Free The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan

American jungle has shrunk to this strip at the edge of the continent. The natives who lived on the Olympic Peninsula for thousands of years left only a few fingerprints. In the brief run of Western Man’s attachment to this place, the Olympics have nearly been exhausted of fish and trees, the two sources of native prosperity. Instead of cutting on an even rotation, the timber industry turned to automation and export, tearing down as much of the ancient forest as the law would allow, and they now demand the last of the old trees. The town of Forks, painful to see, its social ills heartbreaking to hear of, is their monument.
    At dinnertime, I decide to cook sausage, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, and oregano and pour it all over spaghetti noodles. I take my time, adding adash of wine from a plastic container, and letting everybody get to know each other over the low heat of my camp stove. Soon I’ve got company, a doe and her fawn, wobbling on new legs. When I stand up, the deer makes a defiant scrape of the ground with her hoof, something I’ve never seen before. The fawn is toy-store cute, a Bambi look-alike, and would not do well to get a taste of Italian cooking at her age. The doe steers her away. I eat while sitting on a log next to the roaring Quinault, watching the river flow. So hypnotic, this surge of deep, clear water, bouncing out of the mountains and sprinting toward the Pacific. Later, inside my tent, I find sleep comes easy, aided by the drip, drip, drip and the white noise of the Quinault. I dream of traveling geologists (like traveling salesmen) who come by the campsite with tips on how to comprehend the mystery that surrounds me: Have you considered the influence of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, the late movements of the Pleistocene Epoch, the relative youth of these mountains?
    In the morning there is sunlight—sunlight! The drip is gone. I stick my head out and see a woodpecker drilling into a dying fir that looks completely different from what it did ten hours ago; the striations of advanced age are fully visible in this light. I get some idea of why a woodpecker pecks: he drills for sap, knowing it will draw bugs. Later, it’s easy pickings. For me, breakfast is much simpler, instant oatmeal and coffee. I break camp in a hurry. Sunlight, who knows how long it’ll stick around? On the trail, my blisters hurt, but the scenery is diverting. The Enchanted Valley is six miles upriver, and I’m told to expect a place that lives up to its name. Even with the sun, the forest is dark most of the way, and becomes greener still with each mile closer. Where the valley walls steepen, there are more casualties among the giant trees. After living the long life on shallow topsoil gouged by the glacier, they are felled by exhaustion. I pass several uprooted monsters, their trunks at root level fanning out in a starburst pattern. The valley is about a thousand feet above sea level here, and the river is so swollen and hurried it appears to have come from an outlet of some grand lake.
    After passing through the darkest, greenest, thickest, wettest and most sweet-scented part of the valley, I find the air lightens, the canopy opens up and the trees change somewhat. There is something big and white straight ahead, shining through the trees. The valley widens, until it is flat and open and grassy, a perfect park with a wall of glaciers at the head. Ice Age and temperate jungle commingle. The first thing I notice about the Enchanted Valley is the wildflowers, great bursts of color against a green backdrop. The waterfalls—to the north, the south andup ahead in the cirque of the valley—plunge down rock walls, falling hundreds of feet to shock life into the infant Quinault. Like movements of a symphony, they each contribute to the sound of the valley—a rumble, a splash, a rhythmic slapping of water on rock, water on snow, water on moss.
    On the floor of the Enchanted Valley is a three-story chalet, made of wood,