we’ll find out about it on your computer when we get home. Good idea. Farther down the beach I find a small green and black rock. It’s beautiful. I wonder what it is. I turned it in my hand and then put it in my pocket. Curiosity rising.
Millipedes and Mountain Trolls
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