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

cedar-shingled on top, with large windows, a nice porch, a stone fireplace. Very storybook, something like a retirement home for Hansel and Gretel. Once a hotel whose guests were hauled up the valley trail on horseback, the chalet is National Park Service property now, a fact the government makes instantly clear. In search of human companionship, I go to the chalet and find it locked. I peer through the window: inside is a well-cleaned, well-kept residence, home of some lucky park ranger. Outside, in bold letters, is this sign: WARNING: T HIS S TRUCTURE I S U.S. G OVERNMENT P ROPERTY AND M UST N OT B E M OLESTED . Molested?
    Fresh coffee is brewing somewhere. I follow the scent to a bright-orange-domed tent, occupied by a man and a woman from Maine. We swap exclamations, talking about the strange and wonderful things happening within this fortress of green. The man from Maine says he’s come to the valley to look at the biggest hemlock tree in the world. It’s somewhere in the Quinault, but unmarked. I tell him he can go into the Queets River rain forest, one valley over, and look for the biggest Douglas fir in the world, which is marked. Or he can look for the biggest Sitka spruce in the world, which is also in this neighborhood. He likes trees better than just about anything and had to come all across the country and wait out several weeks of rain and then some to find them. He started in Oregon, where the temperate rain forest begins, extending in a coastal strip all the way north to the Alaskan panhandle. But nowhere do the trees grow so big, so fast, in such a protected setting as in the Olympics, where the garden of conifers is watered by glacier melt and Pacific storms.
    I ask him and his girlfriend if they mind the drip, drip, drip, and they say not at all, because in Maine the drip falls as snow, and the land doesn’t come alive until late in the spring. I look up at the Anderson Glacier, which leans down from a pass at the head of the valley, and get to thinking about doing some climbing while the weather is just right. I ask the people from Maine if they want to come along, through snow up to Anderson Pass, and they say no, they want to read their books and lie in the grass.
    While I’m traveling over the snow, the wind is chill and fresh. The giant trees are gone, and the land becomes white except for the rock andthe tops of dwarfed firs which poke through the snow. My heart is racing, but not from the exertion. Something the man from Maine said sets off an internal palaver. In New York City, there is a tree from the Olympic Rain Forest inside a glass cage in the basement of the Museum of Natural History, as frozen as a stuffed moose head. I remember seeing the trunk of that tree, and a little stuffed deer nearby, and some salal bushes and grass and ferns and other plants from the forest inside this window display. In the explanatory museum text, they got it just about right: the story of a single drop of rain that comes from a Pacific wind that feeds on the moisture of the warm sea, sweeps into the land, is forced up the mountains, then falls and becomes part of the ice or snow that will eventually return to the earth. It’s a fine story, as nature tales go. Lots of conflict and resolution. But I’d hate to learn about this place from a glass cage.
    A few years out of college, I traveled a lot, working just long enough to get a big wad of money to spend on some exotic trip, looking for places ever more remote and foreign and new. When I arrived at these places halfway around the globe, I had an attitude of, Okay, I’m here, now surprise me. Only now am I starting to learn that this place across Puget Sound, forty miles from my home in Seattle, contains enough secrets to last a lifetime.
    In the valley of the Hamma Hamma River, the woods are not as thick. This is the eastern drainage of the Olympics, over the ridge from the Quinault Valley, no longer rain forest but still overgrown and evergreen. I’m