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 Dwight Peck's personal website
Summer
2004
The
Olympic Peninsula in Washington, USA
You
may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a
good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught
up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.
Cape
Flattery, Rialto Beach, and the Hole in the Wall
Cape
Flattery is at the extreme northwest of the Olympic Peninsula, within the Makah
Indian Reservation, and it's fairly impressive. A short automobile drive in from
Neah Bay (where the Indian Museum is emphatically worth a stop), and then a short
walk out to the point, where you can see the orcas, whatever they are.
Forget
the orcas, whatever they are; this is Goonies country. The Goonies was a Spielberg-assisted
film from 1985 that was probably the best movie ever made for its purpose - a
teen-oriented take-off on Indiana Jones adventures in which kids follow a treasure
map and evade subterranean traps set by long-dead pirates and modern gangsters,
and succeed in finding One-Eyed Willie's treasure as his pirate ship floats out
of the caves and into the sunset. (IMDB
database entry.)
Well,
if these are not those same caves, rebuke me.
Kristin
envisaging Goonies escaping from the pirate caves.
[If
we were in Cornwall, this would be called "Merlin's Cave"!]
Rialto
Beach and the Hole-in-the-Wall
Rialto
Beach lies just north of La Push, across the mouth of the Quillayute. The favored
hike goes northward, towards those little pointy things in the left photo, but
we are enjoined to pick our times wisely, since some of the route is submersible.
This
phallic item (behind Kristin) is not a problem, in tidal terms -- one of them
is over there to the right, where a little hole in the buttress coming off the
highlands can be seen dimly, and an hour later not at all.
Kristin
visits the huge phallic coastal thing and watches the powerful oceanic fluids
surging in and out with the tides and action of the waves.
Kristin
amongst oceanic fluids surging in and out.
A
point along the coast, now passable, but soon not.
Kristin
contemplating the eternal ebb and flow of the tides (perhaps recalling Arnold's
immortal lines on "the turbid ebb and flow of human misery" on Dover
Beach, but perhaps not), and timing things pretty closely as the window of passability
begins to close tidally.
Scrutinizing
phallic symbolism in all directions
Kristin
wends northward and watches the incoming tides for any signs of not getting home
again.
Dr Peck,
since he's wearing his Makuma Matata T-shirt (which drew frequent comment throughout
the State of Washington, though he doesn't know what it means (something to do
with Disney)), waits patiently for the tide to come in, as for him
it has never done.
Here's
the next buttress off the headland that won't be passable in about twenty minutes,
but will be six hours and twenty minutes later, of course. WAY after dinnertime.
It's
a seriously irregular, and pointy, coastline. North Carolina's Outer Banks are the opposite.
Kristin
looking closely for starfish and anemones, visibly moved when these little guys
can be seen hugging their fragile support networks and . . .
. . . trying
to wait the Bush regime out of office so they can get on with their lives.
The
phallic coastline view northward.
With
the tide becoming fairly incessant -- "time and tides wait for no Kristin" (proverb) -- Kristin decides to bolt southward again.
The
"hole in the wall" has got tides of hefty momentum, so up we go over
the overland path on top of the buttress.. . .
and
so back to La Push for another splendid fish dinner in the local BYOB.
Oh,
wait, here we are at Second Beach in the evening, putting dinner off by just a
little bit.
More of nature's left-behind monuments -- a Washington State obsession, it appears -- near Teahwhit Head.
Kristin
in some of the tidal caves, with her stopwatch out waiting for the last moment
to clear out of here, and get back to La Push for a very nice fish dinner, with
free use of the bottle-opener and wine glasses.
 Feedback
and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative,
 .
All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 24 September 2004, revised 27 April 2013.
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