Memories from Family Adventures in the Mountain Forests

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Enjoy anyway!*

Our blended family enjoyed many adventures into the wilds of Washington State. We spent more time in Olympic National Park than in any other national park or wilderness area. Memories of these trips, while wonderful, flitter like ghosts in a sad happy kind of way. Most of this is due to the disruption caused by the March 2010 housefire in particular. We lost about 90% or more of our print fotos, slide transparencies, and digital pictures from the time before the Fire. We had many hundreds, almost 2,000 pictures from family trips to the Olympics after the Fire such as from the Summers of 2010 and 2011. Only a small few images remain from some of our adventures before then. In some cases, however, nothing survived the Fire.

These losses led to a blurry fragmentation of memories as we all struggle to recall what happened when. These pictures, for example, stem from two family camping trips to the Olympics, including both Salt Creek Park – Clallam County Recreation Area and the national park as well as visits to other local gems in the area. One set of fotos is from our August 2004 trip there and the other from 2005, possibly August as well, altho the those pictures stamped February 2006. They clearly were taken in the summertime thus placing them back in 2005. These digital images have been copied and shared several times. Often the time dates reflect the time copies of the now-lost original images was shared, saved, recopied, reshared, and saved again. My family’s story here is as much about our relationships to our memories of places, times, and people as well as the road trips and camping adventures we found ourselves upon. Sometimes all this feels as if we’re chasing ghosts thru the forests. 

After all, as there only exists the present moment in our consensual reality with the nature of time debated as another dimension or an illusion of perception. Fotografs and videos are proof we once existed in other places and changing bodies in what seems to be differrent times. Along with any written records and illustrations, these fotos are the only proof we ever existed. As such they trigger our memories. Too often we unconsciously allow these images to define us, forgetting we are not our bodies or our pictures or even our memories. After all, fotografic images do not show reality. They capture interpretations of perceptions composed from creative events we consider real without deeper consideration of what is real. Thus all we have left are emphemeral recollections. Let us be grateful for what do have regardless of all our material losses and fuzzy memories. Let’s be thankful we have something tangible and physical to hold onto, even if but digital images rendered upon glowing computer screens or printed out with chemical reactions.

Kristina and I each had children from previous marriages. There was a bit of polyamorous overlap mixed with building a new intentional community, Dragonfly, by former members of Orca Landing in Seattle and the Zeb-Elf-Kat-Bark Barn in Bellevue. All three were what many in the intentional communities subculture and movement called urban cooperative households. There were a wide range of such communities from egalitarian communes to cohousing ecovillages to informal, nameless gatherings of people who choose to live together without many rules or labels. There were a number of people from other communities who expressed interest in joining with Dragonfly. Creating and establishing such a new community as a Dragonfly took great effort, energy, and expense. At the same time we were busy with efforts to build new careers, get out of debt, and raise children. We coparented together and with others. We had issues with our own aging parents as mine were quite ill. There were issues to resolve with ex-spouses and current housemates. We had children in school struggling with learning disabilities and with various health issues. But don’t most families more or less struggle with many of the same challenges?

As part of our efforts to blend our family of five together, Kristina and I sought sanctuary and fun in the Great Outdoors. Family road and camping trips were the linchpin of these crazy adventures and fond mishaps. While we loved places as diverse as the SanJuan Islands, Mt. Rainier, the Glacier Peak Wilderness, and the Channeled Scabland desert, the Olympics were by far our favorite destination.

Why? No where else has Olympic National Park’s variety of terrain, biodiversity, and more. The Olympics are stellar with its wild tumble of mountains, lakes, whitewater river gorges, wildlife, flora, snowy glaciers, rainforests, arid grasslands, alpine meadows, immense trees, tidal pool life, and rugged, remote seashores. It’s where I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. My children first experienced the Paciic along its wild, rocky coasts, too. Kristina Katayama, my partner and eventually my 3rd-now-ex-wife and Talia’s momma, grew up nearby in Port Angeles on the Salish Sea’s Strait of Juan de Fuca before she took off to live abroad for most of ten years. Before that Gwen Hughes, my 2nd-now-ex-wife and mother of Morgan and Kate, used to go out to the Olympics with me. Gwen was the one who moved from Virginia to Washington to take a summer job within ONP at Sol Duc Hotsprings Resort back in 1986. She introduced me to the Olympics and took me down to 2nd Beach to see the deep blue sea during our magickal Summer of ’86. Dragonfly Community, including both partners Gwen and Kristina plus our kids, took several community-bonding trips across 2002 and 2003, three of them to Olympic National Park. Here we were back in the Olympics in a different configuration as a communitarian, postpoly, post-double divorce blended family. Mouth-churning labels aside, we were basically a family of 5 learning to be with each other and journey together into nature and wilderness.

Kristina had nostalgic memories of exploring Salt Creek Park, a Clallam County Recreation area and marine sanctuary as a child with her parents. The park isn’t part of Olympic National Park, but is beautiful and unique enough to be in it. It’s where Gwen and I had to tie Kate to a rope a few years earlier. She was a wild toddler. Blessed with high energy, Katie would race all around camp and tried to hurl herself off the cliffs into the sea. The campground at cliff’s edge was the last one available, too, and the fence between us and the cliff was not stopping her. Some of the neighbors looked aghast at Gwen and me, but a small number of others chuckled and nodded their heads in understanding. Fotunately, Kate was 5 and 3/4 years old in 2003 and 6 and 3/4s the following summer, so we didn’t have to tie her up any more. We kidded around with her about it, tho, and she reveled in retelling the tale.

We explored the rocky cliffs and sandy beaches of Salt Creek Park. The creek itself ran nearby into Crescent Bay of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, itself part of the Salish Sea. The Pacific Ocean lay beyond to the west and Vancouver Island to the north in Canada. So many starfish, sea anemones, and smelly seaweed! Talia loved running around across the flat, sandy beaches of Crescent Bay. Eventually we moved on to our favorite campground in the Olympics, Sol Duc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memory Jogger Notes:

***relationship dynamics…challenges? Joys?

Aug 2004 pics
* Salt Creek Recreation Area, Clallam County Parks
* Salt Creek inc Tongue Point, Crescent Bay & Sand Beach & Salt Creek/Crescent Beach, Camp Hayden bunkers WW2, Tongue Point Marine Life Sanctuary, Straight of Juan de Fuca of Salish Sea

2005
Sol Duc Campground/River/Valley/Resort/Falls/Trails

Kids playing around with neighbors. We camped in Sol Duc. Day hikes out from there.

Hike to Sol Duc Falls fiasco… Morgan was stung by a yellow jacket, Kate developed a phobia of mountain lions/cougars.

Kids eaten up with mosquitoes at Lake Crescent campground…was that Gwen & I w/ Morgan & Kate or Kristina & I with all 3 kids on one of these 2 trips? Looked like they had chicken pox. (Happened both times. With Gwen went to Sol Duc restaurant w kids & w Kristina took kids to restaurant near Moclips/Pacific Bch & got chicken pox comments both times from staff.)

*This is an unfinished work in progress. Enjoy anyway!*

As sorting, organizing, restoring, and digitalizing the boxes of jumbled fotos recovered from the 2010 Fire is a long and tedious if intermittent process, more pictures of these adventures may be added if found.

William Dudley Bass
Thursday 22 February 2018
SeaTac/Seattle, Washington
U.S.A.
Earth
Sol

 

Copyright © 2018 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we humans establish our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.