In Search of Signal
We were in search of signal, the possession of which is a race with no finish line.
It was a familiar feeling from our days on the road, when the presence of signal meant we set down roots (and by that, I mean our internet antenna) in places that weren’t nearly as picturesque as #vanlife would have you believe.
On a Thursday afternoon this summer, we were moving between campgrounds and an important meeting was imminent for my partner. He and I have different definitions of “imminent” – in this case, we were five minutes from turning on the Zoom camera. Had it been my meeting, the timeline would have been…shall we say, expanded.
But as it was, we were willing those four bars in the upper righthand corner of our phones to fill in. We crested a hill to find several more in front of us and the magical signal was found. There were two options for stopping in that particular corner of the Washington rainforest.
The first was a gravel forest road blocked by a gate a few hundred meters in. The second was a vaguely tamped-down grassy area next to the main road, a place where we would have to hope that passing cars wouldn’t be using either their horns or their engine brakes as my partner tried to make a salient point on his video call.
Forest road it was. Our tires crunched on the gravel of a surprisingly robust dirt road (and after the traveling and camping, I have a good notion of what comprises good and not-so-good dirt roads.) We pulled to a stop at the metal gate and I got out to read the sign while my partner turned our car-and-trailer rig around.
The sign didn’t indicate anything other than “motor vehicles must be authorized.” It was clear this was a logging area; two of the hill faces were bare of the trees that thickly populated everywhere else. I grimaced in the way you do when you come upon trash on the trail or a deer hit by a car. The faces we make when we encounter something we know all the way to our bones is unnatural. So the road had been made by the logging companies to access where they were cutting, but pedestrians and bikes and other forms of travel weren’t forbidden. I guess that’s one of the compromises made by the Forest Service.
Once parked, my partner unlocked the doors to the trailer and took out the internet. The dish swiveled to find the satellites that would provide us with what he needed for his meeting. The boys opened the doors to the car but stayed inside to listen to their podcasts.
I stood outside, unsure what to do. I thought about joining the boys in the car and looking at my phone, but the lack of signal for the previous few days inserted a second of pause into the decision. I had become just slightly unhitched from the reflex to dive into the ocean of the internet.
Then the sun drove me to move. It didn’t seem as strong if I was in motion, as if I could evade its strength by my bipedal movement. As if any of that would matter to radiation that had already traveled billions of miles to arrive on my shoulders.
When I’m bored and without the usual crutches, I default to finding patterns. It’s one of the reasons I like walking in the woods so much: observing an arrangement of trees just-so. Looking at what’s around from a huge and a teeny perspective to try to find “the shot.” The same way I would if I were the director of photography, which I never have been and never will be.
So I did. I found the one that would go with the wistful montage. I found the shot that, along with some zippy and full orchestral music, would mean an adventure was about to take place. I found the shot that would layer on the sadness.
On a logging road with a closed gate with foxgloves rising all around the dirt that had been displaced to make the road, we had found signal in each of our ways.
Inspired by events in Olympic National Forest, on the land of the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis.