Two Hour Line
We stopped our cars on the road, which is a thing we’ve all done hundreds of times on hundreds of different roads. But this time, we were waiting for entry into a National Park.
It was a hotly anticipated visit. I was going into the woods to find a place that had been designated as containing a square inch of silence. I wanted to experience that in compensation for all the silence I had wanted when it wasn’t there, and the silence I had but didn’t appreciate when it was. It was the pivot point of the trip that covered a few thousand miles.
But first, we had to get in. This was not the easy thing it seemed to be, as the Hoh Rainforest in July is evidently the winner of a popularity contest.
We came to a slow halt with a ribbon of red lights ahead. The road curved so we couldn’t see much further. After ten minutes of idling we turned the car off. After ten more minutes of no forward motion, we got out.
I wouldn’t have given this roadside a second’s worth of glance in any other circumstance. But now, I was climbing over the guardrail to get a closer view of the river right next to us. A little boy and his father came up beside me. What are you looking at? He said in only the way a little boy can. I knelt down and pointed at the plant’s shape and how that told us what kind of pollinator it had. He carefully touched the stems and flowers.
My boys and I and our new friends walked and talked about our past and future National Parks visits. We sketched out our lives in a few sentences in the way you do when you meet people that you might be with for a few hours. Not the restaurant version, not the month-long backpacking trip version, but somewhere in between.
Before this day, I had spent quite a bit of time roadside either cycling or running, enough to know that roads are loud, frightening, and fast. But here, it was so quiet. The few engines that still rumbled were blending with the river. Funny how cars sound like rivers and vice versa, at lest from afar. They, of course, are diametrically opposed in terms of origin, materials, age, and more. It’s a sound easy to dismiss but hard to ignore.
“It’s a sound easy to dismiss but hard to ignore. ”
The cars creeped along at a rate unmeasurable by on the speedometer. But no one was really angry, which wouldn’t have been the case had we been in an airport or a traffic jam on the interstate. In the end, we waited in that line on that two lane road for over two hours. The road ended at this part of Olympic National Park; past it was wilderness.
There were some in our line making an attempt on Mt. Olympus the next morning. But they traded their alpine boots and crampons for flip-flops while in line, on a dappled and sunny roadside pullout, sitting in loose groups entertaining children with stories of their mountaineering feats.
And then, our time at the entrance gate was near. We waved goodbye and got back in the car but when I closed the door, its efficient insulation blocked out the noise from our new friends. The cutoff from the chatter of the river and the humans made me feel separate in a way that I hadn’t only a few hours before.
We didn’t see any of them again. They did their visit and we set up our campsite. Over the next few days, we had our adventures but I didn’t find the one square inch of silence. I did get to experience a forest with the same vital quality our roadside gathering did - minus the idling car engines and plus the rustle of leaves.
The forest chattered and lived in a way my ears fundamentally understood. We were the richer for having chattered and lived unexpectedly on the side of a road to get there.
Inspired by events in Olympic National Park
on the land of the Jamestown S'Klallam, Lower Elwha Klallam, Makah, Port Gamble S'Klallam, Quileute, Quinault and Skokomish (source).