July 9, 2010 Day 2-5, The Electronic Blackout Zone, and the Gifts.

We left Seattle on Tuesday, the 6th and took off for the Olympic Peninsula. There was a fair amount of disagreement and head scratching about whether there was indeed a Mt. Olympus, or Olympia on the peninsula. Cesare, the keeper of Greek myths was certain we were blurring myth with reality, but I was certain there was something big out there.

I took remarkable public transportation from Seattle to a suburb, Bellevue, to pick up the rental car. It was a bus/tram/train that went under water, through a tunnel on tracks, but emerged on a road and morphed into a regular bus. Looking around the bus/tram/train I was reminded that we’re in i territory: the home of all things Microsoft and Apple (and Expedia.) Everyone, everyone on the bus was engaged in i business iPods, iPads, Mac laptops and other gadgets. Suffice it to say, it seemed everyone of any age was wired. An older man in the rear of the bus was… reading a book. Clearly shunned by the others, poor fella, he seemed to know he should stay in the back of the bus.

You could eat off the floor of Bellevue. Colorful, landscaped and with the backdrop being the white frosted Mt. something, not surprising it is the home of Bill Gates and other execs in the i world. (I’m going to say Mt. Rainer.)

Since the morning of our third day here, the north west has been hit with the most unusual beautiful-wave. It has been around 85 and sunny, not a cloud in the royal blue sky. Profound gift number one. (Two, the plane not falling down was one.)

Our drive to the peninsula was about three and a half hours including a 30 minute ferry ride. As the snow topped whatever-mountain range on the peninsula came into focus (truly will get back to you on what mtns rise here), Griffin said “It looks better than HD!” Well, it was a clear day.

We stopped in Sol Duc for a night, in the center of the Olympic national park. It is a source of natural hot springs that, for better or worse, has been funneled into three swimming pools. Believing in the inherent medicinal powers of the springs I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it was a Mecca for the elderly and the suffering. Tom and I sat in for a while and there was a way too detailed story from a gentleman to the right of us about his optical MRI that wasn’t all that relaxing, I’ve gotta say. And, he didn’t even have his eye in the water- so I don’t know what’s up with that.

Leaving Sol Duc to head to the west coast of the peninsula was magical. I’ve been out to the north west several times, and have never seen the sun. It wasn’t even raining in the rain forest. Griff wanted very much to stop in Forks, the mythical home of Bella and Edward (and Jacob) from the Twilight series. Griff was hoping to see some of the significant spots from the films, the high school, Bella’s home, the Cullen’s (vampire’s) home etc. A very small, sleepy town: Forks didn’t deliver for Griff. We saw what remains of the Forks High school, which is being torn down to make way for the new HS, no doubt funded by the loads of filming proceeds. The front of the vampire’s house was here, but it was suggested that the back of the house (all glass, looking out at a magical forest) is on Vancouver Island. Griff was so disappointed that the real world wasn’t even close to the make believe. I don’t think Ces was disappointed, firmly grounded in reality he. Which reminds me of a clock Ces and I loved at the Pike Place market. In the center was a Buddha and in place of numbers around the circle of the face was the word “now” twelve times. That’s Cesare in a nutshell.


I’m writing from Kalaloch, on the outer coast. We have a cabin overlooking the ocean, the seals and the driftwood. We stopped at Ruby Beach to see the amazing sea stacks. See the pics.

Griffin is a doll and game for anything. He waded out with me to see the seal rocks more closely and when he saw one of the distant figures out there lift off in flight. He insisted that there are nothing but gulls out there and heckled me until I had to reveal that out here, in the magical northwest there are flying seals. Cesare made sure to bag some sand for his nurse/buddy Michelle, and picked up many a polished rock that he knew his friend Rose would love.

This morning, another blue sunny morning, I went down to the beach early and found the tide at it’s lowest, easily 200 feet out from last night. The rock outcrops revealed starfish and sea anemones. Spectacular. Gift three.

On this, our fourth day in the semi-wilderness, I’ve come to accept that unlike our friends the Berkowitzs and the Pickerings, the Brotman/Schwarts and many more, that it doesn’t come easily to our family to leave our electronic connections behind and be at peace (and wonder) with nature. After three nights in cabins with brief forays to the postcard beautiful world around us we’re ready to kill each other. In a nice way. Last night we played several rounds of no-talking canasta. It was a thing of beauty. A different kind of beauty, of course.

Our sweet Ces is seizing a lot at night, and drowsy during the days. He’s game for anything, though. He stood for a long, long, long time in the water yesterday allowing the waves to bury his feet in sand. He never looked up to see where the rest of us were, not once. I made a mental note that he isn’t really cognizant of his safety, or his whereabouts. I mentioned this to Griff who agreed. Much later, after the boys found the best zombie defending driftwood sticks they could find and went, boldly, into the mist to battle what few zombies might be here in the north west (with no electronics, of any kind? Really?) Griff caught up to me and told me he had schooled Ces in where the beach access was to our cabin, what our cabin number was and what to do if he found himself lost. Gift four, five, six seven, eight….



What we’re reading:
Cesare: Flying through the Lemony Snicket books on tape. You can’t beat listening to anything read by Tim Curry!

Griffin: The Wizard Heir, Chima

Tom: Gave A Fraction of the Whole a good shot, but never quite got hooked. Looking at Rocket Boys, a memoir by Homer Hickam about his improbable career at NASA after a simple start in Coalwood, West Virginia.

Me: The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks , by Rebecca Skloot about the origin of the HeLa cells that were, literally stolen from her in 1951 before she died of cancer and have been divided trillions of times and shipped the world over. Her cells were used by Salk to create the vaccine for Polio and hundreds of other life saving uses, but her rural and poor descendents, who have never been compensated, cannot even afford health care.

Griffin has repeatedly regaled us with a dead on imitation of the joke told by the dog in “Up”: “Master, I have a joke. There was a squirrel and he said, oh no, I forgot to store nuts for the winter and he died. The joke is funny because the squirrel is dead.” With Griff’s gift for accents and voices, it kills every time, but Tom said that after the 700th time or so, it gets annoying. Griff said “Well then I guess we’ll have something to look forward to”. Note: it is a four hour drive to Seattle.

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