In a Washington Fog
Between Hoquiam and Forks on Highway 101 is a beach called Ruby. The beach huddles around a creek just south of the Hoh Indian Reservation.
Dad and I pulled off the 101 into a crowded national park lot. Early August, just after noon, every caravan winding its way around the peninsula had stopped here ahead of us.
Behind us, the mists of Oregon crept up the coast. In the parking lot I peered up at the sky and wondered if the fog we’d been trysting with all along the Pacific coast would meet us here. The clouds held a familiar shape.
Ignoring the crowd, we made our way down to the beach. The Washington coast is craggy, marked by volcanic rocks too stubborn to be weathered away by anything short of a millennium.
We made our way down the hill, through tall, vibrantly green trees and came out on a rocky pebble beach littered with the white carcasses of dead trees.
Some logs lay closer to the ocean in pools rippled only by the slight breeze, the slow lapping of the sea at rest, and the missteps of people crossing the creek.
In the distance I saw a temple.
Dad and I picked our path across the water. It seemed a sin to risk disturbing the gentle lapping of the tide with a misplaced step but a greater sin to ignore the pull of the mist altogether. To leave the fog unexplored.
I’m thankful for the corpses, the driftwood dead and the beaten flat rocks, they allow us to cross the creek.
As the fog thickened I patiently took pictures of the monoliths, the trees, the temple rock in the distance. There were people everywhere, but so too was the mist, the driftwood, the rocks. The fog leached all color from my memory and silenced every noise, save the ocean’s gentle humming.
I will really never remember the color of the stones on Ruby Beach, but the silhouettes of strangers wandering through the mist will forever linger in my mind.
Hope you enjoyed my story. I've written a series of blogs collecting the images and telling the stories from my Pacific Northwest Roadtrip last summer, check them out!
