It’s official: The Banana Slug is a thing. Some clever marketing type decided to capitalize on people’s utter disgust and fascination for what I used to call the state bird of Washington State. It turns out it uncannily parallels my time in the Evergreen State.
When I made that trip to Seattle some 48 years ago, it made an impression. It was so different than anything I had experienced so far. For some reason, I was compelled to move there only to discover how much I disliked living there. Especially these fucking banana slugs that oozed their slime everywhere and ate your lovely plants. Pretty much the story of my life – fire, ready, aim!
When I arrived, my goal was to become a Nuclear Engineer. When I left, I was a marketing type for a big, prestigious high-tech company. WFT? When I was offered the job, I thought to myself:
What the fuck do I know about Marketing other than I’ve spent most of my time thinking this kind of stuff was complete bullshit?
Me in 1984 after being offered a job in marketing for Hewlett-Packard
Here’s what it was – I would get to travel the world to do this. After all, when I finally left Seattle some eight years later, it was to move to Germany. Was it worth it?
Ask the Banana Slug.
The Big Kahuna
We drove to the further reach of the trip today.
We started the drive by crossing the massive Astoria-Megler Bridge outside Astoria. I am glad I didn’t have to do it in a windstorm! The long drive across the causeway dumped us into Washington.
The drive north seemed comfortably familiar. Very green and had lots of water, large production plants for forest products (and the various smells that accompany them!), and small towns that looked somehow stuck a bit in the past.
We eventually reached the Quinault Reservation and into the Olympic National Forest. People and several named rainforests, including the Hoh. A series of beaches along the coast marked 1, 2, 3, and so on. It seemed sort of unimaginative to me!
Our stop for two nights is Forks. Forks is also famous (as I quickly learned) for being the backdrop for the Twilight Vampire books. There are several themed stores in town for the faithful to score merch. The RV Park was not the greatest, and a pack of obnoxious dogs was in a private residence across from me. One did a divebomb on Jake out of the blue before the owner yelled at him enough that he left.
Hoh Rain Forest
I visited here before in the Winter, sometime in the early 1980s. It was a bright sunny day, although it had been raining earlier. I remember the thick moss sparkling with moisture and the green glow everything had.
It maybe wasn’t quite what I remembered, but it was stunning!
I walked the Hall of Mosses trail. I saw the nurse tree, whose name came from new trees that would take root in the fallen log. When the nurse tree finally decayed, it exposed the newer tree’s roots.
Although it had been drizzling, it held off until I left the park.
The Hoh River flows out of the park. There was a fair amount of road damage where the river had caused damage from Spring runoff. There were a lot of large trees in places held together by substantial concrete blocks explicitly shaped to keep them more or less in place.
As we left the park, it started to rain harder. It was our first good rain since we left the South over a month ago. It was refreshing! Thank you, Oh Noodly One, for the most excellent weather!
Rialto Beach
In the afternoon, we drove west to the coast. Rialto Beach sits on the north side of the mouth of the Guillayute River. It is littered with driftwood of all shapes and sizes from hundreds of years of flooding.
I learned the islands that sit off the coast like this are called stack islands. There were some very nice ones here!
The weather was spectacular – cool and breezy with a great mix of clouds and sun.
The Big Kahuna – Indeed!
If it could, the Banana Slug would say something like Slime On Dude. I saw a sign at the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center that the Banana Slug is queer because it can change sex at will. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Time to make something else up! Can I get a ‘ramen? π€£.
Everything is as it is supposed to be. More memories to update. Another checkmark on the endless bucket list. Next stop, another memory to investigate, this time in the mystical Port Townsend.
